CISAC senior fellow Scott Sagan decodes the enduring lessons and secret messages hidden in the hauting battlefield drawings of the Lakota Chief known as Red Horse, who fought against Lt. Col George Custer and his Seventh Cavalry forces during their infamous defeat in 1876, in this story for the New York Times' Sunday Review section.
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An eyewitness drawing from the Battle of Little Bighorn by the Lakota Chief known as Red Horse.
National Anthropological Archives/Smithsonian Institution
CISAC senior fellow Martha Crenshaw challenges statements from presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump that “thousands upon thousands of people” are entering the United States, “many of whom have the same thought process” as the Orlando shooter, and his assertions that they are forming “large pockets” of people who want to “slaughter us” in an OpEd for The Washington Post.
Doomed to Cooperate tells the remarkable story of nuclear scientists from two former enemy nations, Russia and the United States, who reached across political, geographic, and cultural divides to confront, together, the new nuclear threats that resulted from the collapse of the Soviet Union. Using the lingua franca of science and technology, the brilliant minds and unparalleled scientific nuclear programs of Russia and the United States embarked upon more than two decades of cooperation to avert the loss of nuclear weapons, nuclear materials, nuclear weapons expertise, and the export of sensitive nuclear technologies during a time of economic and political turmoil in the newly formed Russian Federation— a herculean endeavor known as lab-to-lab cooperation.
The Hoover Institution’s Working Group on Foreign Policy and Grand Strategy has produced a national security strategy that acknowledges this uncertainty and hedges as well as engages, recognizing that resources are not limitless. This strategy also endeavors to lay out the conceptual and policy road map for success
For the past two years, we have convened a bipartisan group of Hoover and Stanford scholars to better understand foreign policy challenges and develop a strategy for the next administration — whomever wins — to address them. Our conclusion: U.S. foreign policy needs to get back to basics. A smart national security strategy starts with three guiding principles and focuses on three key strategic challenges: Russia, China, and “black swan” threats comprised of biological, nuclear, and cyber dangers.
The Soviet Union responded sceptically to Eisenhower’s ‘Atoms for Peace’ speech in December 1953 but eventually entered negotiations on the creation of the International Atomic Energy Agency. It believed the IAEA would provide opportunities for political influence and scientific collaboration. It did not want the peaceful uses of atomic energy around the world to be dominated by the United States. It pressed for close ties between the new agency and the United Nations and supported India and other developing countries in their opposition to safeguards. The new Agency was to be a forum for competition as well as cooperation.
Abstract: On 13 February 2016, in a widely-reported interview for the BBC, Ashton Carter, the US Secretary of Defense, made clear that the US Government supported the maintenance and renewal of Britain’s strategic nuclear deterrent force of Trident submarines. According to Carter, Trident enabled Britain to ‘continue to play that outsized role on the world stage that it does because of its moral standing and its historical standing.’ However, during the early 1960s, attitudes in Washington to the UK’s independent nuclear capabilities were altogether different. This paper will begin with a re-examination of Robert McNamara’s famous address at Ann Arbor in June 1962 when he openly criticised the existence of independent allied nuclear forces. Using new evidence, it will chart the background to the speech, the reception it was accorded, and how it helped to intensify tensions in Anglo-American relations when the Skybolt missile system was cancelled by the US at the end of the same year. The paper will also show how by the end of the Johnson administration, and the tenure of McNamara’s period as Secretary of Defense, the US had become reconciled to the continued existence of the UK’s independent nuclear deterrent and even begun to take steps to assist with its improvement.
About the Speaker: Matthew Jones is Professor of International History, London School of Economics and Political Science. After receiving his DPhil from St Antony's College, Oxford, he was appointed to a Lectureship in the History Department at Royal Holloway, University of London in 1994, and subsequently promoted to Reader in International History before moving to the University of Nottingham in 2004, and then to the LSE in 2013. His interests span post-war British and US foreign policy, nuclear history, and the histories of empire and decolonization in South East Asia. His books include Britain, the United States and the Mediterranean War, 1942-44 (Macmillan, 1996), Conflict and Confrontation in South East Asia, 1961-1965: Britain, the United States, Indonesia, and the Creation of Malaysia (Cambridge University Press, 2002), andAfter Hiroshima: The United States, Race, and Nuclear Weapons in Asia, 1945-1965, (CUP, 2010). In 2008, Jones was commissioned by the Cabinet Office to write a two-volume official history of the UK strategic nuclear deterrent, covering the period between 1945 and 1982, the first volume of which has now been completed.
Matthew Jones
Professor of International History
Speaker
London School of Economics and Political Science
Stanford researchers working with the U.S. Navy’s Marine Mammal Program in San Diego have discovered a startling variety of newly-recognized bacteria living inside the highly trained dolphins that the Navy uses to protect its ships and submarines, find submerged sea mines and detect underwater intruders. They found similar types of bacteria in wild dolphins as well.
“About three quarters of the bacterial species we found in the dolphins’ mouths are completely new to us,” said David Relman, Stanford professor of microbiology and medicine, and co-author of a paper published in the journal Nature Communications on Wednesday.
A U.S. Navy dolphin opens its mouth for a swab to collect bacterial samples.
These previously unknown bacteria represent “whole new realms of life,” according to Relman.
“Bacteria are among the most well-studied microbes, so it was surprising to discover the degree to which the kinds of bacteria we found were types that have never been described,” he said. “What novelty means is not just new names of species, families, classes or phyla…there’s reason to believe that along with this taxonomic novelty, there’s functional novelty.”
The U.S. Navy has been training dolphins and sea lions to carry out defensive military missions from their bases in San Diego and elsewhere since the early 1960s.
Over the years, it has also funded scientific research and become the single largest contributor to the scientific literature on marine mammals, producing more than 800 publications, according to the Navy.
Relman started working with the Navy more than 15 years ago to identify bacteria suspected of causing stomach ulcers in their dolphins.
His latest project to catalog the bacterial communities (or microbiota) living inside the dolphins began when the Navy asked him to help develop a probiotic bacterial strain that could keep their dolphins healthy, or help sick dolphins get better.
Navy trainers took regular swabs from the dolphins’ mouths and rectal areas, using what looked like a Q-tip, and shipped the samples to Stanford on dry ice for analysis.
Stanford researchers analyzed oral, rectal and gastric samples from the U.S. Navy's dolphins and sea lions, as well as samples from the dolphins' blowholes and the surrounding water.
They also collected samples of the air the dolphins exhaled from their blowholes (known as “chuff”) onto sterile filter paper, as well as samples of their gastric juices using a tube that the dolphins would swallow on command, and for comparison, bacteria from the surrounding water.
The study found a similar amount of diversity and novelty in bacterial samples taken from wild dolphins living in Sarasota Bay off the west coast of Florida, although there were slight differences in the bacteria from the dolphins’ mouths.
Relman said he hoped to develop a profile of the normal microbial communities in healthy dolphins and other marine mammals, so that scientists could detect any early change that might signify an imminent disease, or health problems caused by climate change and ocean warming.
“There’s a lot of concern about the changing conditions of the oceans and what the impact could be on the health of wild marine mammals,” Relman said. “We would love to be able to develop a diagnostic test that would tell us when marine mammals are beginning to suffer from the ill effects of a change in their environment.”
The research could help solve other mysteries, such as how dolphins digest their food, even though they swallow fish whole without chewing them.
The key could be a unique bacterial group that’s also been identified in an endangered species of freshwater dolphins living in China’s Yangtze River, said Elisabeth Bik, a research associate at the Stanford Department of Medicine and lead author on the paper.
“It’s a very intriguing bacterial group that nobody has seen before in any other terrestrial animal group,” said Bik. “I would really love to know more about those bacteria and sequence their genomes to understand more about their functional capacity.”
Zak, a 375-pound California sea lion, shows his teeth during a training swim. Zak has been trained to locate swimmers near piers, ships, and other objects in the water considered suspicious and a possible threat to military forces in the area.
The study also examined oral, gastric and rectal samples from the Navy’s trained sea lions.
“The sea lions and dolphins are kept at the same facility, they’re fed exactly the same fish, and they’re swimming in the same water…but they’re very, very different in terms of microbiota,” Bik said.
Unlike dolphins, sea lions share many common types of bacteria with their terrestrial cousins.
“Sea lions weren’t that different from other carnivores like dogs and cats,” Bik said. “They’re evolutionarily related to them, and their microbiota looks very similar to those animals. But dolphins don’t really have a terrestrial mammal that’s closely related, and their microbiota looks very different from anything else that people have seen.”
Relman said his team was planning on expanding their study to include other marine mammals such as sea otters, killer whales, baleen whales, grey whales, harbor seals, elephant seals and manatees. Their purpose, in part, is to understand how life in the sea, over the millions of years since the return of mammals, may have shaped the structure of their microbial communities and the roles they play in marine mammal health.
They’re already working to analyze more than 80 samples of killer whale stool that the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has gathered with the help of specially trained sniffer dogs, which stand on the bow of their boats and point to fresh killer whale feces before it sinks.
The California Department of Fish and Wildlife is contributing samples from the sea otters and seals it studies as part of its conservation, ecological, and monitoring programs.
And the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, which is the West Coast’s largest rescue and rehabilitation facility for marine mammals, is sending samples from the seals in its care.
Relman said the research could help scientists begin to answer fundamental questions about life in the ocean.
“Marine mammals remain one of the more poorly understood habitats for studying microbial life, and there would be lots of reasons for thinking that these are important environments to study, in part because of the relevance for the health of these marine mammals, but also because they represent a view into what it means to live in the sea and the nature of our relationship with this vast aspect of our environment,” Relman said.
Collaborators and co-authors on this study included Stephanie Venn-Watson and Kevin Carlin from the National Marine Mammal Foundation, and Eric Jensen from the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Pacific, in San Diego.
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A U.S. Navy dolphin opens its mouth for a swab to collect bacterial samples.
For the past 15 years, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) has stored transuranic waste from the US nuclear-defense programme. The facility, located 650 meters below ground in the bedded salt deposits of southeastern New Mexico, is run by the US Department of Energy (DOE) and will be permanently sealed in 2033. Yet an arms-control agreement made with Russia in 2000 requires the United States to dispose of 34 tonnes of weapons plutonium, which a recent DOE panel recommended should be stored at WIPP. Tripling the amount of plutonium held at WIPP could increase the risk of release of radioactive material to the biosphere. Safety assessments have so far not adequately considered chemical interactions of this material with that already stored in the repository. In 2014, for example, plutonium-contaminated nitrate salts reacted with a wheat-based kitty litter used to absorb liquid wastes, resulting in a small radioactivity leak to the surface. Reassessment of the risk of potential human ‘intrusion’ in the future is also necessary. Inadvertent drilling through the repository, in the search for oil and gas, could release brine into the tunnels, spreading radioactivity to groundwater. The addition of this weapons plutonium will require expansion of the repository, increasing the probability of intrusion, and will increase the amount and chemical complexity of the radioactive material that might interact with the brine. The DOE should reassess its confidence in WIPP’s performance over the millennia during which this material will remain a threat to environmental safety before adding an additional 34 tonnes of plutonium to its inventory.
Brad Roberts's book is a counter to the conventional wisdom that the United States can and should do more to reduce both the role of nuclear weapons in its security strategies and the number of nuclear weapons in its arsenal.
A U.S. Navy dolphin opens its mouth for a swab to collect bacterial samples.
Stanford researchers analyzed oral, rectal and gastric samples from the U.S. Navy's dolphins and sea lions, as well as samples from the dolphins' blowholes and the surrounding water.
Zak, a 375-pound California sea lion, shows his teeth during a training swim. Zak has been trained to locate swimmers near piers, ships, and other objects in the water considered suspicious and a possible threat to military forces in the area.
