Science, Technology, and Public Policy

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.

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 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.

The study of existential risk — the risk of human extinction or the collapse of human civilization — has only recently emerged as an integrated field of research, and yet an overwhelming volume of relevant research has already been published. To provide an evidence base for policy and risk analysis, this research should be systematically reviewed. In a systematic review, one of many time-consuming tasks is to read the titles and abstracts of research publications, to see if they meet the inclusion criteria. The authors show how this task can be shared between multiple people (using crowdsourcing) and partially automated (using machine learning), as methods of handling an overwhelming volume of research.

The arguments in favor of the United States' declaring that the only purpose of its nuclear weapons is to deter others who possess them from using theirs — in other words, that in no circumstances will this country use nuclear weapons first — are far stronger than the arguments against this stance. It must be hoped that the next US administration will take this no-first-use step promptly.

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.