Science & Technology

130 Items

Image of Vladimir Putin standing in front of a podium

AP Photo

President Joe Biden delivers remarks about government regulations on artificial intelligence systems during an event in the East Room of the White House, Monday, Oct. 30, 2023, in Washington.

(AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Policy Brief

Action on AI: Unpacking the Executive Order’s Security Implications and the Road Ahead

| Nov. 08, 2023

On October 30, 2023, President Biden issued the Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence, aimed at realizing the benefits of AI, while mitigating critical risks. This article provides an overview of its key national security initiatives and explores issues relevant to implementation.

A security guard stands near a sculpture of the Chinese Communist Party flag at the Museum of the Communist Party of China on May 26, 2022, in Beijing.

AP Photo/Ng Han Guan

Journal Article - Quarterly Journal: International Security

Strategic Substitution: China’s Search for Coercive Leverage in the Information Age

    Author:
  • Fiona Cunningham
| Summer 2022

After the mistaken U.S. bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999, China turned to information-age weapons to create a risk of escalation to nuclear war with the United States. This shift helps compensate for its conventional military inferiority.

A boy plays with his toy soldiers inside a school that is being used as a shelter for people who fled the war, in Dnipro city, Ukraine, on Tuesday, April 12, 2022.

AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris

Analysis & Opinions - Offensive Cyber Working Group

Subversion over Offense: Why the Practice of Cyber Conflict Looks Nothing Like Its Theory and What This Means for Strategy and Scholarship

    Author:
  • Lennart Maschmeyer
| Jan. 19, 2022

Cyber attacks are both exciting and terrifying, but the ongoing obsession with ‘cyber warfare’ clouds analysis and hampers strategy development. Much commentary and analysis of cyber conflict continues to use the language of war, where actors use ‘offensive cyber operations’ to meet adversaries in ‘engagements’ striving for victory on the ‘battlefield’ in the ‘cyber domain’. This discourse persists despite a growing consensus that cyber operations are primarily relevant in conflict short of war.

Discarded biohazard bags fill a trash can near a registration table for COVID-19 collection vials at Genetworx Clinical Lab in Richmond, Virginia, Friday April 24, 2020.

AP

Analysis & Opinions - Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School

The Urgent Need for a National Biosecurity Initiative

| June 18, 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic has cast into stark relief a harsh reality that health and biosecurity experts have been worrying about for many years: our extreme vulnerability to naturally occurring pandemics and man-made bioweapons.

Graffiti painted on the sidewalk that reads "amazno" by someone opposed to the location of the Amazon headquarters in New York

AP Photo/Mark Lennihan

Analysis & Opinions - HBS Working Knowledge

Seven Negotiation Lessons from Amazon's HQ Disaster in Queens

| Mar. 08, 2019

As Amazon’s stunning pullout from New York fades into the news archives, its potent lessons for business negotiators risk being lost. Highly promising deals in diffuse multiparty settings with many potential spoilers, like Amazon’s planned headquarters in Queens, often collapse as a result of negotiating too narrowly with those who have formal power and authority. Negotiation experts have a patriarchal name for a version of this classic—and avoidable—mistake: Decide-Announce-Defend or DAD.

Ambassador Nicholas Burns speaks at Halifax International Security Forum 2018

Halifax International Security Forum

Analysis & Opinions

Western Allies Focus on Crisis of Leadership at Halifax Security Forum

| Nov. 19, 2018

For a decade now the Halifax International Security Forum has been a place to discuss the major external threats facing Western democracies and how to counter them.  One of the main themes coming out of this year's gathering of military, political and academic leaders is the biggest threat to democracy is coming from within.

"In the democratic world, many of our strongest and largest democracies are in some type of crisis," says former U.S. ambassador Nicholas Burns, who now teaches at the Kennedy School at Harvard University.