International Security & Defense

245 Items

Image of Vladimir Putin standing in front of a podium

AP Photo

Intel semicondictor

The National Interest

Analysis & Opinions - The National Interest

Intel Is Reeling: Why Should the Government Save It?

| Apr. 06, 2023

Why should Washington save Intel? The answer most frequently provided by policymakers is that the U.S. produces no advanced chips, putting it at risk of losing a conflict with China if Taiwan is unable to ship chips across the Pacific. In reality, this is a canard. Peter Wennink, CEO of Dutch lithography giant ASML, dispelled this myth in December, saying that “it is common knowledge that chip technology for purely military applications is usually 10, 15 years old.” America’s warfighting capability is not meaningfully undermined by its lack of production of advanced chips as even platforms like the F-35 fighter jet use only legacy chips.

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Analysis & Opinions

Will Dreams for Equality Be Deferred by Gaps in Technology?

    Author:
  • Francella Ochillo
| Feb. 28, 2022

High broadband access and adoption rates can significantly improve earnings and net worth. Yet, year after year, Black and Brown Americans are among the most disparately impacted by digital inequities, which only contribute to the structural economic disparities that have tormented them for centuries. This tribute to Black History Month explains why historic investments in digital infrastructure are insufficient without transformational broadband policies that support economic resilience in every household.

an alert from the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency

AP/Jon Elswick

Journal Article - Foreign Affairs

The End of Cyber-Anarchy?

| January/February 2022

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 car parked next to a hydrogen fuel pump in Japan with the text "hydrogen 35" vertically on the side.

Shizuo Kambayashi/AP

Report - Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School

Mission Hydrogen: Accelerating the Transition to a Low Carbon Economy

To accelerate the global transition to a low-carbon economy, all energy systems must be actively decarbonized. While hydrogen has been a staple in the energy and chemical industries for decades, clean hydrogen – defined as hydrogen produced from water electrolysis with zero-carbon electricity – has captured increasing political and business momentum as a versatile and sustainable energy carrier in the future carbon-free energy puzzle.

A sign indicates a hydrogen fuel option at a newly opened refueling station in Munich, Monday, March 26, 2007.

AP Photo/Diether Endlicher

Policy Brief

Hydrogen Deployment at Scale: The Infrastructure Challenge

Clean hydrogen is experiencing unprecedented momentum as confidence in its ability to accelerate decarbonization efforts across multiple sectors is rising. New projects are announced almost every week. For example, an international developer, Intercontinental Energy, plans to build a plant in Oman that will produce almost 2 million tons of clean hydrogen and 10 million tons of clean ammonia. Dozens of other large-scale projects and several hundred smaller ones are already in the planning stage. Similarly, on the demand side, hydrogen is gaining support from customers. Prominent off-takers such as oil majors like Shell and bp, steelmakers like ThyssenKrupp, and world-leading ammonia producers like Yara are working on making a clean hydrogen economy a reality.

Les Droits de l’Homme, 1947 - a surrealist painting showing an anthropomorphic chess piece standing on a bridge next to a flaming tuba.

Rene Magritte

Report

Whose Streets? Our Streets! (Tech Edition)

    Author:
  • Rebecca Williams
| August 2021

This report is an urgent warning of where we are headed if we maintain our current trajectory of augmenting our public space with trackers of all kinds. In this report, I outline how current “smart city” technologies can watch you. I argue that all “smart city” technology trends toward corporate and state surveillance and that if we don’t stop and blunt these trends now that totalitarianism, panopticonism, discrimination, privatization, and solutionism will challenge our democratic possibilities. This report examines these harms through cautionary trends supported by examples from this last year and provides 10 calls to action for advocates, legislatures, and technology companies to prevent these harms. If we act now, we can ensure the technology in our public spaces protect and promote democracy and that we do not continue down this path of an elite few tracking the many. 

A miniature of “The War Room” as depicted in the 1964 classic film Dr. Strangelove

Courtesy Eric Chan  and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CC-BY 2.0

Paper

Toward a Collaborative Cyber Defense and Enhanced Threat Intelligence Structure

| August 2021

National security structures envisioned in the 20th century are inadequate for the cyber threats that America faces in the 21st century. These structures, created to address strategic, external threats on one end, and homeland security emergencies on the other, cannot protect us from ambient cyber conflict, because they were designed for different times and threats. Our nation—comprising the federal government, private sector companies, critical infrastructure operators, state and local governments, nonprofits and universities, and even private citizens—are constantly under attack by a myriad of cyber actors with ever-increasing capabilities.