Nonproliferation: Now a Workable Idea

This editorial in the Christian Science Monitor discusses the contradictions inherent in the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, especially in the world 25 years later. The authors argue that nuclear nonproliferation is viable in large part because of the commercial collapse of the nuclear market and the rise of superior alternative energy sources. With so many energy options available today, an entity that wants nuclear reactors is clearly using them for non-energy producing purposes. The authors explain that the NPT’s and developing countries’ equity and development goals are better met by nonviolent energy options that support nonproliferation, development, and the environment.

Security Without War: A Post Cold War Foreign Policy

This book lays out security principles and policies for the United States to adopt in a post-Cold War world. The authors encourage Americans to take account of all threats, to emphasize preventing conflicts over winning wars and to enhance every nation's security, to favor multilateral approaches over bilateral ones and to promote greater citizen participation in foreign policy. The entire book is available here. The book considers how to define security, the limits of force, the limits of arms races, how to prevent and resolve conflicts, the roots of conflict, and strategies for the military defense of aggression.

Why America Beat Iraq but Loses to Japan

This paper compares superiority of the Japanese over the US in competitive business strategy to the US win over Iraq in the first Gulf War. The author argues that America won the military war against Iraq for the same reason the Japanese are winning the high-technology trade war against the Americans: the application of a fast-cycle, time-based competitive strategy. In the Gulf War, America used a dynamic, maneuver-based strategy to defeat the entrenched Iraqi forces who expected a head-on attack. Similarly, the Japanese use fast-innovation, flexible manufacturing to out-compete traditional mass production techniques widely used in the US. The author warns that unless American business abandons its traditional methods and adopts these techniques to a far greater degree, and unless the federal government supports the rapid research, development, and manufacturing necessary to sustain such a transition, then not only will American economic security suffer; ultimately, so will our military security, as our high-tech weapons will increasingly have to rely on foreign-made parts that may not be available fast enough in a future crisis.

Drill Rigs and Battleships are the Answer, But What Was the Question?: Oil Efficiency, Economic Rationality, and Security

This paper examines how the efficient use of energy, particularly of oil, can help to create and smooth a transition beyond this one source of energy. It analyzes the dynamics of how the United States used efficiency to improve its oil supply/demand balance throughout the period 1977–1985. The authors explain the unusual events that in 1986 reversed this steady decline in oil imports. The paper concludes by quantifying the approximate size and cost of the least-cost technical and policy options available to reduce or eliminate oil imports while stretching domestic resources in the years and decades ahead. This paper was originally published as a chapter in The Oil Market in the 1980s: Challenges for a New Era.

Make Fuel Efficiency Our Gulf Strategy

This article was originally published as an editorial in The New York Times. The authors argue that by making our use of energy more efficient, we can avoid using oil from the unstable Gulf region. They claim that America can roll back the oil dependence that perpetually holds our foreign policy hostage and distorts other U.S. priorities in the Middle East. Just by aiming at greater efficiency, we could eliminate all Gulf imports by using only an eighth less oil. They describe efficiency-based policy measures that can have a significant impact on Gulf oil consumption.

Energy: The Avoidable Oil Crisis

This article, published after the oil shocks of the 1970s, details strategies for reducing oil shortages and keeping costs low, thereby preventing another oil crisis. The authors see three possible strategies for responding to oil shocks: protectionism, trade, and substitution. While they explain how each of these strategies could help the US avoid an energy crisis, the practice of substitution would serve America's energy needs most effectively. Substitution (that is, substitute the use of oil with increases in efficiency or alternative fuels) avoids all of the problems posed by protectionism and trade while increasing security, saving money, and avoiding damage to the economy and environment. This document also includes letters from readers in response to the article.

Nuclear Weapons and Power-Reactor Plutonium

This article, originally published in Nature in 1980, seeks to provide a discreet, selective, but adequate physical basis for understanding the scope for using reactor-grade plutonium in fission bombs at some of the diverse levels of sophistication open to various potential users. With modest design sophistication, high-burn-up plutonium from power reactors can produce powerful and predictable nuclear explosions. The author argues that denaturing plutonium by adding to it is not possible or valid. Taking all effects on weapons physics into account, a high plutonium content may reduce expected yield to a level that could reduce expected yield to a level that could devastate only a modest portion of a city, and make that yield much less predictable. The author concludes that the greater technical difficulty of using power-reactor plutonium for effective military bombs may be more than counterbalanced by the greater political and economic ease of obtaining that plutonium.