National Security Experts Research Articles

The scale politics of emerging diseases.

The concept of scale politics offers historians a useful framework for analyzing the connections between environment and health. This essay examines the public health campaign around emerging diseases during the 1990s, particularly the ways in which different actors employed scale in geographic and political representations; how they configured cause, consequence, and intervention at different scales; and the moments at which they shifted between different scales in the presentation of their arguments. Biomedical scientists, the mass media, and public health and national security experts contributed to this campaign, exploiting Americans' ambivalence about globalization and the role of modernity in the production of new risks, framing them in terms that made particular interventions appear necessary, logical, or practical.

The pros from Dover

President Bush surrounded himself with what should have been a crack team of national security experts. So what went wrong? Did their system just not work, or did they have the wrong agenda?

The pros from Dover

President Bush surrounded himself with what should have been a crack team of national security experts. So what went wrong? Did their system just not work, or did they have the wrong agenda?

Vaccinating health care workers against smallpox in an isolated primary care facility

Just as civilian emergency response teams and health care workers in the United States are being immunized against smallpox, primary care facilities in rural or isolated areas are being confronted with the need to develop terrorism response plans, including smallpox vaccination programs (1). Many are reluctant to administer or receive the vaccine because of concerns about potential side effects, lower productivity, and providing compensation for medical expenses or lost wages to workers with persisting adverse reactions to the vaccine (2–8). In April 2003, only a fraction of health care workers and first responders who were scheduled to receive the vaccine did receive it (8,9). By July 2003, national security experts feared that the smallpox immunization program was all but dead (8). Some states such as Arizona and Nevada have immunized fewer than 50 people (8). Washington state has immunized only 543 of their initial goal of 7000 medical personnel (8).

DHS Security Efforts under Fire

The US Department of Homeland Security is being slammed by US National Security Experts for losing prominent cybersecurity experts, and placing the cybersecurity division down the list in terms of political weight. This is a short news story only. Visit www.compseconline.com for the latest computer security industry news.

SCIENCE AT A TIME OF TERROR

SINCE SEPT. 11, 2001—AND THE anthrax contamination in Florida, New York City, and Washington, D.C., that followed soon after—concern has been rising about the ability of terrorists to glean useful information from scientific literature, especially in the life sciences. Although there have been no confirmed cases of foreign terrorists using published research to implement terrorist acts, national security experts and scientists as well have become increasingly worried that it could happen. In fact, concern in Washington, D.C., has risen to such a level that the American Society for Microbiology (ASM)—which has felt a lot of heat for the research it publishes—asked the National Academies (NAS) to convene a workshop titled Scientific Openness and National Security. NAS agreed, and on Jan. 9, it brought together Washington, D.C., a distinguished group of scientists, journal publishers and editors, and national security experts from a variety of government agencies, including the CIA, FBI, and Department of ...

Shining light on "Dark Winter".

On 22--23 June 2001, the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies, in collaboration with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Analytic Services Institute for Homeland Security, and the Oklahoma National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism, held a senior-level exercise entitled "Dark Winter" that simulated a covert smallpox attack on the United States. The first such exercise of its kind, Dark Winter was constructed to examine the challenges that senior-level policy makers would face if confronted with a bioterrorist attack that initiated outbreaks of highly contagious disease. The exercise was intended to increase awareness of the scope and character of the threat posed by biological weapons among senior national security experts and to bring about actions that would improve prevention and response strategies.

Analytic Models and Policy Prescription: Understanding Recent Innovation in U.S. Counterterrorism

The threat of terrorism, particularly terrorism involving a weapon of mass destruction (WMD), has received enormous attention in the last decade. Since the mid1990s, the federal government has embarked on a concerted national effort to prepare the country for acts of WMD terrorism. A key component of the counterterrorism agenda is the domestic preparedness program, a series of initiatives aimed at reducing America's vulnerability to a WMD terrorist attack. However, there is a heated debate over whether or not the United States needs a domestic preparedness program at all. This article argues that much of the debate originates in disparate approaches to analyzing terrorism. Terrorism studies specialists use an internal model that analyzes the root causes, motives, and historical patterns of terrorism and concludes that the threat of WMD terrorism against the United States is not sufficient to warrant the domestic preparedness budget. Policy makers and national security experts, however, rely on an external risk assessment model that considers terrorism within the context of the many risks to American security. This assessment model evaluates WMD terrorism on the basis of risk and consequences, and reaches a logical conclusion that the potential for mass destruction not only merits, but also requires a level of domestic preparedness.

Abstracts of Recent Articles and Literature

Abstracts of Recent Articles and Literature

Technology and the changing face of war

Conflict in the future will be shaped heavily by the epochal, technology-driven change from the industrial age to the information age that is now well under way. Wars among nations will likely take a backseat to a range of conflicts that may crop up almost anywhere under various guises outside todays norms of international law and Riles of engagement. Amorphous enemies without territories or borders could become a greater threat than traditional nation-state rivalries as cyberstates replace nations as the typical adversary. According to an article in the April 27 issue of Aviation Week & Space Technology , these were some of the key points made during a recent gathering of national security experts and theoreticians at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa. As the AWST article puts it: The new stateless enemy might be an amalgam of transnational or subnational adversaries, outlaw syndicates, [and] corporations or drug cartels. Terrorist, political, or criminal in nature, it ...

America's Secret Power: The CIA in a Democratic Society. By Loch K. Johnson. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. 344p. $24.95.

In 1975, after The New York Times published devastating critique of the CIA, three government panels--the Rockefeller, Church, and Pike Committees--were formed to examine these allegations in depth. What they uncovered--assassination plots, opened mail, drug experiments against unsuspecting subjects (two of whom died from side effects)--shocked the American people and moved Senator Frank Church to call the CIA a rogue elephant rampaging out of control. Clearly, America needs strong, effective intelligence effort, but just as clearly, this effort must operate within the bounds of an open, democratic society. Based on hundreds of interviews with CIA officials, national security experts, and legislators, as well as thorough culling of the archival record, America's Secret Power offers an illuminating and up-to-date picture of the Central Intelligence Agency, stressing the difficult balance between the genuine needs of national security and the protection of individual liberties. Loch Johnson, who has studied the workings of the CIA at first hand as legislative overseer, presents comprehensive examination of the Agency and its relations with other American institutions, including Congress and the White House (he offers particularly astute analyses of the CIA's use of journalists and academics to gather intelligence) and he illuminates the CIA's three major missions--intelligence analysis, counterintelligence, and covert action--providing vivid descriptions of their purpose and their pathologies. For example, he offers fascinating analysis of the Seven Sins of intelligence work, revealing how the best intelligence reports can be distorted or ignored (in the mid-1960s, the evidence against quick American victory in Vietnam was dismissed); how covert actions can spin out of control despite extensive safeguards, as in the Iran-Contra scandal; and how the CIA has spied on American citizens in clear violation of its charter. Further, he provides thorough review of legislative efforts to curb these abuses, suggesting several important ways to achieve the delicate balance between national security and democratic ideals. Vividly written and meticulously documented, America's Secret Power draws the strands of vast amount of research into balanced critique of our intelligence networks. It is work that stands alone in its thoroughness and objectivity, thoughtful and sobering portrait of the contemporary CIA.

Chemical Warfare, A Study in Restraints.

In the aftermath of 9/11, the potential terror of weapons of mass destruction--from nuclear, biological, and chemical to dirty bombs--preoccupies national security experts. In Chemical Warfare, Frederic J. Brown, presents a cogent, innovative framework for understanding the historical forces that have restrained the of WMD and how they continue to have relevance today. Analyzing both world wars, he argues that the restraints on were complex and often unpredictable and ranged from the political to the technological. The author offers a detailed examination of American chemical warfare policy as it was shaped by industry and public sentiment, as well as national and military leaders. The organization of the book into three parts reflects the importance of battlefield experiences during the First World War and of international political restraints as they evolved during the interwar years and culminated in first use policies by major powers in World War II. Part I examines the of chemical weapons in World War I as it influenced subsequent national policy decisions. Part II focuses on the evolution of political, military, economic, and psychological restraints from 1919 to 1939. Part III discusses World War II during two critical periods: 1939 to early 1942, when the environment of the war was being established largely without American influence; and during 1945, when the United States faced no credible threat of retaliation to deter its strategic and battlefield of chemical weapons. Written at the height of controversy about the U.S. of chemicals in Vietnam, Chemical Warfare offers a valuable historical perspective, as relevant now in its analysis of chemical and also nuclear policy as it was when first published.