Book Review of Insider Threats by Matthew Bunn and Scott D. Sagan

While books on various kinds of insider threats do exist, meticulously compiled information on the topic in the context of nuclear security is hard to come by. Information in the nuclear domain rarely comes to light for security reasons and makes this strain of insider threats a challenging topic to write about. This edited volume entitled Insider Threats, compiled by two of the most respected Professors in the field of nuclear security today, namely Matthew Bunn of Harvard University, and Scott D. Sagan of Stanford University, arrived on bookshelves as a timely publication

Leader Type and Responses to State-Sponsored Terrorism

State-sponsored terrorism (SST) has for long been used as a tool by countries to inflict costs on rival states without direct confrontation, as the latter risks inviting limited to full-scale war. The literature on SST has so far focused primarily on the motivations, facilitating factors, and the timing of state sponsorship. What has been insufficiently studied, however, are the responses of victim states to SST. Why does state response to SST vary spatio-temporally in different countries, under different governments, and even under different leaders of the same ruling political dispensation in a country? Under what conditions does a state respond militarily or in a Rapoport-esque tit-for-tat fashion with their own SST as opposed to responding more mildly through economic sanctions, the use of diplomatic tools, and lodging grievances with IOs? I argue that an important reason for this variation in response to SST attacks occurs because of leader type, i.e. whether a leader is a hawk or a dove. Basing my characterization of hawk-dove leader type on Brown (2017), Snyder and Diesing (1977), and Keller (2005), this dissertation controls for other confounding variables and explores the above relationship empirically using a small-n research design by examining cases from several countries worldwide. In the first chapter, I analyze the decision-making of 12 leaders, from five different countries, responding to 19 separate terrorist attack incidents by groups supported by rival states. In the second chapter, I take a deep dive into the India-Pakistan rival dyad, examining responses by three different Indian leaders to five instances of alleged Pakistan-sponsored terrorism between 2000-2019. Finally, in my third chapter, I evaluate three responses of the Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan and one by his predecessor, Turgut Ozal, to SST attacks orchestrated by the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK), an organization backed by multiple states (namely, Iran, Iraq, and Syria). While the response is often the result of complex calculations by the top decisionmakers in the victim state, I empirically demonstrate that variation in response occurs because of leader type

Sunken Efforts? Legal Hurdles to Stemming Maritime CBRNE Proliferation

For four centuries, the law of the sea has rested on the principle of mare liberum or the freedom of the high seas. The oceans have traditionally been regarded as areas over which no state could claim dominion or sovereignty. Nations desirous of countering security threats have found that their efforts are curtailed by the traditional paradigm, partly because of the resistance from other states to permit further derogation. Several extant laws aim to contain the spread of CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear) material through a variety of measures. Certain bilateral agreements between nations exist, but the foreign vessel still tends to remain sacrosanct primarily because of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. Normally, merchant vessels in the open seas may only be stopped and searched without flag state consent in rare circumstances. In light of the scourge of a terrorist CBRN attack hanging like a Damocles’ sword upon the world today, this article seeks to discern whether a state possesses the right to interdict and search vessels of another state suspected of ferrying CBRN material in international waters. Countering the kind of faceless non-state actor threats of the 21st Century would require curtailing some of these freedoms earlier enjoyed in the open seas. Better integration of maritime laws, such as the relevant sections of the UNSCR 1540, the PSI and the SUA 2005 with the UNCLOS is of the essence

Book Review of The United Nations, Peace and Security: From Collective Security to the Responsibility to Protect by Ramesh Thakur

This is a review of the second edition of the book by the writer and former UN man, Prof. Ramesh Thakur, that traces the metamorphoses of UN policies from that of collective security in 1945, when it was founded, to the more contemporary notion of the responsibility to protect (R2P) - the notion that sovereignty entails a responsibility to protect all populations from mass atrocity crimes and human rights violations. Thakur’s book is a critique of UN policies and a revelation of the good, bad, and ugly within the system. However, it conjures up an ultimately optimistic image and has a message for those who may be unbelievers of the relevance of the UN in the modern day. The message is that a balanced path needs to be tread between the realists and the idealists, the cynics and the romantics

Book Review of The Logic of American Nuclear Strategy. Why Strategic Superiority Matters by Matthew Kroenig

Matthew Kroenig is among the best regarded names of the modern generation in the nuclear policy and deterrence fields. He is the author of several books and has had a stellar career in both the policy and academic fields, giving him an indubitable edge in translating from English to English - that is, \u27policy-ese\u27 English to \u27academish\u27 English, and vice-versa. Kroenig is a scholar-practitioner by training having served in the Pentagon, on Presidential campaigns, and currently holding position as Associate Professor at Georgetown University’s Department of Government

Book Review of Global Nuclear Developments: Insights from a Former IAEA Nuclear Inspector by Pantelis F. Ikonomou

With a touching dedication to his grandchildren “in the hope that they will live in a world free of nuclear weapons,” a sentiment shared by numerous professionals working in the nuclear security and disarmament circuits, Pantelis F. Ikonomou sets the perfect stage for what is to follow in this excellent work. The author brings in his career-long expertise from important and sensitive programs, projects, and missions he has served in with the mother of all nuclear 3S (safety, safeguards, and security) organizations, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)

Book Review of Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides\u27s Trap? by Graham Allison

CHINA AND THE UNITED STATES ARE HEADING TOWARD A WAR NEITHER WANTS. The reason is Thucydides’s Trap, a deadly pattern of structural stress that results when a rising power challenges a ruling one. This phenomenon is as old as history itself. About the Peloponnesian War that devastated ancient Greece, the historian Thucydides explained: “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.” Over the past 500 years, these conditions have occurred sixteen times. War broke out in twelve of them. Today, as an unstoppable China approaches an immovable America and both Xi Jinping and Donald Trump promise to make their countries “great again,” the seventeenth case looks grim. Unless China is willing to scale back its ambitions or Washington can accept becoming number two in the Pacific, a trade conflict, cyberattack, or accident at sea could soon escalate into all-out war. In Destined for War, the eminent Harvard scholar Graham Allison explains why Thucydides’s Trap is the best lens for understanding U.S.-China relations in the twenty-first century. Through uncanny historical parallels and war scenarios, he shows how close we are to the unthinkable. Yet, stressing that war is not inevitable, Allison also reveals how clashing powers have kept the peace in the past — and what painful steps the United States and China must take to avoid disaster today

Arms and the Man: Strategic Trade Control Challenges of 3D Printing

3D printing is on the verge of confronting Customs and other security agencies with a whole new set of mind-boggling problems. With the tremendous reach of the Internet worldwide, virtual blueprints to weapon parts, components and accessories of drones, narcotic drugs and psychoactive substances, all strategic trade items, as well as other restricted items such as pornographic material, can be proliferated and printed out swiftly by any individual or organization with access to a 3D printer. Intellectual Property Rights are also endangered by these machines. Technology is forever outpacing fast antiquating legal institutions, and security systems, which require revamping to tackle impending threats looming ominously in the horizon. Upgrading the Multilateral Export Control Regimes well in time to incorporate novel trade control challenges posed by 3D printing is the need of the hour. This article proposes to look into the impending threats looming ominously in the horizon in this brave new world of manufacturing evolution and revolution, and the means to counter them

Inhomogeneous Tensionless Superstrings

We construct a novel tensionless limit of Superstring theory that realises the Inhomogeneous Super Galilean Conformal Algebra (SGCA$_I$) as the residual symmetries in the analogue of the conformal gauge, as opposed to previous constructions of the tensionless superstring, where a smaller symmetry algebra called the Homogeneous SGCA emerged as the residual gauge symmetry on the worldsheet. We obtain various features of the new tensionless theory intrinsically as well as from a systematic limit of the corresponding features of the tensile theory. We discuss why it is desirable and also natural to work with this new tensionless limit and the larger algebra.Comment: 34 page