Asia & the Pacific

Kendall Hoyt, Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Dartmouth Medical School and former fellow with the Belfer Center’s International Security Program, talks with Aroop Mukharji (@aroopmukharji) about improving response time to outbreaks, a brief history of anti-vaxxers, and how she got into biodefense.

Kendall Hoyt, Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Dartmouth Medical School and former fellow with the Belfer Center’s International Security Program, talks with Aroop Mukharji (@aroopmukharji) about improving response time to outbreaks, a brief history of anti-vaxxers, and how she got into biodefense.

The Right Honourable Douglas Alexander offered his views on European security in a discussion moderated by FDP Executive Director Cathryn Cluver.

Industry and academic experts from Harvard, MIT, and other Boston-area universities met for a three-day conference in September 2011 to examine policy choices facing the fast-changing field of information and communications technology at the intersection of public policy. The conference was convened by the Belfer Center for Science and International Affair’s Information and Communications Technology and Public Policy Project (ICTPP) at the Harvard Kennedy School.

The Winter 2010/11 issue of the Belfer Center newsletter features recent and upcoming activities, research, and analysis by members of the Center community on critical global issues. This issue highlights a major Belfer Center conference on technology and governance, the Center's involvement in the nuclear threat documentary Countdown to Zero, and a celebration of Belfer Center founder Paul Doty.

Although projections of nuclear proliferation abound, they rarely are founded on empirical research or guided by theory. Even fewer studies are informed by a comparative perspective. The two books under review—The Psychology of Nuclear Proliferation: Identity, Emotions, and Foreign Policy, by Jacques Hymans, and Nuclear Logics: Alternative Paths in East Asia and the Middle East, by Etel Solingen, are welcome exceptions to this general state of affairs, and represent the cutting edge of nonproliferation research. Both works challenge conventional conceptions of the sources of nuclear weapons decisions and offer new insights into why past predictions of rapid proliferation failed to materialize and why current prognoses about rampant proliferation are similarly flawed. While sharing a number of common features, including a focus on subsystemic determinants of national behavior, the books differ in their methodology, level of analysis, receptivity to multicausal explanations, and assumptions about decisionmaker rationality and the revolutionary nature of the decision. Where one author emphasizes the importance of the individual leader’s national identity conception in determining a state’s nuclear path, the other explains nuclear decisions primarily with regard to the political-economic orientation of the ruling coalition. Notwithstanding a tendency to overinterpret evidence, the books represent the best of contemporary social science research and provide compelling interpretations of nuclear proliferation dynamics of great relevance to scholars and policymakers alike.

This chapter focuses on the role of government policy in the evolution of GM technology and institutions.