A bill in the last Congress “to provide a comprehensive framework for the United States to prevent and prepare for biological and other WMD attacks” was described in a lengthy Senate report last month. The report provided a detailed congressional perspective on a range of biosecurity issues, inspired in part by the Graham-Talent Commission on the subject. However, the bill was not enacted, and its provisions did not achieve consensus support. It drew criticism in particular from Sen. Carl Levin whose dissenting comments were appended. See “WMD Prevention and Preparedness Act of 2009” (pdf), Report of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, December 17, 2010.
The Indian physicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (1910-1995) was remembered in several fascinating and inspiring articles in the December 2010 issue of Physics Today. Perhaps the most stimulating one of them, written by Freeman Dyson, is freely available to non-subscribers on the Physics Today website. See “Chandrasekhar’s Role in 20th Century Science” by Freeman Dyson.
We were pleased to receive a copy of “The Black Bats: CIA Spy Flights over China from Taiwan 1951-1969” by Chris Pocock with Clarence Fu, Schiffer Publishing, 2010.
Did President Calvin Coolidge really issue an executive order on “homeland security”? That seems to be the conceit of a “Compilation of Homeland Security Related Executive Orders (EO 4601 through EO 13528) (1927-2009)” prepared and published last year by the House Committee on Homeland Security. In fact, of course, “homeland security” is a term of recent vintage (and also a questionable one for a nation of immigrants). It was never used by President Coolidge. But his 1927 executive order 4601 was modified a few years ago to include reference to the Secretary of Homeland Security, thereby justifying its inclusion in this 544-page volume. Disturbingly, the editors misspelled “Foreword” as “Foreward.”
To empower new voices to start their career in nuclear weapons studies, the Federation of American Scientists launched the New Voices on Nuclear Weapons Fellowship. Here’s what our inaugural cohort accomplished.
Common frameworks for evaluating proposals leave this utility function implicit, often evaluating aspects of risk, uncertainty, and potential value independently and qualitatively.
The FAS Nuclear Notebook is one of the most widely sourced reference materials worldwide for reliable information about the status of nuclear weapons and has been published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists since 1987. The Nuclear Notebook is researched and written by the staff of the Federation of American Scientists’ Nuclear Information Project: Director Hans […]
According to the National Center for Education Statistics’ August 2023 pulse panel, 60% of public schools were utilizing a “community school” or “wraparound services model” at the start of this school year—up from 45% last year.