The Anser Institute for Homeland Security.
Anser, one of the less visible nonprofit research agencies, hosts this institute, which preceded the events of September 11. Its Web site presents an array of resources, including an online journal, access to the syllabi of several courses on terrorism and homeland security, links to a wide array of Internet sources, and a large virtual library. The institute has partnership arrangements with the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and other organizations that contribute some of the material found on this site. To pick one grim topic at random, a few clicks brought this reviewer to a depressingly lucid paper by D. A. Henderson on the danger of a deliberate release of smallpox in the United States.
Related
Ten years after the end of the Cold War, nuclear danger is rising. Despite the end of the struggle in whose name the great nuclear arsenals were built, Washington now seeks to stop proliferation while holding on to its own arsenal indefinitely. But as nuclear restrictions falter -- battered by India's and Pakistan's tests, Iraq's defiance, North Korea's missiles, and the U.S. missile-defense plan -- the absence of a middle ground becomes stark. Holding on to nuclear arms is not a deterrent but a "proliferant" that goads others to join the club. Arms control has become a way of avoiding a fateful choice: a world of uncontrolled proliferation or a world with no nuclear weapons at all.
Failure on the part of the superpowers to negotiate on strategic nuclear weapons could bring about the end of arms control as a tool of international politics. Various technical and political problems with 'deep cuts' are outlined, and cuts of between 25% and 30% are advocated as sufficient to allay public concern, but not so great as to put deterrence in jeopardy. Internal debate on SDI should not hinder this process.
The issues of strategic arms control are complex in their technical details, but they nonetheless revolve around a reasonably simple central problem. The United States is primarily interested in reducing the level of strategic force deployments in order to alleviate a perceived threat to the U.S. intercontinental ballistic missile forces and a politically sensitive imbalance in weapons deployed in Europe. The Soviet Union is primarily interested in restricting the process of technical improvement in order to alleviate what it perceives as an emerging threat to Soviet ICBMs and ultimately to the entire structure of Soviet military forces. With the United States committed to revising the past and the Soviet Union to shaping the future, viable compromise requires arrangements that do both. The issues are too extensive and the underlying hostility too great to allow an immediate, comprehensive solution. Thus, compromise must be achieved through a series of partial measures, each of which balances force reductions and modernization restrictions.

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