Science, Technology, and Public Policy

David W. Kearn argues that deployment of nuclear weapons cannot rectify a perceived imbalance in conventional forces in the western Pacific.

The powerful effects of artificial intelligence are already being felt in business, politics, medicine, war, and almost every other domain of twenty-first century life. For all of its positive potential, the technology presents significant risks that are best addressed sooner rather than later.

In the authors' view, neither formal NATO membership nor nuclear weapons are fitting security options for Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression. To secure its borders and achieve sustainable peace and stability in Europe, Ukraine should forge a treaty-based strategic alliance directly with the United States.

A large part of operating costs in urban water supply networks is usually due to energy use, mostly in the form of electricity consumption. There is growing pressure to reduce energy use to help save operational costs and reduce carbon emissions. This study shows how a hybrid linear and multi-objective optimization approach can be used to identify key energy consumption elements in a water supply system, and then evaluate the amount of investment needed to achieve significant operational gains at those points in the supply network.

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is an important cooperative framework that increasingly affects the global economy, trade, and emission patterns. However, most existing studies pay insufficient attention to consumption-based emissions, embodied emissions, and non-CO2 greenhouse gases (GHGs). This study constructs a GHG emissions database to study the trends and variations in production-based, consumption-based, and embodied emissions associated with BRI countries

In this report, the authors conduct a benchmarking analysis for energy and CO2 emissions intensity of the steel industry among the largest steel-producing countries.

Cement production is one of the most energy-intensive and highest carbon dioxide (CO2) emitting manufacturing processes. The goal of this study is to develop a roadmap for decarbonization of California's cement and concrete production. In this study, the authors look at the current status of cement and concrete production in California and develop scenarios up to 2040 to analyze different decarbonization levers that can help to reduce CO2 emissions of cement and concrete production in California.

Bruce Schneier  explains that there is no escaping the technology of inevitable surveillance. Consumers have little choice but to rely on the companies that build their computers and write their software, whether in  smartphones,  5G wireless infrastructure, or subway cars.  China is more likely to try to get data from the U.S. communications infrastructure like the United States does rather than try to produce a subway car outfitted with surveillance apparatus.

Although Trump did not outline his legal basis for imposing the tariffs, several analysts anticipated that he was seeking to use the authorities granted him under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act—the legal basis that presidents rely on to impose financial and economic sanctions against WMD proliferators, terrorist organizations, narco-traffickers, and human rights abusers. Mixing trade and immigration policy under the guise of a national security threat, however, may end up deflating Trump’s “maximum pressure” sanctions campaigns against Iran and North Korea.

Understanding deterrence in cyberspace is often difficult, because  minds remain captured by an image of deterrence shaped by the Cold War: a threat of massive retaliation to a nuclear attack by nuclear means. A better analogy is crime: governments can only imperfectly prevent it.