Analysis & Opinions

Calder Walton writes that Soviet espionage inside the Manhattan Project would change history. By the end of World War II, Stalin's spies had delivered the secrets of the atomic bomb to the Kremlin. This accelerated Moscow's bomb project. When the Soviets detonated their first atomic weapon in August 1949, it was a replica of the weapon built at Los Alamos and dropped by the Americans on Nagasaki.

After viewing the movie Oppenheimer, Matthew Bunn, John P. Holdren, Mariana Budjeryn, Matthew J. Parent, and Calder Walton, and Sylvia Mishra offer their thoughts on its relevance to the world today. 

AI is shaping up to be part of surveillance capitalism, warn Bruce Schneier and Nathan Sanders.

Stephen Walt argues that when states are in trouble and worried that they might suffer a setback, they toss their principles aside and do what they think it takes to win.

Gabrielle Armstrong-Scott and Jim Waldo argue that machine learning tools and a better definition of "terrorist and extremist content" could help make the Web a safer place.

At the foot of the Eqi Glacier in Greenland in June, I watched ice formed thousands of years ago drop into the warming ocean. With this vivid depiction of climate change in my mind, I was disappointed that neither of the conferences held last month to prepare for the UN’s upcoming COP28 summit had produced any real breakthroughs.

However, while the need for climate action is rising, the stakes for COP, perhaps counter-intuitively, look to be diminishing. An underwhelming COP28 would be a missed opportunity but it may not be a tragedy. Twenty or even 10 years ago, it was reasonable to hope a co-operative approach could address climate. But it is no longer a realistic expectation — nor the most promising route for progress.

A future where A.I.s interpret, apply, and enforce most laws at societal scale like this will exponentially magnify problems around fairness, transparency, and freedom, warn Jonathon W. Penney and Bruce Schneier.

In May 2023, the Arctic Initiative held a closed-door workshop for climate scientists, regional experts, Indigenous and youth leaders, and national security officials from six Arctic states, with the goal of identifying the most plausible scenarios and pathways for how geopolitics linked to climate change in the Arctic might evolve and actionable steps that the U.S. government might consider taking today to manage emerging risks. Eyck Fremann summarizes his key takeaways from the event.

Ever since its seizure by Russian forces in March 2022, the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant—Europe’s largest, with six reactors—has posed a serious danger of a radioactive disaster. Now, Ukrainian officials have charged that Russia has rigged the plant with explosives, while Russia claims that Ukraine plans an attack on the facility. On July 4, the site lost off-site power yet again, forcing its cooling systems to rely on backup power supply. How serious is the risk of a major radioactive disaster?

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken wrapped up his recent trip to Beijing with few clear successes and further uncertainty ahead. Blinken’s mission had been to stabilize the teetering US-China relationship and find a way to prevent a potential crisis between the two global superpowers from escalating into a larger conflict. But a daunting set of challenges remain — from tussles over high-tech supply chains to tensions over Taiwan — not least of which is repairing the military communications channels that have fallen dangerously silent, while the two nation’s armed forces operate within closer proximity and greater freque.