Governance

7 Items

Mike Pence and Donald Trump

AP/Alex Brandon

Analysis & Opinions - Project Syndicate

China and America Are Failing the Pandemic Test

| Apr. 02, 2020

All national leaders must put their countr's interests first, but the important question is how broadly or narrowly they define those interests. Both China and the US are responding to COVID-19 with an inclination toward short-term, zero-sum approaches, and too little attention to international institutions and cooperation.

Indian health workers carry culled ducks to burial at a state-owned poultry farm in Agartala, India, Feb. 18, 2011. Avian flu remains difficult for humans to catch, but experts fear the virus may mutate into a form that spreads easily among people.

AP Photo

Analysis & Opinions - The Boston Globe

Security vs. Scourge

| January 5, 2012

"...[T]he board is made up of scientists and has no enforcement power. The government does, and the board’s position should be seen as a plea to the journals to avoid a showdown with national-security officials who are understandably concerned with biological weapons. The absence of a globally enforceable Biological Weapons Convention (the United States withdrew its support in 2001) means that each nation, individually, must monitor itself."

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Discussion Paper - Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School

Implications for Public Policy of the Threat from Bioterrorism

| October 31, 2003

In the summer of 2001, U.S. government officials faced a desperate situation. Tests conducted by the Centers for Disease Control had confirmed that a group of patients, suffering from fever and an increasingly angry rash, was infected with smallpox.

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Analysis & Opinions - The Scotsman

Nuclear and Present Danger

| January 29, 1996

ON 18 APRIL 1995, American terrorists demolished Oklahoma City's federal office building, killing 162 people. Two and a half years earlier, international terrorists attacked New York City's 110-storey World Trade Center. Had that explosion succeeded in undermining the structural foundation, 30,000 people would have died.

From Oklahoma City and the World Trade Center to the first act of nuclear terrorism is but one small step. Suppose that instead of mini-vans filled with hundreds of pounds of the crude explosives used in Oklahoma City and New York, terrorists had acquired a suitcase carrying a, grapefruit sized 100 pounds of highly-enriched uranium (HEV).