Hollywood and the Bomb July 11, 2020
Among the lesser known consequences of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 75 years ago was that it triggered a race between Hollywood movie studios MGM and Paramount…
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“Strengthening Deterrence” with More Nuclear Bombs? February 18, 2020
Earlier this month the Department of Defense acknowledged that it has recently begun to deploy low-yield nuclear warheads on certain submarine ballistic missiles. “This supplemental capability…
Read moreAgainst Naive Transparency November 15, 2017
“Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants,” Louis Brandeis famously wrote a century ago in praise of publicity. But in fact there are many better disinfectants, such as…
Read moreThe Darkening Web July 7, 2017
Cyberspace has increasingly become an arena of national self-assertion and international conflict instead of the transnational global commons it once seemed to be. Preserving the vision and the possibility of…
Read moreBook Review: The Ethics of Technological Innovation August 18, 2016
My review of the new book The Ethics of Invention: Technology and the Human Future by Sheila Jasanoff appeared in this week’s Nature magazine. It begins: “Technological…
Read moreA Bureaucratic History of Cyber War March 10, 2016
When Gen. Keith Alexander became the new director of the National Security Agency in 2005, “his predecessor, Mike Hayden, stepped down, seething with suspicion”– towards Alexander. As told by Fred…
Read moreThe Domestic Role of the American Military January 6, 2016
The role of armed forces in an open society may be likened to a potent medicine that is life-saving in the proper dosage but lethal beyond a certain proportion. Military…
Read moreThe Red Web: Russia and the Internet October 5, 2015
The Internet in Russia is a battleground between activists who would use it as a tool of political and cultural freedom and government officials who see it as a powerful…
Read moreH-Bomb History Published Over Government Objections March 25, 2015
Physicist Kenneth W. Ford, who participated in the design of the hydrogen bomb in the early 1950s, has published a memoir of his experiences despite the objections of Energy Department reviewers…
Read moreData and Goliath: Confronting the Surveillance Society March 11, 2015
Within a remarkably short period of time– less than two decades– all of us have become immersed in a sea of electronic data collection. Our purchases, communications, Internet searches, and…
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