The September 6, 2007 Israeli strike against a suspected Syrian nuclear facility remains a puzzle despite the confident assertion by U.S. intelligence officials last week (pdf) that the target was a Syrian reactor constructed for the production of plutonium with the assistance of North Korea.
An extensive, frequently updated collection of open source materials on the subject — including foreign and domestic news reports, satellite imagery and analysis — has been compiled by Allen Thomson in “A Sourcebook on the Israeli Strike in Syria, 6 September 2007” (currently 812 pages in a 15 MB PDF file).
An updated bibliography of Syrian nuclear science research, from reactor safety to laser isotope separation, was prepared by researcher Mark Gorwitz. See “Syrian Nuclear Science Bibliography: Open Literature Citations” (pdf), April 2008.
A list of all cooperative agreements between the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Atomic Energy Commission of Syria, also compiled by Mr. Gorwitz, is here (pdf).
The web site of the Atomic Energy Commission of Syria is here.
This rule gives agencies significantly more authority over certain career policy roles. Whether that authority improves accountability or creates new risks depends almost entirely on how agencies interrupt and apply it.
Our environmental system was built for 1970s-era pollution control, but today it needs stable, integrated, multi-level governance that can make tradeoffs, share and use evidence, and deliver infrastructure while demonstrating that improved trust and participation are essential to future progress.
Durable and legitimate climate action requires a government capable of clearly weighting, explaining, and managing cost tradeoffs to the widest away of audiences, which in turn requires strong technocratic competency.
FAS is launching the Center for Regulatory Ingenuity (CRI) to build a new, transpartisan vision of government that works – that has the capacity to achieve ambitious goals while adeptly responding to people’s basic needs.