Arms Race Research Articles

Artificial intelligence and arms races in the Middle East: the evolution of technology and its implications for regional and international security

ABSTRACT Artificial Intelligence is now deeply connected to weapons systems. It therefore plays a critical role in matters concerning international peace and security. AI has also seen military competition take on a new dynamic. However, few studies have addressed the distinct dynamics of AI and its effects on Middle Eastern arms races. Given that these issues have the potential to fuel regional conflicts and jeopardise international security, it is contended that it is crucial to investigate their impact in both the medium and long-term. This article argues that the Middle East has had several arms races in past, which need to be understood to learn the lessons about what might happen in the future. It is also important to understand how a variety of international actors have negatively affected peace and stability in the region with their arms sales. The research argues that at present, there is a lack of understanding about the implications of AI and its economic, legal, security, and political consequences. The article makes a variety of recommendations on the implications of AI, including that states in the region should be coordinating, planning, and developing policy with respect to AI and arms matters.

Deepdefense: annotation of immune systems in prokaryotes using deep learning.

Due to a constant evolutionary arms race, archaea and bacteria have evolved an abundance and diversity of immune responses to protect themselves against phages. Since the discovery and application of CRISPR-Cas adaptive immune systems, numerous novel candidates for immune systems have been identified. Previous approaches to identifying these new immune systems rely on hidden Markov model (HMM)-based homolog searches or use labor-intensive and costly wet-lab experiments. To aid in finding and classifying immune systems genomes, we use machine learning to classify already known immune system proteins and discover potential candidates in the genome. Neural networks have shown promising results in classifying and predicting protein functionality in recent years. However, these methods often operate under the closed-world assumption, where it is presumed that all potential outcomes or classes are already known and included in the training dataset. This assumption does not always hold true in real-world scenarios, such as in genomics, where new samples can emerge that were not previously accounted for in the training phase. In this work, we explore neural networks for immune protein classification, deal with different methods for rejecting unrelated proteins in a genome-wide search, and establish a benchmark. Then, we optimize our approach for accuracy. Based on this, we develop an algorithm called Deepdefense to predict immune cassette classes based on a genome. This design facilitates the differentiation between immune system-related and unrelated proteins by analyzing variations in model-predicted confidence values, aiding in the identification of both known and potentially novel immune system proteins. Finally, we test our approach for detecting immune systems in the genome against an HMM-based method. Deepdefense can automatically detect genes and define cassette annotations and classifications using 2 model classifications. This is achieved by creating an optimized deep learning model to annotate immune systems, in combination with calibration methods, and a second model to enable the scanning of an entire genome.

Participation of the Russian Orthodox Church in the activities of the Christian Peace Conference in 1960–1972

The article aims to describe and analyse the experience of the active participation of the Russian Orthodox Church in the Christian peace movement, which had as its main task consolidation of Churches and Christian figures in the struggle for peaceful relations between peoples, against the arms race and the nuclear threat. In the context of the global confrontation between the USSR and the USA, the “Cold war”, the activities of the Christian Peace Conference (CPC) were the integral part of the international policy of socialist countries. The departments for church affairs of the socialist camp states monitored the work of the peacekeeping organization and the direction of their development. Attempts by Western Christian figures to distract the organization from practical efforts to fight for peace came into conflict with the interests of socialist states and gave rise to divisions within the organization and crises. The events of the Prague Spring and the entry of Warsaw Pact troops into Czechoslovakia brought the CPC to the brink of collapse. On the basis of the church and state archival sources, the author of the article outlines the sequence of actions of the Chairman of the Department of External Church Relations, Metropolitan Nikodim (Rotov) of Leningrad and Novgorod, aimed to overcome internal discord in the Conference. The hierarch held senior positions in the СPС, including the post of president, which allowed him to have a significant influence on the course of peacekeeping work.

SIGURNOST U NESIGURNOSTI MEĐUNARODNOG PORETKA

The modern world is exposed to increasingly rapid and dramatic changes. In the past three years. the most important global processes are marked by great dangers, which interrupted the thirty-year period of global stability and progress. The past three years have been marked by processes that radically change the current political, economic and security relations in the world and significantly affect contemporary states and the international order. The consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, increasingly intense global migration, the American effort to preserve global dominance, the strengthening of China’s role in the world, Russia’s preoccupation with the war in Ukraine, and the renewal of the arms race, especially with nuclear weapons, have the effect that security turns into insecurity of the international order. With the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, the world is faced with major economic and political consequences. The end of the war in Ukraine is also uncertain, as is the possibility of its spread to other countries and the unfathomable consequences it has caused for global politics and the economy. Already these two global problems have dramatically affected the global community, and the repositioning of many countries, especially the leading world powers. Because of this, the US continuously adapts its foreign and security policy to the state of the world, strengthening its influence in Europe and Asia, where it confronts Russia and China. As America’s main challenger, China continues to strengthen its economy and project soft power in the global community, especially in Africa and the Middle East. India, which has recently become the world’s most populous country, is also gaining a growing global influence. Taking into account the influence of other global actors such as the European Union, Brazil, Japan and Australia, it is certain that we are facing a period of new multipolarism as a framework for solving both new and old global political, economic and security problems. Global security, which until recently was threatened primarily by terrorism, organized crime, hybrid threats, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and cyber threats, due to the increasing number of new and more challenging threats, such as wars, will be realized in the uncertainty of the international order.

АМЕРИКАНСЬКО-БРИТАНСЬКІ ВІДНОСИНИ В КОНТЕКСТІ ФОРМУВАННЯ МІЖДЕРЖАВНОГО ОБ’ЄДНАННЯ AUKUS

The article presents the results of a study of the genesis of US-British relations in the context of the historical and political peculiarities of the formation of the interstate association AUKUS. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the use of comparative analysis in the process of understanding the history of US-British relations during the presidencies of Presidents D. Trump and J. Biden as a prerequisite for the participation of both countries in the process of forming the AUKUS interstate association. Attention is focused on the commitment of the J. Biden administration to a multilateral approach to foreign policy, which required the search for updated mechanisms of cooperation with traditional partners, including the UK. The AUKUS project is seen as a mechanism for preserving the influence of the Anglo-Saxon world in the Indo-Pacific region in the context of the growing conflict with China. The author summarizes the considerations of the impact of AUKUS on Ukraine’s international position. The purpose of the research is to identify the causes, preconditions, content, and impact of the updated format of US-British relations on international relations on the example of the formation of the AUKUS interstate cooperation project in the context of current global and regional political processes. The research methodology included chronological, historical and political, historical and genetic, and comparative methods. This made it possible to study the development of interstate relations between the United States and the United Kingdom on the eve and at the stage of formation of the interstate association AUKUS, in which Australia also participated, to study the impact of current trends in international relations on the peculiarities of these states’ participation in AUKUS and to assess the significance of this innovative association in the world security system. Conclusions. It has been established that the commitment of the administration of US President J. Biden to a multilateral approach to foreign policy, unlike his predecessor D. Trump, has required the search for updated mechanisms of cooperation with traditional partners, among which the UK continues to occupy a leading position. The international project AUKUS proposed by the United States reflects an attempt to maintain influence in the Indo-Pacific region in the face of the growing conflict with China while maintaining the dominance of the Anglo-Saxon world as the core for a potentially broader unification of the region’s states. Conclusions. With the launch of the AUKUS project, the US-British “special relationship” has once again received an incentive to intensify. However, such an association has both a preventive function in terms of deterring military conflict in the region and the world, and the challenges of further intensifying the arms race and the opposite effect – increasing international tension. The interests of the main actors in the possible resolution of the military conflict in Ukraine have converged in the Indo-Pacific region. Therefore, Ukraine’s international prospects indirectly depend on the success of the AUKUS project as an element of international relations in the Indo-Pacific region as a whole.

Five Years Without the INF Treaty: Lessons and Prospects

This article focuses on regional ground-launched missiles in the context of the Russia-U.S.-China strategic triangle. It studies the bilateral nature, limited scope, and asymmetric limits/ reductions of the INF Treaty; considers the military and symbolic significance of regional ground-launched missiles in comparison with their sea- and air-launched counterparts; and examines the reasons for the INF Treaty’s termination, future U.S. deployments, and Russian and Chinese responses. In conclusion it describes two possible U.S. deployment scenarios and analyzes possibilities for minimizing the unfolding arms race.

Coaching Transitions Across Borders: The Pursuit of Individuals Advancing Coaching Careers in the Competitive Global Landscape of Olympic Sports

Intensified international competition for sporting success has facilitated coaches’ cross-national migration, which constitutes a space for coaches’ career transitions and development. This paper examines elite coaches’ international migration as part of coaching career transitions within the context of the global sporting arms race. Using a qualitative case study design, data were generated from documents and semistructured interviews with six South Korean coaches who had moved to Western nations to coach national teams in two Olympic sports. The analysis reveals an underlying mechanism of the coaches’ international mobility: dual imbalances existing between the sending and receiving countries—one in the levels of sporting performance; and the other in the perceived levels of modernisation in coaching cultures and sports systems. The migration opportunities were created by the performance imbalance between the home nation and destinations amid the structural context of the global sporting arms race. However, equally important is the individuals’ strategic initiative to seize the opportunities for their career development and mitigate the perceived modernisation imbalance in coaching practices. By highlighting coaches’ agentic capacity to navigate their career pathways within the global context, this study contributes to the literature on both international coach migration and coaching transitions.

How Countries Compete for Success in Elite Sport: A Systematic Review

The ‘Global Sporting Arms Race’ is the term that describes the competition among different countries to succeed in international sports competitions. The development of that peaceful competition determines two outputs: an increase in soft power at the international level and a promotion of the national identity and social impact. It means increasing the level of influence that the countries obtain internationally as a cornerstone of the concept of a sporting nation with a proud and healthy population. In order to explain the factors involved in the success of a sports system at the elite level, a systematic review was carried out based on the PRISMA protocol in the databases Scopus, SPORTDiscus, and Web of Science. The findings of the study show that the factors that determine success at the international level have received increased attention, as shown by the number of publications since 2010. The results indicate the following research factors: (1) it was observed that most researchers tend to carry out comprehensive analyses with a holistic perspective, while the UK, Australia, Canada, and Spain carry out segmented analyses; (2) Olympic sports—especially athletics—were the most analysed; while in non-Olympic sports, those with social influence predominate in countries, such as netball; (3) the analysis of meso and micro factors is preferred over macro factors; (4) quantitative studies are preferred through the analysis of primary sources, such as official reports; and (5) the economic variable is the most common input, with medals reached at the elite level being the most used output to check the correlation or significativity of the results.

ESTABLISHING AND CONTROLLING A STABLE MORAL AND PSYCHOLOGICALCLIMATE IN FOREIGN DIPLOMATIC INSTITUTIONS AS A KEY SECURITYCOMPONENT

This article addresses the issues of forming and controlling a stable moral and psychological atmosphere in the foreign diplomatic institutions (FDI) of Ukraine, as well as preventing and localizing potential negative markers in FDI and their impact on security. The role of management and security officers (FDI SO) is emphasized. Modern negative global trends such as increased competition for natural resources, sustained tension in certain states and regions, acceleration of the arms race, manifestations of terrorism, organized crime, smuggling, drug and arms trafficking, illegal migration, human trafficking, the threat of escalation of frozen conflicts, and the emergence of new sources of international tension, including the undeclared aggressive hybrid war by the russian Federation against Ukraine and the activation of its intelligence services, impose on Ukraine's special bodies the task of most effectively ensuring the national security of the state, including the security of Ukrainian foreign diplomatic institutions, their staff, and family members, as well as Ukrainian state secret holders sent abroad. The comprehensive nature of addressing security issues in FDI, especially the potential impact of negative signs within diplomatic teams on their security, necessitates thorough scientific analysis. The results of such work will serve as a foundation for further improvement of state political and legal acts, departmental orders, instructions, and relevant practical recommendations for leadership and FDI SO for the proper fulfilment of their duties.

ЭКОНОМИЧЕСКОЕ ОБОСНОВАНИЕ ИСПОЛЬЗОВАНИЯ ДОРОГОСТОЯЩИХ ВООРУЖЕНИЙ НА ПРИМЕРЕ ГИПЕРЗВУКОВОГО ОРУЖИЯ

The desire to dominate the global battlefield is fueling the arms race, pushing for the creation of ever more advanced offensive and defensive systems. Weapons capable of reaching hypersonic speed have become the new frontier in this race, and the world’s leading powers are actively investing in their development. The article compares the economic aspects of the creation, production, and operation of hypersonic weapons, and also examines their direct and indirect advantages. Direct benefits include delivering a precise and crushing blow to enemy military equipment, infrastructure and manpower. Indirect benefits include a deterrent and a demoralizing effect on a potential aggressor. It is proven that the development of innovative types of weapons, such as hypersonic weapons, is the key to strategic military superiority, which allows a country to protect its interests and sovereignty, and also stimulates the development of science, the military-industrial complex and the economy as a whole.

INTEGRATED DETERRENCE: RELEVANCE & IMPLICATIONS FOR SOUTH ASIA

The US National Security Strategy of 2022 introduced a relatively new concept of Integrated Deterrence (ID) that will likely impact security discourse amongst global rivals such as the US, China, and Russia while affecting the strategic thinking of relatively smaller powers like India, Pakistan, and others. With an expanded scope and objectives, ID aims to build and integrate the entire spectrum of capabilities of the US, its allies, and partners against the perceived threat from China and possibly Russia. Resultantly, the paper focuses on implications of ID for security and strategic stability in South Asia. India, being a major strategic partner with the will to play a significant role in the US-led China containment strategy, is likely to be a major beneficiary of the new US posture of ID. With enhanced and integrated military capabilities, India is likely to adopt a more hostile posture towards its neighbours, especially Pakistan, thus forcing the latter to develop options in the form of 'Integrated Response', to help maintain strategic stability in the region without indulging in an arms race, and by maintaining neutrality in the evolving US-China great power competition. Bibliography Entry Sultan, Adil, Faraz Haider and Shayan Hassan Jamy. 2023. "Integrated Deterrence: Relevance & Implications for South Asia." Margalla Papers 27 (2): 71-84.

Richardson’s Multilateral Military Expenditure Model Augmentation via Sentiment Analysis of News Data in the Framework of Complexity Eco-nomics

Complexity economics incorporates factors that are not accounted for in classical economic thought. With this paper, we intend to demonstrate the potential of using the complexity economics frame of reference by revisiting an existing model of the past, especially one that has been proven to be effective and, most importantly, could utilize the recent developments in advanced analytics as a tool to address a more realistic social milieu. We propose the introduction of more complex dynamics into an already existing model by using Deep-Learning-based NLP analysis of large news article data to fill in the action-reaction matrix for Richardson’s multilateral arms race model. By introducing said complex dynamics we also opened a discussion about the effect that media has on democratic societies’ military spending and concluded at the first level of analysis that media has a significant influence on the electorates’ decision-making of democratic nations in the matter of arms race and defense budgets. Also, we were able to demonstrate the final form of the augmented multilateral arms race model and its predictive capacity. We hope that our findings will encourage the use of advanced analytics in the framework of complexity analysis and improve the existing models’ performance via big data insights.

Anti-CRISPR proteins: a weapon of phage-bacterial arm race for genome editing

Anti-CRISPR proteins: a weapon of phage-bacterial arm race for genome editing

AraPathogen2.0: An Improved Prediction of Plant-Pathogen Protein-Protein Interactions Empowered by the Natural Language Processing Technique.

Plant-pathogen protein-protein interactions (PPIs) play crucial roles in the arm race between plants and pathogens. Therefore, the identification of these interspecies PPIs is very important for the mechanistic understanding of pathogen infection and plant immunity. Computational prediction methods can complement experimental efforts, but their predictive performance still needs to be improved. Motivated by the rapid development of natural language processing and its successful applications in the field of protein bioinformatics, here we present an improved XGBoost-based plant-pathogen PPI predictor (i.e., AraPathogen2.0), in which sequence encodings from the pretrained protein language model ESM2 and Arabidopsis PPI network-related node representations from the graph embedding technique struc2vec are used as input. Stringent benchmark experiments showed that AraPathogen2.0 could achieve a better performance than its precedent version, especially for processing the test data set with novel proteins unseen in the training data.

P4 protein of an Indian isolate of rice tungro bacilliform virus modulates gene silencing.

Plant hosts and their viral pathogens are engaged in a constant cycle of defense and counter-defense as part of a molecular arms race, principal among them being the plant RNAi defense and the viral RNAi suppressor counter-defense. Rice tungro bacilliform virus (RTBV), member of the family Caulimoviridae, genus Tungrovirus, species Tungrovirus oryzae, infects rice in South- and Southeast Asia and causes severe symptoms of stunting, yellow-orange discoloration and twisting of leaf tips. To better understand the possible counter-defensive roles of RTBV against the host RNAi defense system, we explored the ability of the P4 protein of an Indian isolate of RTBV to act as a possible modulator of RNAi. Using a transient silencing and silencing suppression assay in Nicotiana benthamiana, we show that P4 not only displays an RNAi suppressor function, but also potentially enhances RNAi. The results also suggests that the N-terminal 168 amino acid residues of P4 are sufficient to maintain RNAi suppressor activity. Taken together with the earlier reports this work strengthens the view that the P4 protein carries out RNAi suppressor and a potential RNAi enhancer function.

Parasitoid Serpins Evolve Novel Functions to Manipulate Host Homeostasis.

Parasitoids introduce various virulence factors when parasitism occurs, and some taxa generate teratocytes to manipulate the host immune system and metabolic homeostasis for the survival and development of their progeny. Host-parasitoid interactions are extremely diverse and complex, yet the evolutionary dynamics are still poorly understood. A category of serpin genes, named CvT-serpins, was discovered to be specifically expressed and secreted by the teratocytes of Cotesia vestalis, an endoparasitoid of the diamondback moth Plutella xylostella. Genomic and phylogenetic analysis indicated that the C. vestalis serpin genes are duplicated and most of them are clustered into 1 monophyletic clade. Intense positive selection was detected at the residues around the P1-P1' cleavage sites of the Cv-serpin reactive center loop domain. Functional analyses revealed that, in addition to the conserved function of melanization inhibition (CvT-serpins 1, 16, 18, and 21), CvT-serpins exhibited novel functions, i.e. bacteriostasis (CvT-serpins 3 and 5) and nutrient metabolism regulation (CvT-serpins 8 and 10). When the host-parasitoid system is challenged with foreign bacteria, CvT-serpins act as an immune regulator to reprogram the host immune system through sustained inhibition of host melanization while simultaneously functioning as immune effectors to compensate for this suppression. In addition, we provided evidence that CvT-serpin8 and 10 participate in the regulation of host trehalose and lipid levels by affecting genes involved in these metabolic pathways. These findings illustrate an exquisite tactic by which parasitoids win out in the parasite-host evolutionary arms race by manipulating host immune and nutrition homeostasis via adaptive gene evolution and neofunctionalization.

Ongoing shuffling of protein fragments diversifies core viral functions linked to interactions with bacterial hosts.

Biological modularity enhances evolutionary adaptability. This principle is vividly exemplified by bacterial viruses (phages), which display extensive genomic modularity. Phage genomes are composed of independent functional modules that evolve separately and recombine in various configurations. While genomic modularity in phages has been extensively studied, less attention has been paid to protein modularity-proteins consisting of distinct building blocks that can evolve and recombine, enhancing functional and genetic diversity. Here, we use a set of 133,574 representative phage proteins and highly sensitive homology detection to capture instances of domain mosaicism, defined as fragment sharing between two otherwise unrelated proteins, and to understand its relationship with functional diversity in phage genomes. We discover that unrelated proteins from diverse functional classes frequently share homologous domains. This phenomenon is particularly pronounced within receptor-binding proteins, endolysins, and DNA polymerases. We also identify multiple instances of recent diversification via domain shuffling in receptor-binding proteins, neck passage structures, endolysins and some members of the core replication machinery, often transcending distant taxonomic and ecological boundaries. Our findings suggest that ongoing diversification via domain shuffling is reflective of a co-evolutionary arms race, driven by the need to overcome various bacterial resistance mechanisms against phages.

FACILE: A capsule network with fewer capsules and richer hierarchical information for malware image classification

The struggle between security researchers and malware perpetuates an endless arms race. Recent studies indicate that converting malware into grayscale images and using convolutional neural network or capsule network to classify and identify them is a promising approach. Nonetheless, training convolutional neural networks demands a significant amount of data and parameters, posing a challenge to obtaining enough training samples for malware detection tasks, particularly for new malware families. Additionally, a high number of parameters translates to low classification efficiency. Capsule networks offer a promising approach to achieve higher-level feature representations through dynamic routing between capsules, but research on capsule networks is still nascent, and there are two major challenges for malware classification tasks: the huge number of parameters, which makes model training difficult, and capsules shedding, which results in information loss during routing. To address these issues, we propose a capsule network called FACILE that uses fewer capsules and richer hierarchical information. In the initial feature extraction stage, we perform multi-level feature extraction and fusion using dynamic convolution. In the routing phase, we introduce balance coefficients to enhance the model's representational power and stabilize the training process. We conducted experiments on the VIRUS-MNIST, MalImg, and BIG2015 datasets and found that FACILE requires only 8.1% of the capsules and 1.8%-3.3% of the parameters compared to the original CapsNet, while reducing the error rate to 8.087%, 1.149%, and 2.797%, respectively. Furthermore, FACILE demonstrates competitive performance with a small number of parameters as the training samples decrease compared to convolutional neural network-based models such as ResNet, EfficientNet, and VGG.

Reducing the Risks of Nuclear War— the Role of Health Professionals

Reducing the Risks of Nuclear War— the Role of Health Professionals

Diverse gut pathogens exploit the host engulfment pathway via a conserved mechanism

Macrophages clear infections by engulfing and digesting pathogens within phagolysosomes. Pathogens escape this fate by engaging in a molecular arms race; they use WxxxE motif-containing "effector" proteins to subvert the host cells they invade and seek refuge within protective vacuoles. Here, we define the host component of the molecular arms race as an evolutionarily conserved polar "hot spot" on the PH domain of ELMO1 (Engulfment and Cell Motility protein 1), which is targeted by diverse WxxxE effectors. Using homology modeling and site-directed mutagenesis, we show that a lysine triad within the "patch" directly binds all WxxxE effectors tested: SifA (Salmonella), IpgB1 and IpgB2 (Shigella), and Map (enteropathogenic Escherichia coli). Using an integrated SifA-host protein-protein interaction network, in silico network perturbation, and functional studies, we show that the major consequences of preventing SifA-ELMO1 interaction are reduced Rac1 activity and microbial invasion. That multiple effectors of diverse structure, function, and sequence bind the same hot spot on ELMO1 suggests that the WxxxE effector(s)-ELMO1 interface is a convergence point of intrusion detection and/or host vulnerability. We conclude that the interface may represent the fault line in coevolved molecular adaptations between pathogens and the host, and its disruption may serve as a therapeutic strategy.