Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland Research Works
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Item Controlling Dangerous Pathogens(2007-03) Steinbruner, John; Harris, Elisa D.; Gallagher, Nancy; M., StacyAdvances in science has led to a situation where dangerous pathogens that are enormously beneficial for research can also be greatly destructive. However, scientific institutions are not prepared to handle such a burden. Proposals advanced by scientific societies are voluntary by nature but do not alone provide robust global protection. This monograph outlines an advanced oversight arrangement, provisionally labeled the Biological Research Security System (BRRS), which is designed to help prevent destructive applications of biology, whether inadvertent or deliberate. Unfortunately, in order to provide adequate protection, constraints might be necessary on freedom of action at the level of fundamental research, and infringing on autonomy of researchers. In addition a great deal of conceptual innovation, legal specification, institutional design and political accommodation would admittedly be required to establish oversight processes. The author concludes that due to the demands and burdens imposed, that human societies might accept lesser standards of protection and rather acquiesce to more limited and incremental measures.Item Towards a Reconsideration of the Rules of Space Security(2005-12-15) Gallagher, Nancy; CISSMItem Controlling Dangerous Pathogens: A Prototype Protective Oversight System(2005-12-01) Steinbruner, John; Harris, Elisa D.; Gallagher, Nancy; Okutani, Stacy; CISSMAs has become increasingly evident in recent years, advances in biology are posing an acute and arguably unprecedented dilemma. The same basic science that could in principle be highly beneficial could also be enormously destructive, depending on how it is applied. Although the scope of actual consequence remains uncertain, the potential is clearly extraordinary with the health of individuals, the stability of societies and the viability of the global ecology all apparently at stake. Since compelling good and appalling harm cannot be disentangled at the level of fundamental science, a burden of management is being imposed that human institutions are not currently prepared to handle. The dilemma itself has been exemplified in several widely noted experiments1 and professionally acknowledged in reports issued by the United States National Academies of Science (NAS) and by the British Royal Society. Not surprisingly, however, and perhaps inevitably, efforts to devise an effective response are still at an embryonic stage. The proposals separately advanced by the two scientific societies are directed at their own communities and are largely voluntary in character. Those are natural initial steps but would not alone provide robust global protection. In an effort to encourage productive discussion of the problem and its implications, this monograph discusses an oversight process designed to bring independent scrutiny to bear throughout the world without exception on fundamental research activities that might plausibly generate massively destructive or otherwise highly dangerous consequences. The suggestion is that a mandatory, globally implemented process of that sort would provide the most obvious means of protecting against the dangers of advances in biology while also pursuing the benefits. The underlying principle of independent scrutiny is the central measure of protection used in other areas of major consequence, such as the handling of money, and it is reasonable to expect that principle will have to be actively applied to biology as well. The monograph outlines an advanced oversight arrangement, provisionally labeled the Biological Research Security System (BRSS), which is designed to help prevent destructive applications of biology, whether inadvertent or deliberate. The arrangement is put forward with full realization that meaningful protection can only be achieved by imposing some constraint on freedom of action at the level of fundamental research, where individual autonomy has traditionally been highly valued for the best of reasons. Constraints of any sort on research will not be intrinsically welcome and will have to demonstrate that the protection provided justifies the costs entailed. A great deal of conceptual innovation, legal specification, institutional design and political accommodation would admittedly be required to establish such an oversight process, and there is very little precedent to work with. Because of the demands imposed and the inconvenience involved, the monograph concedes that human societies after due reflection might choose at least initially to accept lesser standards of protection and it discusses more limited incremental measures that might be undertaken. The central contention, however, is that the eventual outcome should be a fully considered choice and not the default result of inertia or neglect. John Steinbruner is the Director of the Center for International Security Studies at Maryland.Elisa D. Harris is a Senior Research Scholar at the Center. Nancy Gallagher is the Associate Director for Research at the Center. Stacy Okutani is a Graduate Fellow in the Advanced Methods of Cooperative Security Program.Item Nuclear Weapons and New Security Challenges(2002-05-30) Gallagher, Nancy; CISSMReligious leaders have made strong and influential statements about nuclear weapons at critical moments. The 1983 Pastoral Letter on War and Peace from the National Conference of Catholic Bishops was released shortly before I started working as a first-year teacher at Our Lady Queen of Peace School in Madison Wisconsin. I found that statement very empowering even though I was not a Catholic, and did not even consider myself to be especially religious at that time. It helped channel my own amorphous fears of nuclear war into a more focused plan of action. It provided cogent analysis and moral authority which increased my confidence when I spoke about nuclear issues to parents and the principal at my school. It strengthened my commitment to teaching about war and peace in the nuclear age, which is one reason why I returned to graduate school and devoted my professional life to nuclear arms control. More typically, a different type of theology shapes debates about nuclear weapons. When I accompanied General Shalikashvili and Ambassador Goodby to speak with U.S. Senators, government officials, and others about the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, we were often told that controversies surrounding the Treaty stemmed from basic "theological disagreements." Of course, nobody was suggesting that attitudes toward nuclear weapons are necessarily determined by people"s religious affiliation. Instead, they meant that ideas about nuclear weapons are heavily influenced by worldviews i.e. fundamental beliefs about human nature and about how people should behave in a world that lacks an overarching secular authority. Tonight, I want to start by talking about how the interplay between different worldviews during the Cold War led to a grand bargain and what is sometimes called the "nuclear restraint regime." I will say a few words about why the new security challenges that have emerged since make a legally based nuclear restraint regime more, not less, important. I will then make the case that the Bush Administration has responded to these new security challenges by systematically repudiating the grand bargain and undermining central elements of the nuclear restraint regime. Finally, I will conclude by suggesting that the situation today is much like it was in 1983, in that the security policies being pursued by the government are spreading fear, increasing hatred, and producing actions that degrade the quality of life as they raise the risk of nuclear war. What is missing now is any serious democratic debate or sustained opposition to rhetoric and policies that reflect an extreme version of one worldview and a narrow conception of national interests while violating key tenets of other worldviews and more comprehensive conceptions of the global good. Nancy Gallagher is Associate Director for Research at the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland, University of Maryland.Item Verification and Advanced Cooperative Security(2002-01-01) Gallagher, Nancy; CISSMThe security circumstances confronting the world today are fundamentally different from those which shaped the theory and practice of Cold War arms control. Then, the central problem was to deter a massive nuclear or conventional attack while using arms control to stabilise deterrence and prevent proliferation. Now, the United Stes and its allies have little reason to fear a deliberate large-scale attack. Instead, the most troublesome security problems involve smaller-scale, more diffuse dangers driven by key trends associated with globalisation. Various developments, including the information revolution, the emergence of global markets and transnational networks, widespread access to dual-use materials and sophisticated technologies, and growing economic inequalities, have magnified the threats posed by angry individuals, disaffected groups and weak states. They have also multiplied the destruction that could occur from natural causes, accident, inadvertence or other unintended consequences of "business as usual" in a tightly connected high-technology world. The Advanced Methods of Cooperative Security Program at the University of Maryland is exploring conceptual issues and operational techniques for co-operative responses to new global security problems. The goal is to promote interdisciplinary research and discussion about applications that exemplify emerging security problems and embody elements of potential solutions. The current focus is on research with dangerous pathogens, space activities and fissile material controls. This chapter presents the basic concept of advanced co-operative security and explores the role for verification in advanced co-operative security systems. It also provides a briefillustration of advanced co-operative security in practice, using the example of biotechnology. Nancy Gallagher is Associate Director for Research at the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland, University of Maryland.Item Prospects for Security Transformation(2004-07-01) Steinbruner, John; Gallagher, Nancy; CISSMCertainly for many decades and arguably for most of history, security policy has been an overriding priority of major governments, and large scale forms of deliberate aggression have been the dominant concern. In response to that concern large investments have been made to create military forces prepared for immediate use, and the resulting balance of national military capability has generally been considered the principal determinant of international order. Over the past decade, however, that traditional conception has been continuously eroded by circumstances that do not readily fit the presumptions. The idea of belligerent opponents has been preserved, but the list of candidates has receded to a small number, none of whom are plausibly capable of the classic forms of massive aggression. The extensive violence that does continue to occur is episodic, small in scale, and widely dispersed. In the United States at least, the phenomenon of terrorism has been depicted as a global enemy, but the damage directly caused by terrorist actions has so far been a small fraction of that resulting from civil conflicts and ordinary crime. The capacities and characteristics of the largely anonymous perpetrators seem to be less relevant than the underlying causes. At the leading edge of practice, security officials are being driven to contend as much or more with dangerous processes as they are with deliberate opponents, although the distinction has yet to crystallize in the formulation of policy. It is, of course, notoriously difficult to appreciate a fundamental shift in historical circumstance if you are caught in the middle of it, but there are some very strong indications that a major redirection is occurring, having to do with the aggregate pattern of human development. With economic growth in recent decades concentrated among the wealthier segments of all societies and population growth concentrated in the poorer segments, the global distribution of resources appears to be too inequitable to be indefinitely sustained without generating potentially unmanageable amounts of civil violence. Although the connection between violence and economic performance is neither simple nor well understood, it is prudent, even mandatory, to assume that accumulating grievance combined with increasing access to information and destructive technology poses a major threat to the preservation of consensual order necessary to operate the global economy and to manage the interactions it generates. Not even the most advanced military establishments could expect to cope with a general breakdown of legal order. They could not deny access to any major society by people determined to wreak havoc and they certainly could not identify and preemptively destroy all those who might wish to do harm if their numbers were large. Assuring at least minimally equitable global standards of living and achieving the political accommodation necessary to support that objective is the foundation of security. No amount of traditional military capability could compensate for the failure to establish those determining conditions. John Steinbruner is director of the Center for International Security Studies at Maryland. Nancy Gallagher is the Associate Director for Research at the Center.