Science, Technology, and Public Policy

Michael Lipin interviews Project on Managing the Atom Associate Nicole Grajewski on why Iran may not benefit much from its new membership of Shanghai Cooperation Organization.

Joseph Nye argues that prudence results from the fear of creating unintended consequences in unpredictable systems and can develop into a norm of nonuse or limited use of certain weapons or a norm of limiting targets. Something like this happened with nuclear weapons when the superpowers came close to the brink of nuclear war in 1962, during the Cuban missile crisis. The Limited Test Ban Treaty followed a year later.

Kelly Sims Gallagher asserts that politicians' pledges of dramatic long-term reductions should not let them off the hook for their failure to achieve more modest progress in the short term.

William d'Ambruoso explains why high-level engagement, built on a baseline of deterrence, lessens the chances of war and opens the way for future cooperation in North Korean–U.S. relations.

Arctic Innovator Rumaitha Al Busaidi argues for an Arctic Plastic Partnership that could highlight the business advantage to solving the region's marine plastic crisis.

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has published a document from the Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs concerning nuclear problems and tensions in the time of COVID-19. The document has been co-signed by a large number of Pugwash colleagues and personalities.

In this paper, a quantitative Waste to Energy Recovery Assessment (WERA) framework is used to stochastically analyze the feasibility of waste-to-energy systems in selected cities in Asia.

China's national carbon emissions trading program is expected to become the world's largest carbon market and is critical for achieving China's domestic mitigation goals. But China's trading program is likely to face significant challenges, due to its large scale and high complexity. To address these challenges, we provide a series of policy recommendations, including capacity building from central to local levels, wise selection of allowance allocation methods to cope with changing economic realities, and deepening market-oriented reforms in energy sectors and SOEs.

Joel Clement discusses the negative consequences of a warming Arctic for the entire planet.