The protracted campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq have diminished America’s appetite for waging wars to end tyranny or internal disorder in foreign lands. Military interventions have traditionally been a source of controversy in the United States. But America’s appetite for the dispatch of armed forces has been diminished greatly by factors that have primarily emerged in the twenty-first century. These include, most painfully, the protracted campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq that have made US political and military leaders more cautious about waging wars to end tyranny or internal disorder in foreign lands. Read more here.

If there is one thing Americans should have learnt from their recent wars, it is that they do not have the wisdom, resources or staying power to dictate political outcomes. Not long ago Washington aspired to build prosperous democracies in Afghanistan and Iraq. Today it would be satisfied if they simply hung together as countries.President Barack Obama says the US should recognise that the world is “messy”. His strategy has been to avoid doing “stupid stuff”. And yet he is again trying to put a more ambitious face on American policy, asserting this month that the US would “degrade and ultimately destroy” the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, the al-Qaeda offshoot known as Isis. Air strikes quickly followed. Read more here.

Don’t presume that tensions between China, a rising state, and the United States, the status quo power, will lead to conflict.

Like several states in the Asia–Pacific region, Australia faces a defining foreign policy challenge in coming years: how to reconcile a rapidly expanding trade relationship with China with a deepening security and defence alliance with the United States. Given the significance that this dilemma poses for states throughout the region, it is worth discussing the rise and fall of great powers — the dynamic that occurs historically when the expanding influence and rapid growth of one state actor threatens the interests of the established hegemonic power. More often than not, the subsequent competition between the rising and status quo powers results in increasingly bitter conflicts and ultimately ends in all out war.

Read more here.

Snow is a vital resource for a host of natural and human systems. Global warming is projected to drive widespread decreases in snow accumulation by the end of the century, potentially affecting water, food, and energy supplies, seasonal heat extremes, and wildfire risk. However, over the next few decades, when the planning and implementation of current adaptation responses are most relevant, the snow response is more uncertain, largely because of uncertainty in regional and local precipitation trends. We identify the range of this "irreducible" uncertainty, which is critical to planning and implementing adaptations to near term snow change. Our results suggest that the direction of near-term snow accumulation change is robust at the regional scale, but that internal variability can influence the magnitude and direction of snow accumulation changes at the local scale, even in areas that exhibit a high signal-to-noise ratio. Read more here.

On Tuesday March 3, 2015, the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations held a hearing entitled, “Understanding the Cyber Threat and Implications for the 21st Century Economy.” This was the first in a series of hearings focused on cyberspace, the Internet, and the challenges and opportunities that they present. Cyberspace has become the backbone and engine of the 21st century economy, and recent high-profile information security breaches have raised awareness of the vulnerabilities and risks facing cyberspace. With this hearing series, the subcommittee seeks to expand the discussion surrounding these issues to examine the broader implications for businesses and consumers in today’s 21st century economy. This initial hearing will provide an overview of the issue, focusing on the history, evolution, and future of cybersecurity.

The witnesses included Herbert Lin, Senior Research Scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University; Richard Bejtlich, Chief Security Strategist, FireEye, Incorporated; and Gregory Shannon, Chief Scientist, CERT Program, the Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University. III.

Lin's testimony begins at 21:00.

Russian intercontinental ballistic missiles are believed to carry a total of approximately 1,000 strategic nuclear warheads that can hit the US less than 30 minutes after being launched. Of this total, about 700 warheads are rated at 800 kilotons; that is, each has the explosive power of 800,000 tons of TNT. CISAC senior research scholar Lynn Eden co-authors this analysis in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that looks at consequences of the detonation of a single such warhead over midtown Manhattan.

In a commentary on the long-term storage of SNF in the March 2015 issue of Nature Materials, Professor Rod Ewing writes that, "to design reliable and safe geological repositories it is critical to understand how the characteristics of spent nuclear fuel evolve with time, and how this affects the storage environment. Globally, about 10,000 metric tonnes of heavy metal (MTHM) are produced each year by nuclear power plants, and a cumulative inventory of approximately 300,000 MTHM is stored either in pools or dry casks at reactor sites around the world1. Most of this inventory is destined for long-term storage and eventual geologic disposal. Thus, the behaviour of UO2 in spent fuel as a waste form must be understood and evaluated under the extraordinary conditions of geologic disposal, which extends to hundreds of thousands of years. The behaviour of nuclear fuel under the conditions of long-term disposal in a geologic repository depend specifically on the chemical changes that have occurred to the fuel during service life in the reactor."

For 25 years now, a weak-state fixation has transfixed U.S. foreign policy, Amy Zegart writes in this Foreign Policy piece. But Washington's paranoia over weak and failing states is distracting it from the real national security threats looming on the horizon.