Last year, Senator Christopher Bond (R-MO) told reporters that there is “a far Left-wing fringe group that wants to disclose all our vulnerabilities. I don’t know what their motives are but I think they are very dangerous to our security.”
More hating on Wikileaks? No, Senator Bond was actually talking about the Federation of American Scientists, after we disclosed the inadvertent publication on the Government Printing Office website of a draft declaration on U.S. nuclear facilities.
Needless to say, we did not recognize ourselves in any part of Senator Bond’s confused comment. But he reminds us that much of what passes for political discourse is little more than pigeonholing of others into friends and enemies, heroes and villains. It is hard to learn much that way.
Somehow it comes as no surprise to discover that Senator Bond is the last Senator to have been “slugged” on the Senate floor, as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell pointed out on Tuesday. It is maybe a little surprising that the person whom he drove to violence was none other than the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
In his farewell remarks to the Senate, Sen. Bond briefly discussed the “little scuffle I had with Pat Moynihan. I never talked about it. We never said anything publicly until now. Later on, as we became fast friends, he used to tease me about setting up boxing matches so we could raise money for charity. But when I looked at his height and his reach, I didn’t take him up on that.”
FAS and FLI partnered to build a series of convenings and reports across the intersections of artificial intelligence (AI) with biosecurity, cybersecurity, nuclear command and control, military integration, and frontier AI governance. This project brought together leaders across these areas and created a space that was rigorous, transpartisan, and solutions-oriented to approach how we should think about how AI is rapidly changing global risks.
Investment should instead be directed at sectors where American technology and innovation exist but the infrastructure to commercialize them domestically does not—and where the national security case is clear.
To tune into the action on the ground, we convened practitioners, state and local officials, advocates, and policy experts to discuss what it will actually take to deploy clean energy faster, modernize electricity systems, and lower costs for households.
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