Why China Has Not Caught Up Yet Gilli, Andrea; Gilli, Mauro
International security,
02/2019, Volume:
43, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Can countries easily imitate the United States’ advanced weapon systems and thus erode its military-technological superiority? Scholarship in international relations theory generally assumes that ...rising states benefit from the “advantage of backwardness.” That is, by free riding on the research and technology of the most advanced countries, less developed states can allegedly close the military-technological gap with their rivals relatively easily and quickly. More recent works maintain that globalization, the emergence of dual-use components, and advances in communications have facilitated this process. This literature is built on shaky theoretical foundations, however, and its claims lack empirical support. In particular, it largely ignores one of the most important changes to have occurred in the realm of weapons development since the second industrial revolution: the exponential increase in the complexity of military technology. This increase in complexity has promoted a change in the system of production that has made the imitation and replication of the performance of state-of-the-art weapon systems harder—so much so as to offset the diffusing effects of globalization and advances in communications. An examination of the British-German naval rivalry (1890–1915) and China’s efforts to imitate U.S. stealth fighters supports these findings.
From 1948 to 1954, the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission conducted a study of pregnancy outcomes among births to atomic bomb survivors (Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan) who had received radiation doses ...ranging from 0 Gy to near-lethal levels. Past reports (1956, 1981, and 1990) on the cohort did not identify significant associations of radiation exposure with untoward pregnancy outcomes, such as major congenital malformations, stillbirths, or neonatal deaths, individually or in aggregate. We reexamined the risk of major congenital malformations and perinatal deaths in the children of atomic bomb survivors (n = 71,603) using fully reconstructed data to minimize the potential for bias, using refined estimates of the gonadal dose from Dosimetry System 2002 and refined analytical methods for characterizing dose-response relationships. The analyses showed that parental exposure to radiation was associated with increased risk of major congenital malformations and perinatal death, but the estimates were imprecise for direct radiation effects, and most were not statistically significant. Nonetheless, the uniformly positive estimates for untoward pregnancy outcomes among children of both maternal and paternal survivors are useful for risk assessment purposes, although extending them to populations other than the atomic bomb survivors comes with uncertainty as to generalizability.
In December 2016, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved their iconic "Doomsday Clock" thirty seconds forward to two and a half minutes to midnight, the latest it has been set since 1952, the year ...of the first United States hydrogen bomb test. But a group of scientists-geologists, engineers, and physicists-has been fighting to turn back the clock. Since the dawn of the Cold War, they have advocated a halt to nuclear testing, their work culminating in the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which still awaits ratification from China, Iran, North Korea-and the United States. The backbone of the treaty is every nation's ability to independently monitor the nuclear activity of the others. The noted seismologist Lynn R. Sykes, one of the central figures in the development of the science and technology used in monitoring, has dedicated his career to halting nuclear testing. InSilencing the Bomb, he tells the inside story behind scientists' quest for disarmament.Called upon time and again to testify before Congress and to inform the public, Sykes and his colleagues were, for much of the Cold War, among the only people on earth able to say with certainty when and where a bomb was tested and how large it was. Methods of measuring earthquakes, researchers realized, could also detect underground nuclear explosions. When politicians on both sides of the Iron Curtain attempted to sidestep disarmament or test ban treaties, Sykes was able to deploy the nascent science of plate tectonics to reveal the truth. Seismologists' discoveries helped bring about treaties limiting nuclear testing, but it was their activism that played a key role in the effort for peace. Full of intrigue, international politics, and hard science used for the global good,Silencing the Bombis a timely and necessary chronicle of one scientist's efforts to keep the clock from striking midnight.
Significant recent scholarship has addressed the apparently accelerating proliferation of antisatellite (ASAT) weapons in the international system by proposing the development of new institutions or ...instruments for arms control in space. However, the historical record is not encouraging for this approach, as the last 40 years have seen repeated, failed attempts to do just that. How might it be possible to surmount this evident resistance to developing an arms-control regime for space? This article advances the argument that rather than attempting to create new mechanisms for controlling ASATs, the most profitable path forward may be to reframe kinetic space weapons as strategic weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). It presents a typological framework for the classification of WMDs, and situates kinetic ASATs within this rubric. It then discusses how reframing kinetic ASATs as WMDs could provide for the effective control of such weapons by rendering them subject to existing treaty and normative frameworks, thus avoiding the need for new agreements or institutions. Finally, it discusses some of the limitations and potential consequences of this approach.
How do we interpret the extraordinary visibility and ordinariness of social media as delivery workers resist their precarious working lives? Drawing on fieldwork, interviews, photo elicitation, and ...digital data collection in Turkey with a focus on delivery workers’ strikes in early 2022, we argue that understanding the delivery workers’ movement requires not only considering spectacular strikes and social media protests but also workers’ everyday forms of resistance and their ordinary uses of social media as part of what we call weapons of the gig. Although not as visible as spectacular street action and social media campaigns, these weapons (motorcycle drivers’ solidarity, algorithmic resistance, and social media use for information sharing, as well as production of humor and resentment) enable the subtle formation of a movement. Our contribution lies in reframing social media use as both an ordinary and extraordinary weapon of delivery workers and approaching workers’ solidarity as a question of continuum. Enabling us to look beyond the antagonisms in the labor process and locate affective tensions in the everyday, this approach allows for seeing workers not only as economic but also as political and affective subjects demanding freedom and searching for meaningful connection in their lives.
Autonomous weapons systems (AWS) are emerging as key technologies of future warfare. So far, academic debate concentrates on the legal-ethical implications of AWS but these do not capture how AWS may ...shape norms through defining diverging standards of appropriateness in practice. In discussing AWS, the article formulates two critiques on constructivist models of norm emergence: first, constructivist approaches privilege the deliberative over the practical emergence of norms; and second, they overemphasise fundamental norms rather than also accounting for procedural norms, which we introduce in this article. Elaborating on these critiques allows us to respond to a significant gap in research: we examine how standards of procedural appropriateness emerging in the development and usage of AWS often contradict fundamental norms and public legitimacy expectations. Normative content may therefore be shaped procedurally, challenging conventional understandings of how norms are constructed and considered as relevant in International Relations. In this, we outline the contours of a research programme on the relationship of norms and AWS, arguing that AWS can have fundamental normative consequences by setting novel standards of appropriate action in international security policy.
The chemical terrorist attack is an unconventional form of terrorism with vast scope of influence, strong concealment, high technical means and severe consequences. Chemical terrorism risk refers to ...the uncertainty of the effects of terrorist organisations using toxic industrial chemicals/drugs and classic chemical weapons to attack the population. There are multiple risk factors infecting chemical terrorism risk, such as the threat degree of terrorist organisations, attraction of targets, city emergency response capabilities, and police defense capabilities. We have constructed a Bayesian network of chemical terrorist attacks to conduct risk analysis. The scenario analysis and sensitivity analysis are applied to validate the model and analyse the impact of the vital factor on the risk of chemical terrorist attacks. The results show that the model can be used for simulation and risk analysis of chemical terrorist attacks. In terms of controlling the risk of chemical terrorist attack, patrol and surveillance are less critical than security checks and police investigations. Security check is the most effective approach to decrease the probability of successful attacks. Different terrorist organisations have different degrees of threat, but the impacts of which are limited to the success of the attack. Weapon types and doses are sensitive to casualties, but it is the level of emergency response capabilities that dominates the changes in casualties. Due to the limited number of defensive resources, to get the best consequence, the priority of the deployment of defensive sources should be firstly given to governmental buildings, followed by commercial areas. These findings may provide the theoretical basis and method support for the combat of the public security department and the safety prevention decision of the risk management department.
Abstract
The scheduling of the carrier-based aircraft weapon involves many resources and is subject to many constraints. The design of the scheduling scheme belongs to a type of typical NP-Hard ...problem. In this paper, genetic algorithm is selected as the optimization algorithm, and a two-layer real-value coding method is designed, and the selection, cross, and mutation operations of the algorithm are improved by using the elite strategy and other methods. The improved algorithm was used to simulate the established mathematical model to verify the effectiveness and superiority of the improved algorithm.
Rational Fog Lindee, M. Susan
2020, 2020-09-15
eBook
Scientists have long been intimately connected with warfare, called upon to supply fighters with tools of killing. Some scientists have attempted to reorient the morality of their disciplines. ...Rational Fog takes stock of these efforts and explores the quandary of scientific productivity today, in an era of perpetual war.
Shooting with the available weapons is a determining and defining element of armed combat, and the mysteries, practice, art and, above all, the science of shooting are learnt during shooting ...training, a discipline of overwhelming importance in the process of training troops and, implicitly, their preparation for combat. Nowadays, the construction of (fire) weapons has reached unprecedented technical and technological levels, with lethal and destructive accuracy and capability that were unimaginable a few decades ago. In this context, the maximum exploitation of the characteristics of the available weapons and the training of instictual shooting is an indispensable requirement coming from the reality of the military conflicts in which the Romanian military have taken part, a reality that has generated the need to develop the existing training facilities in order to create the best conditions for training the necessary skills. This development can be done either by purchasing training systems incorporating state-of-the-art technologies, at high cost, or by modernizing the existing ones at relatively lower costs and bringing them to the level of the accepted training requirements.
PDF
