8 Items

Donald Trump and Anthony Fauci

AP/Alex Brandon

Paper - Centre for International Governance Innovation

US Intelligence, the Coronavirus and the Age of Globalized Challenges

| Aug. 24, 2020

This essay makes three arguments. First, the US government will need to establish a coronavirus commission, similar to the 9/11 commission, to determine why, since April 2020, the United States has suffered more coronavirus fatalities than any other country in the world. Second, the COVID-19 pandemic represents a watershed for what will be a major national security theme this century: biological threats, both from naturally occurring pathogens and from synthesized biology. Third, intelligence about globalized challenges, such as pandemics, needs to be dramatically reconceptualized, stripping away outmoded levels of secrecy.

petri dishes

AP/Federica Narancio

Journal Article - European Review

Human Heredity Now and in the Future

| February 2019

The distinctive human characteristic of curiosity, once liberated from belief in supernatural causes of natural phenomena, has led with increasing speed to the brink of a world in which humanity will increasingly direct its own genetic endowment, raising the question of what we most value in being human and how to keep faith with it.

Analysis & Opinions - The Washington Post

Saving the World at Plutonium Mountain

| August 16, 2013

Last October, at the foot of a rocky hillside near here, at a spot known as Degelen Mountain, several dozen Kazakh, Russian and American nuclear scientists and engineers gathered for a ceremony. The modest ribbon-cutting marked the conclusion of one of the largest and most complex nuclear security operations since the Cold War — to secure plutonium (enough to build a dozen or more nuclear weapons) that Soviet authorities had buried at the testing site years before and forgotten, leaving it vulnerable to terrorists and rogue states. The effort spanned 17 years, cost $150 million and involved a complex mix of intelligence, science, engineering, politics and sleuthing. This op-ed is based on documents and interviews with Kazakh, Russian and U.S. participants, and reveals the scope of the operation for the first time.

Analysis & Opinions - The Boston Globe

The Darker Side of the Bio Industry

| June 18, 2012

"...[O]ne of the fundamental challenges for scientists today is how to communicate basic and vital safety information about the threats we face....Numerical scales work....The public does not need to grasp all the details of the science behind changes to the scale. It just needs a way to know, and process, what is normal, heightened, and extreme danger. This is particularly true given that biological threats are invisible, causing a type of fear distinct from those we can feel or see."

teaser image

Journal Article - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Weapons Lab

| January / February 2007

"The lack of transparency in U.S. biodefense work is fostering a widespread perception that we are secretly developing novel threat agents and exploring novel bioweapons concepts. This constitutes a kind of psychological proliferation that risks eroding the constraints against military and paramilitary use of biological weapons. And aside from security considerations, secrecy in biological research will impede rather than foster the discovery and development of practical methods of prophylaxis and therapy of infective disease."

Journal Article - Quarterly Journal: International Security

A Double-Edged Sword: Globalization and Biosecurity

| Winter 2003/04

Contrary to those who argue that economic globalization increases vulnerability to a bioterrorist threat—and for this reason should be restricted—Hoyt and Brooks contend that globalization is a “double-edged sword” that has the potential to increase but also decrease levels of vulnerability—for example, by facilitating the development of vaccines.