At the request of Congress, this report presents findings and recommendations related to governance of the U.S. government's monitoring, detection, and verification (MDV) enterprise and offers findings and recommendations related to technical MDV capabilities and research, development, test, and evaluation efforts, focused in particular on the nuclear fuel cycle, nuclear test explosions, and arms control.
This book addresses how to conduct policy analysis in the field of national security, including foreign policy and defense strategy. It is a philosophical and conceptual book for helphing people think deeply, clearly, and insightfully about complex policy issues. This books reflects the viewpoint that the best policies normally come from efforts to synthesize competing camps by drawing upon the best of each of them and by combining them to forge a sensible whole. While this book is written to be reader-friendly, it aspires to in-depth scholarship.
Understanding Contemporary Strategy provides an accessible and comprehensive introduction to the theory and practice of modern strategy. Covering all the main issues in the field, the book explores the major themes through a combination of classical and modern strategic theory, history and current practice. The book is split into three main sections: Definition and Context : including discussion of the human, technological, intelligence, ethical and grand-strategic dimensions Strategy in the Geographic Environments: land, sea, air and space Contemporary Strategic Challenges: terrorism, insurgency and nuclear strategy. Each chapter presents the reader with a succinct summary of the topic, but also provides a challenging analysis of current issues, supporting students with pedagogical features such as suggested further reading, boxed case studies and study questions. This book will be essential reading for upper-level students of strategic studies, war studies, military history and international security.
NOTE: NO FURTHER DISCOUNT FOR THIS PRINT PRODUCT- OVERSTOCK SALE -- Significantly reduced list price The U.S. Government has recently issued seven major studies that together put forth a comprehensive blueprint for major global changes in U.S. national security strategy, defense plans, and diplomacy. These seven studies are brought together in this illuminating book, which portrays their individual contents and complex interrelationships and evaluates their strengths and shortfalls. It argues that while these studies are well-written, cogently argued, and articulate many valuable innovations for the Department of Defense, Department of State, and other government agencies, all of them leave lingering, controversial issues that require further thinking and analysis as future U.S. national security policy evolves in a changing and dangerous world. For all readers, this book offers a quick, readable way to grasp and critique the many changes now sweeping over the new U.S. approach to global security affairs."
Both Henry Kissinger and Robert Art make it clear that the identification of national interests is crucial for the development of policy and strategy. Interests are essential to establishing the objectives or ends that serve as the goals for policy and strategy. "Interests are the foundation and starting point for policy prescriptions." They help answer questions concerning why a policy is important.4 National interests also help to determine the types and amounts of the national power employed as the means to implement a designated policy or strategy. The concept of interest is not new to the 21st century international system. It has always been a fundamental consideration of every actor in the system. Despite what many academics have maintained, national interests are not only a factor for nation-states. All actors in the international system possess interests. Using Barry Buzan, Ole Weaver, and Jaap de Wilde's units of analysis, the need to have interests is equally applicable to international subsystems (groups or units that can be distinguished from the overall system by the nature or intensity of their interactions with or independence on each other) like the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, individual units (actors consisting of various subgroups, orga¬nizations, and communities) such as nations of people that transcend state boundaries and multi¬national corporations, subunits (organized groups of individuals within units that are able or try to affect the behavior of the unit as a whole) like bureaucracies and lobbies, and finally, individuals that all possess separate personal interests as they participate in the overall system.5 Some academ¬ics choose to distinguish between national interests (interests involved in the external relations of the actor) and public interests (interests related within the boundaries of the actor).6 For purposes of this essay, given the closing gap between the influence of external and internal issues in the 21st century international system brought about by the associated components of a rapidly globalized world, there will be no distinction made between external and internal interests. In effect, they all fall under the concept of the national interest. There is a generally accepted consensus among academics that interests are designed to be of value to the entity or actor responsible for determining the interest for itself. This could include 4 those interests that are intended to be "a standard of conduct or a state of affairs worthy of achieve¬ment by virtue of its universal moral value."7 However, there is less agreement over the question of whether all nation-state interests are enduring, politically bi-partisan, permanent conditions that represent core interests that transcend changes in government,8 in contrast to those interests that may be altered over time and or respond to change in the international system.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is the premier public resource on scientific and technological developments that impact global security. Founded by Manhattan Project Scientists, the Bulletin's iconic "Doomsday Clock" stimulates solutions for a safer world.
