Shortly before the end of the Trump Administration in January 2021, then-Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe issued a directive that altered the process for preparing the National Intelligence Priorities Framework, or NIPF, stripping out limitations on signals intelligence collection from the previous policy. The NIPF is perhaps the single most important administrative tool for managing the U.S. […]
[Article updated May 11, 2021] The United Kingdom announced yesterday that it has decided to abandon a previous plan to reduce it nuclear weapons stockpile to 180 by the mid-2020s and instead “move to an overall nuclear weapon stockpile of no more than 260 warheads.” The decision makes Britain the first Western nuclear-armed state to […]
Updated below For the past three years, the Trump Administration refused to provide an annual tally of the number of nuclear weapons in the U.S. nuclear stockpile or the number of weapons that had been dismantled each year, though that had been the practice under the Obama Administration and through 2017. The Federation of American Scientists […]
The use of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) electronic parts in nuclear weapons systems may reduce the reliability of the US nuclear arsenal over time as the electronics age in ways that are hard to predict, according to a newly disclosed report from the JASON science advisory panel. “Most of the electronic materials and components within a weapon […]
What actions should the federal government take “to ensure that our nation can continue to harness the full power of science and technology on behalf of the American people”? President Biden posed that question and five more specific ones to his Science Advisor Dr. Eric S. Lander. “My hope is that you, working broadly and transparently […]
Is it possible to reliably detect persons with malicious intent by remotely measuring their physiological state or studying their involuntary verbal or behavioral signs? That is a problem that is far from having a technological solution, the JASON science advisory panel told the Department of Defense in a 2008 report that was released under the Freedom […]
On February 4, President Biden issued a memorandum to agency heads on “advancing the human rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex persons around the world.” He directed that “it shall be the policy of the United States to pursue an end to violence and discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender […]
As the U.S. continues to grapple with the pandemic, there are growing concerns about the risks posed by variants of SARS-CoV-2 – the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. Recent data have shown that at least one SARS-CoV-2 variant is more transmissible than the original, and there are questions as to whether any variants could be more deadly. The […]
The Chinese military appears to be significantly expanding the number of ballistic missiles silos under construction in a new sprawling training area in the northern part of central China. Recent satellite images indicate that at least 16 silos are under construction, a significant expansion in just a few years since a silo was first described […]
Addressing the climate crisis is one of the Biden administration’s key goals. On January 27th, the president issued an executive order stating that the U.S. should aim for net zero emissions, economy-wide, by 2050. The House Energy and Commerce Committee held a hearing last week to discuss reaching this goal that featured leaders from industry, academia, and the environmental […]
Last month, in the final days of his Administration, President Trump moved to renew the “national emergency” along the US-Mexico border that he had declared in 2019. “The ongoing border security and humanitarian crisis at the southern border of the United States continues to threaten our national security, including by exacerbating the effect of the […]
The Department of Defense is authorized to use unmanned aircraft systems within U.S. airspace for more than a dozen different types of operations, from search and rescue to counterintelligence. These domestic missions, and the official guidance or legal authority behind each of them, were tabulated in a newly updated manual on military support to civilian […]