Science, Technology, and Public Policy

All the world's nuclear-armed states (except for North Korea) have begun modernizing and upgrading their arsenals, leading many observers to predict that the world is entering a new nuclear arms race. While that outcome is not yet inevitable, it is likely, and if it happens, the new nuclear arms race will be different and more dangerous than the one we remember. More nuclear-armed countries in total, and three competing great powers rather than two, will make the competition more complex. Meanwhile, new non-nuclear weapon technologies — such as ballistic missile defense, anti-satellite weapons, and precision-strike missile technology — will make nuclear deterrence relationships that were once somewhat stable less so.

Bruce Schneier writes that airport security needs to be evaluated on the basis of concrete costs and benefits and not continued to be implemented as security theater based on fear.

The paper provides a detailed analysis of the contemporary Sino-Indian conventional ground and nuclear force balances and carefully reconstructs how mutual developments in these areas are perceived by both New Delhi and Beijing.

For true political and strategic stability in Southern Asia, China must be involved as a committed party to India-Pakistan confidence building measures, argues Frank O'Donnell in South Asian Voices' series, "Twenty Years Into Nuclear South Asia."

John P. Holdren won the 2018 Daniel Patrick Moynihan Prize. He delivered the annual Moynihan Lecture on May 17, 2018, at the Willard Intercontinental Hotel in Washington, D.C.

India's nuclear profile, doctrine, and practices have evolved rapidly since the country's nuclear breakout in 1998. However, the outside world's understanding of India's doctrinal debates, forward-looking strategy, and technical developments are still two decades behind the present. India and Nuclear Asia will fill that gap in our knowledge by focusing on the post-1998 evolution of Indian nuclear thought, its arsenal, the triangular rivalry with Pakistan and China, and New Delhi's nonproliferation policy approaches. The authors show how India's nuclear trajectory has evolved in response to domestic, regional, and global drivers.

In this Project on Managing the Atom Discussion Paper, Mansoor Ahmed examines India’s fissile material production capacity and the military potential of its unsafeguarded nuclear fuel cycle and energy program.

Cyber Security Project Director Michael Sulmeyer and Project Affiliate Charley Snyder analyze the purported draft of President Trump's first executive order covering cybersecurity issues, leaked to the Washington Post and released on Friday, January 27, 2017.

Cyber Security Project Director Michael Sulmeyer and Project Affiliate Charley Snyder examine some of the most important provisions to the recently signed into law 2017 National Defense Authorization Act that the Trump Administration must grapple with during its first year in office.

Cyber Security Project Fellow Dr. Ben Buchanan discusses how the traditional concept of the "security dilemma" applies to conflict in cyberspace, arguing that as states play offense and defense in the digital domain, they risk tension no one wants.