At risk of tooting the horn for my former employer, IEEE Spectrum magazine, I want to commend my former colleagues and fellow bloggers for sharply raising the question of whether the U.S. government considered the global consequences when it decided to unleash Stuxnet and, most likely, Flame as well. In …
Me culpa. Yesterday I speculated about the origins of Flame and noted at the outset that Stuxnet generally is attributed to Israel, perhaps with the United States as an accessory. In an exhaustive report published this morning, the New York Times reports that Stuxnet was in fact a …
Upon hearing of Flame, the recently discovered computer malware sometimes described as the most insidious and sophisticated ever, one’s first thought is bound to be of Stuxnet. Upon discovery of that virus a year and a half ago, analyses by top cyber-security firms soon yielded smoking-gun proof that …
Scientific American Executive Editor Fred Guterl has a superb short article in the June issue of the magazine laying out the basics of the H5N1 virus scare:
• how it is that bird flus represent a “natural reservoir” of influenzas that jump to human populations
• …
Earlier this week I had the opportunity to sit down with Jim Oberg to discuss the trip he and 130 other foreign journalists made to North Korea to witness—or so they thought—the attempted launch into space of a small weather satellite. Oberg, a former space mission …
After much delay and intense global controversy, Britain’s Nature magazine has published online the first of two papers describing how the bird flu virus could be modified to be more transmissible from mammal to mammal through the air. The paper, “Experimental adaptation of an …
For a discussion of all technicalities connected with the Korean launch–from its military implications to the launch plan–I highly recommend the preview physicist David Wright had in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists last week. Wright, who is codirector of the global security program …
Nuclear negotiations with Iran having been punted forward six weeks to a day in May, a positive development in principle, attention is focusing on whether Iran can be trusted at all and on who’s really in charge. The consensus of close observers seems to be that the country’s …
Without commenting on Israel’s decision today to declare Guenter Grass persona not grata, Grass’s peculiar decision to publish what is really a short op-ed piece in the form of a poem, his decision to publish the piece at all given the embarrassment he suffered when his …
Huff Post draws attention today to an interview on the subject of the Iranian nuclear dilemma that Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman did with the daily Yedioth Ahronoth on March 18. In it, amazingly, the hard-right, ultra-nationalistic Lieberman said:
“If, God forbid, a war with Iran breaks …
The good: Those many small incremental improvements in securing nuclear materials worldwide–the fruit of much labor by dedicated people, as laid out by Jodi Lieberman in a recent post.
The bad: The absence of any evident progress in dissuading North Korea from a satellite launch, which, if …
With Vladimir Putin’s re-election for a six year term, and with him talking of helping himself to second-six year term after that, it is a good time to take stock of what Masha Gessen calls the “criminal tyranny” he has established in Russia. Gessen, the author of a …
The startling agreement announced today–the U.S. providing North Korea food aid in exchange for the North’s putting a moratorium on uranium enrichment, nuclear weapons tests and long-range missile testing–would seem by any reckoning a very positive step in the right direction. The mere fact that North Korea’s new leadership is …
To judge from reports that appeared in The New York Times and Washington Post, as well as Science magazine, it appears that the World Health Organization will recommend, over U.S. objections, full publication of the bird flu studies showing that an air-transmissible, mammal-to-mammal form of the …
The estimable Robert Kagan, senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brooking Institution has a new book, The World America Made (Knopf). Because Kagan is the most formidable of the neoconservative foreign policy intellectuals, and because he reputedly has the attention of both the Obama administration …
