FSI scholars produce research aimed at creating a safer world and examing the consequences of security policies on institutions and society. They look at longstanding issues including nuclear nonproliferation and the conflicts between countries like North and South Korea. But their research also examines new and emerging areas that transcend traditional borders – the drug war in Mexico and expanding terrorism networks. FSI researchers look at the changing methods of warfare with a focus on biosecurity and nuclear risk. They tackle cybersecurity with an eye toward privacy concerns and explore the implications of new actors like hackers.
Along with the changing face of conflict, terrorism and crime, FSI researchers study food security. They tackle the global problems of hunger, poverty and environmental degradation by generating knowledge and policy-relevant solutions.
Bechtel Conference Center, Encina Hall 1st Floor
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room, East 207, Encina Hall
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room, East 207, Encina Hall
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room, East 207, Encina Hall
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room, East 207, Encina Hall
CISAC Conference Room
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room, East 207, Encina Hall
Book abstract:
This book addresses the organization and management of the national security establishment, and especially the Department of Defense, to implement the policies the nation's leaders choose for it, to manage the programs they direct, and to adapt to a changing world.
This paper focuses on the question of how much protection a building provides its inhabitants from a BW attack. The reason for considering this problem is simple: most people spend the majority of their daily lives inside buildings. In fact, the U.S. EPA estimates that average Americans spend approximately 87% of their time indoors.5 However, most previous technical assessments of BW incidents ignore the effects of buildings, computing casualties based only on integrated outdoor surface dosage. The protective effects of buildings have been considered for other toxic releases. Karlsson, for example, looks at the effects of indoor deposition upon toxic gas clouds,6 and Engelmann7 and others examine the sheltering effectiveness of buildings against respirable plutonium releases. In this paper we seek to extend these basic ideas to biological agents and to explore aspects of the problem that are unique to biological weapons.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows: A brief discussion of general aspects of biological weapons is first presented. Then, we introduce the method used to model the penetration of buildings by biological agents and discuss the factors that determine the sheltering effectiveness of a particular building. The paper concludes with a discussion of simple measures that individuals can enact to increase the sheltering effectiveness of a particular building.
This paper develops a probabilistic model that can be used to determine the technical performance required for a defense to meet specific political/military objectives. The defense objective is stated as a certain probability that no warheads leak through the defense. The technical performance is captured by the interceptor single-shot probability of kill and the warhead detection, tracking, and classification probability. Attacks are characterized by the number of warheads and undiscriminated decoys. Barrage and shoot-look-shoot firing modes are examined, with the optimal interceptor allocation derived for the shoot-look-shoot mode. Applications of this model for sizing national and theater missile ballistic missile defenses are discussed.
