Ideally, arms control agreements that are well-conceived and faithfully implemented will foster international stability and build confidence between nations. But things don’t always work out that way, and arms control itself can become a cause for suspicion and conflict. “Can you say anything about how Russia, in this venue, is using their Open Skies flights […]
The Department of Defense needs to take several steps in order to avoid “strategic surprise” by an adversary over the coming decade, according to a new study from the Defense Science Board, a Pentagon advisory body. Among those steps, “Counterintelligence must be enhanced with urgency.” See DSB Summer Study Report on Strategic Surprise, July 2015. […]
In 2010, then-Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair convened a panel to review the November 2009 Fort Hood shooting committed by Army Maj. Nidal Hasan and the Christmas Day bombing attempt by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab aboard Northwest Flight 253. A redacted version of the resulting panel report was finally declassified and released this week. […]
In response to public inquiries about the location of nuclear weapons, Department of Defense officials are normally supposed to respond: “It is U.S. policy to neither confirm nor deny the presence or absence of nuclear weapons at any general or specific location.” Remarkably, “This response must be provided even when such location is thought to […]
This week the Department of Energy posted the first declassification guidance for nuclear weapons-related information, known as the Tolman Committee reports, prepared in 1945-46. The Tolman reports were an early and influential effort to conceptualize the role of declassification of atomic energy information and the procedures for implementing it. Though the reports themselves were declassified in the […]
The number of people in the Department of Defense holding security clearances for access to classified information declined by 100,000 in the first six months of FY2015. There are now 3.8 million DoD employees and contractors with security clearances, down from 3.9 million earlier in the year, and a steep 17.4% drop from 4.6 million […]
If protesters are arrested for disrupting the proceedings of the U.S. Supreme Court through angry speech, is that a violation of their First Amendment rights? The question was analyzed by the Congressional Research Service. See Haranguing in the Court, CRS Legal Sidebar, October 6, 2015. Other new and updated products of the Congressional Research Service […]
By Hans M. Kristensen The number of U.S. strategic warheads counted as “deployed” under the New START Treaty has dropped below the treaty’s limit of 1,550 warheads for the first time since the treaty entered into force in February 2011 – a reduction of 263 warheads over four and a half years. Russia, by contrast, […]
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 instrument of political control, write investigative journalists Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan in their new book The Red Web. For now, the government appears to […]
If President Obama vetoes the pending FY2016 defense authorization bill, “it would mark the fifth time since 1961, when Congress enacted the first annual defense authorization bill, that a president has vetoed that measure,” according to the Congressional Research Service. See Presidential Vetoes of Annual Defense Authorization Bills, CRS Insight, October 1, 2015. New and […]
The U.S. government blocked dozens of life science experiments over the past decade because they were deemed to pose undue risks to public health and safety. Between 2006 and 2013, researchers submitted 618 potentially restricted experiment proposals for review by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Division of Select Agents and Toxins (DSAT), according to […]
The Congressional Research Service has produced a bibliography on domestic surveillance to support this year’s national high school debate program which is devoted to that subject. “Resolved: The United States Federal Government Should Substantially Curtail Its Domestic Surveillance” is the topic that was selected for the 2015-2016 high school debate by representatives of the National […]