Science, Technology, and Public Policy

The authors analyze the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear accident and the recent back-to-back crashes of two Boeing 737 Max jets and make policy recommendations for the regulation of increasingly complex technologies.

Steven E. Miller writes that U.S. withdrawal from the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty offers few benefits and solves no significant security problem, while raising some potential costs and obvious disadvantages.

The arc of innovation has reached an inflection point: technological change now threatens to overwhelm us. Discovery is unstoppable, but it must be shaped for good. We ourselves—not just market forces—must manage it.

"Nigeria is Africa's largest economy and 26th in the world. Its GDP stands at $510 billion with immense growth potential. A stable and peaceful Nigeria will contribute to Africa's rise and integration into the global economy. On the other hand, an unstable, stagnant and conflict-driven Nigeria will be a threat to regional and global stability."

"Are the nuclear talks are an adequate platform for those human-rights concerns that remain? Probably not. The nuclear talks are complex enough without the addition of an extremely complicated and largely separate issue."

"But adopting federalism would help to ease one of modern China's most fundamental governance problems: The fact that local officials often implement central policies halfheartedly, if at all. Caught in a system that gives them plenty of responsibilities but no accountability to constituents, China's local officials emphasize short-term economic growth over compliance with directives like antipollution and social welfare targets. The result is that environmental and social policies are often badly implemented. If provincial and local officials had a greater voice in developing policy, they would have a greater stake in the outcome of these policies."