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Stop the emerging AI cold war
Proliferating military artificial intelligence will leave the world less safe — so we must focus on ethics and global cooperation.
Proliferating military artificial intelligence will leave the world less safe — so we must focus on ethics and global cooperation.
Journal Article
The Four Faces of Nuclear Terrorism
The Four Faces of Nuclear Terrorism, a new book from the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, assesses the motivations and capabilities of terrorist organizations to acquire and use nuclear weapons, to fabricate and and detonate crude nuclear explosives, to strike nuclear power plants and other nuclear facilities, and to build and employ radiological weapons or \"dirty bombs.\"
eBook
The current global threat of weapons of mass destruction to humanity and public health
Weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) have profoundly shaped global conflict and security landscapes throughout history. From the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the chemical attack in Halabja, these catastrophic events underscored the devastating potential of WMDs on health, humanity, ecosystems, and international stability. This study explored the immediate and long-term impacts of WMDs, analyzing historical precedents and current global conflicts to highlight ongoing risks. Emphasizing the urgent need for international disarmament and non-proliferation efforts, the study aimed to raise awareness of the humanitarian, psychological, and ecological consequences of WMD use. By examining the geopolitical hotspots and the humanitarian crises they generated, it called for proactive crisis prevention strategies and enhanced global cooperation to mitigate the catastrophic effects of WMDs and protect global security.
Journal Article
Biosafety and biosecurity as essential pillars of international health security and cross-cutting elements of biological nonproliferation
The critical aspects of biosafety, biosecurity, and biocontainment have been in the spotlight in recent years. There have also been increased international efforts to improve awareness of modern practices and concerns with regard to the safe pursuit of life sciences research, and to optimize current oversight frameworks, thereby resulting in decreased risk of terrorist/malevolent acquisition of deadly pathogens or accidental release of a biological agent, and increased safety of laboratory workers. Our purpose is to highlight how the World Health Organization’s (WHO) revised International Health Regulations (IHR[2005]), the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), and the United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1540 overlap in their requirements with regard to biosafety and biosecurity in order to improve the understanding of practitioners and policymakers and maximize the use of national resources employed to comply with internationally-mandated requirements. The broad range of goals of these international instruments, which are linked by the common thread of biosafety and biosecurity, highlight their significance as essential pillars of international health security and cross-cutting elements of biological nonproliferation. The current efforts of the Republic of Georgia to enhance biosafety and biosecurity in accordance with these international instruments are summarized.
Journal Article
Proliferation Concerns
The successor states of the former Soviet Union have enormous stocks of weapons-usable nuclear material and other militarily significant commodities and technologies. Preventing the flow of such items to countries of proliferation concern and to terrorist groups is a major objective of U.S. national security policy. This book reviews the effectiveness of two U.S. programs directed to this objective. These programs have supported the efforts of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakstan in upgrading the physical protection, control, and accountability of highly enriched uranium and plutonium and strengthening systems to control the export of many types of militarily sensitive items.
eBook
Food safety in the 21st century
The global importance of food safety is not fully appreciated by many public health authorities despite a constant increase in the prevalence of foodborne illness. Numerous devastating outbreaks of salmonellosis, cholera, enterohaemorrhagic Escherichia coli infections, hepatitis A and other diseases have occurred in both industrialized and developing countries. In addition, many of the re-emerging or newly recognized pathogens are foodborne or have the potential of being transmitted by food and/or drinking water. More foodborne pathogens can be expected because of changing production methods, processes, practices and habits. During the early 21st century, foodborne diseases can be expected to increase, especially in developing countries, in part because of environmental and demographic changes. These vary from climatic changes, changes in microbial and other ecological systems, to decreasing freshwater supplies. However, an even greater challenge to food safety will come from changes resulting directly in degradation of sanitation and the immediate human environment. These include the increased age of human populations, unplanned urbanization and migration and mass production of food due to population growth and changed food habits. Mass tourism and the huge international trade in food and feed is causing food and feedborne pathogens to spread transnationally. As new toxic agents are identified and new toxic effects recognized, the health and trade consequences of toxic chemicals in food will also have global implications. Meeting the huge challenge of food safety in the 21st century will require the application of new methods to identify, monitor and assess foodborne hazards. Both traditional and new technologies for assuring food safety should be improved and fully exploited. This needs to be done through legislative measures where suitable, but with much greater reliance on voluntary compliance and education of consumers and professional food handlers. This will be an important task for the primary health care system aiming at \"health for all\".
Journal Article
Biotechnologies and International Human Rights
This book follows and complements the previous volume Biotechnology and International Law (Hart 2006) bringing a specific focus on human rights. It is the result of a collaborative effort which brings together the contributions of a select group of experts from academia and from international organisations with the purpose of discussing the extent to which current activities in the field of biotechnology can be regulated by existing human rights principles and standards, and what gaps, if any, need to be identified and filled with new legislative initiatives. Instruments such as the UNESCO Declaration on the Human Genome (1997) and on Bioethics and Human Rights (2005) are having an impact on customary international law. But what is the relevance of these instruments with respect to traditional concepts of state responsibility and the functioning of domestic remedies against misuse of biotechnologies? Are new legislative initiatives needed, and what are the pros and cons of a race toward the adoption of new ad hoc instruments in an area of such rapid technological development? Are there risks of normative and institutional fragmentation as a consequence of the proliferation of different regulatory regimes? Can we identify a core of human rights principles that define the boundaries of legitimate uses of biotechnology, the legal status of human genetic material, as well as the implications of the definition of the human genome as ‘common heritage of humanity’ for the purpose of patenting of genetic inventions? These and other questions are the focus of a fascinating collection of essays which, together, help to map this emerging field of inquiry.
eBook
From Here to Biosecurity: Advice for an Incoming Administration
Graphs might be drawn plotting surrogate markers known or surmised: dollars spent, firms surviving, Biosafety Level 3 and 4 laboratories registered, people employed, \"select agents\" studied, surveillance methods and countermeasures devised, results withheld, patent-disclosure applications filed, and papers published. If the current theory of Amerithrax guilt holds, then modern history's signal act of bioterrorism will resolve into a tale of crank criminality distinguished chiefly by the scandalous news that a murder weapon had been mixed in and stolen from a government-regulated biosecurity laboratory. China's reluctance-to-disclose dangerously complicated the global response to the severe acute respiratory syndrome, SARS, and Indonesia's reluctance-to-share has hampered both the virology and vaccinology of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI).
Journal Article
Life Sciences and Related Fields
During the last decade, national and international scientific organizations have become increasingly engaged in considering how to respond to the biosecurity implications of developments in the life sciences and in assessing trends in science and technology (S&T) relevant to biological and chemical weapons nonproliferation. The latest example is an international workshop, Trends in Science and Technology Relevant to the Biological Weapons Convention, held October 31 - November 3, 2010 at the Institute of Biophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.
Life Sciences and Related Fields summarizes the workshop, plenary, and breakout discussion sessions held during this convention. Given the immense diversity of current research and development, the report is only able to provide an overview of the areas of science and technology the committee believes are potentially relevant to the future of the Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention (BWC), although there is an effort to identify areas that seemed particularly ripe for further exploration and analysis. The report offers findings and conclusions organized around three fundamental and frequently cited trends in S&T that affect the scope and operation of the convention:
The rapid pace of change in the life sciences and related fields;
The increasing diffusion of life sciences research capacity and its applications, both internationally and beyond traditional research institutions; and
The extent to which additional scientific and technical disciplines beyond biology are increasingly involved in life sciences research.
The report does not make recommendations about policy options to respond to the implications of the identified trends. The choice of such responses rests with the 164 States Parties to the Convention, who must take into account multiple factors beyond the project's focus on the state of the science.
eBook