
Meet the scientists quitting academia for climate
activism, https://www.dw.com/en/meet-the-scientists-quitting-academia-for-climate-activism/a-51452337–12 Dec 2019, Emotional stress, burnout, and a sense of frustration at policy makers are driving some academics to take a different path in tackling climate change. DW spoke to three people to find out why they became activists.
Most people have the option to switch off from the terrifying media stories of how climate change is affecting the planet. This isn’t so easy for environmental scientists and academics who spend their days researching the consequences of climate change.
In a letter published in Science magazine in October this year, biologists Andy Radford, Stephen Simpson and Tim Gordon, said the loss of nature for people with a strong emotional attachment to it “triggered strong grief responses.”
They argued institutes needed to adapt strategies from “healthcare, disaster relief, law enforcement and military” for environmental scientists so they can manage their “emotional stress.”
After the letter a number of colleagues reached out to Radford, a professor at the University of Bristol, to express their comfort at the views being made public.
Caught between frustration at the disconnect between climate science and policy, and a hope inspired by burgeoning global climate protests in the last year, DW spoke to three people shunning academia in favor of activism.
Dr Wolfgang Knorr: ‘We know a lot less than we pretend to’
Dr Wolfgang Knorr, 53, researcher, physical geography and ecosystem science, and principal investigator (BECC), Lund University, Sweden
Knorr handed in his resignation in September 2019 after 27 years in environmental science. He believes his skills could be better applied as an activist, though he’s not yet sure what form this will take.
“My attraction to science has always been emotional. But in science, it’s all about keeping the emotions down, because they’re not wanted, basically. On the emotional level, I have this strong sense that there is a tremendous risk out there and we know a lot less than we pretend to.
In 2005, I joined the UK’s Natural Environment Research Council. On a daily basis, I would sit in meetings, debating new renewable energy schemes or whatever. On the train back, you read newspaper stories about climate change, but the next page will be economic news about expansion and GDP growth. At that time it became clear to me that there’s a dichotomy between the work and what’s going on in the rest of the world.
That gut feeling at that time continued until very recently — until the youth protests. There was a real step-change in public perception due to these protests. I would say, as a climate scientist, we’re following the lead of these protesters in a way, because it made me realize that I had a potential for being an advocate. I got a new perspective about what I could do with these skills.
I am hoping to find new uses for the skills that I used as a scientist, and make better use of them.”
Jess Spear: ‘I was really demoralized’
Jess Spear, 38, scientist, educator and socialist activist, RISE, Dublin
Spear left climate science in 2013 to work on a campaign in the US city of Seattle that elected its first socialist city councillor in a century. She moved to Dublin, Ireland, in 2017 and works for a new Irish left-wing group called Radical Internationalist Socialist Environmentalist (RISE).
“I worked at the US Geological Survey. It is much easier to be a scientist working as a civil servant than it is in academia. It wasn’t that stressful and was rewarding, but it wasn’t actually producing what I wanted in the world.
At the beginning of 2011 I was really demoralized about the state of the movement for climate action. There didn’t appear to be very many people concerned about it.
To see constant emission rises and failure of governments was like watching a train about to go off a cliff in slow motion. You know what’s going to happen. You feel powerless to do anything about it when you’re just one person.
In 2013 when I started to work in activism, I can remember standing in my kitchen, watching videos of Occupy Wall Street. It was like a light turning on. That was a life-changing moment for me because it opened up the possibilities for shifting away from finding solutions, to focusing on community activism.”
Mathieu Munsch: ‘What I’m doing now is much more meaningful’
Mathieu Munsch, 30, builder, educator and community activist, France
Munsch quit his PhD in climate change at Strathclyde University in Scotland after two and a half years in September 2018. He’s now constructing an eco-friendly house in rural France and has become involved in local politics.
One major impetus was what he saw as a conflict with his values as an academic concerned about the environment if he continued on a certain career path.
“Strathclyde has a big engineering department that does research on fracking. It receives funding from the oil industry. Professors within my departments, theirpension funds were invested in fossil fuels.
In the first year, I still had some faith that I was doing the right thing. But it became more and more obvious to me that I was never going to be able to have a successful career, access to a pension and all of that if for me to benefit from that, the current economic system would need to continue functioning, and therefore we would go into catastrophic climate change. It became a wake-up call that I needed to get out of that system.
I experienced some burnout, specifically when I was spending eight hours of my day on the computer reading documents about climate change. It was pretty emotionally heavy, even though I don’t think I was in the deep despair that I know some people experience.
Something that helped me cope was giving time to activist groups. But it’s only leaving and finding a completely different way to do things that helped me overcome the stress and burnout.
Since I left, I’ve had people contacting me over Twitter as well, specifically for the decision, and one of them said, ‘Oh, yeah, I did exactly the same thing two years ago. I feel like what I’m doing now is much more meaningful.”
These interviews have been edited and condensed for clarity and length
February 1, 2020
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
climate change, PERSONAL STORIES |
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Could geoengineering strategies help tackle climate change? DW, 31 Jan
2020, A range of technologies — loosely defined as ‘geoengineering’ — are being explored as responses to climate change. Yet their effectiveness, and whether they should be implemented at all, is debated among scientists.Australia’s bushfires have brought the devastating consequences of a warming world into sharp relief. And with modelling pointing to temperature increases of between three and four degrees Celcius by 2100 in a business-as-usual scenario, predictions suggest such extreme events are set to become more frequentV.
What if we could reverse the warming that is fueling drought and causing flooding around the world?
That is exactly what organizations like the US-based non-profit Foundation for Climate Restoration (F4CR), are proposing. The group wants to restore carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere to under 300 parts per million, as was the case in the pre-fossil fuel age. Today, the global average measures more than 400 parts per million.
“I’m very interested in leaving [behind] a world where our children can survive,” Pieter Fiekowsky, an MIT-trained physicist who founded F4CR in 2015, told DW. To him, “that clearly requires getting CO2 back to safe levels.”
According to the foundation, achieving that involves “climate restoration,” that is, making sure we’re collectively removing more greenhouse gases from the atmosphere than we produce. The foundation believes around a trillion tons of carbon dioxide needs to be extracted.
That would require large-scale implementation of nature-based or artificial technologies to suck vast quantities of greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere to cool the planet — strategies that fall under the loose definition of “geoengineering.” However, which technologies are best suited, and whether to implement them at all, is hotly debated among scientists.
Climate benefits
Rob Jackson, an earth systems scientist at Stanford University,believes that restoring the climate to what it once was is a better goal than merely stabilizing Earth’s temperatures.
“We need a new story, a new narrative around climate change,” says Jackson, who argues this should involve ambitions that go beyond merely limiting the damage of climate change. “[Climate restoration] will bring climate benefits. It will save lives by reducing air pollution. It will provide a host of other benefits.”
One solution proposed by F4CR in awhite paper last year entails restoring marine habitats that store carbon, such as underwater kelp forests. Another is a form of concrete that binds carbon as it’s made, which was used recently to build a new terminal at San Francisco airport……….
“I think these long-term goals [of climate restoration] take away focus from the really important challenge that we have today of bending the emissions curve downward,” says Joeri Rogelj, a climate scientist at Imperial College London.
There is also concern that geoengineering technologies could create a false sense of security that increased emissions could be removed. Rogelj says ecosystems unable to adapt to current warming are not likely to return even if temperatures decrease……..
A middle ground?
Bhowmik believes it should be possible to achieve a net decline in greenhouse gases without resorting to the most radical geoengineering approaches. The Exponential Roadmap report published in 2019, in which Bhowmik led the modelling work, lays out a strategy focused heavily on nature-based solutions.
To follow that roadmap, the world would need to halve global greenhouse gas emissions every decade from 2020 onwards, improve agricultural practices so farmland absorbs rather than emits carbon, restore large areas of forest and protect carbon-storing ecosystems like peatlands.
“If you follow that route, it would actually be possible by the end of this century to have a substantial reduction in the atmosphere greenhouse gas concentrations. And soon thereafter we will reach the level that was in the preindustrial period,” Bhowmik believes.
Climate restoration got a boost in September 2019 when F4CR joined scientists, venture capitalists and youth activists at a UN Forum aiming to spur investment for a range of nascent technologies to reverse global warming.
Even though there’s disagreement on what — if any — form climate restoration should take, most scientists do agree that it shouldn’t be a replacement for mitigating climate change or helping communities around the world cope with the impacts of rising temperatures.
That includes F4CR. “Climate restoration is a critical third pillar,” says Rick Parnell, CEO of the organization. “[It’s] a third leg of the stool, along with mitigation and adaptation.” https://www.dw.com/en/geoengineering-projects-climate-change/a-52117714
February 1, 2020
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
2 WORLD, climate change |
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That substance is not ‘water’. It is liquid radioactive waste. It is radioactive water with tritium, radioactive Cesium and Strontium, and other nasty toxic stuff. So better call it ‘waste’ not ‘water’…
Some neighboring countries have also voiced their opposition to the idea of discharging the water into the ocean or atmosphere, citing environmental concerns
A subcommittee under the industry ministry holds a meeting Friday in Tokyo. It recommends releasing treated radioactive water from the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant into the ocean.
Japan’s METI recommends releasing Fukushima radioactive water into sea
The industry ministry Friday recommended releasing treated radioactive water from the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant into the ocean, saying it would be preferable to releasing it into the atmosphere by boiling it.
The government has been exploring ways to dispose of more than 1 million tons of water used to cool the melted-down cores at the Fukushima No. 1 power plant, including groundwater near the site, as the complex is running out of storage space.
The water is being treated using an advanced liquid processing system, or ALPS, before being stored in tanks at the plant. But this does not remove tritium and has been found to leave small amounts of other radioactive materials.
Local fishermen have voiced strong opposition to releasing the water into the ocean, saying consumers will be afraid to buy seafood caught in the area.
Both methods of releasing the water are “realistic options,” the Economy, Trade and Industry Ministry told a government subcommittee Friday, but noted that dumping the water into the ocean would make it easier to monitor radiation levels.
This method could be carried out “with more certainty,” it said, because the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc., already carried out the process, albeit on a much smaller scale, prior to the powerful earthquake and tsunami that triggered the triple meltdown at the Fukushima plant in March 2011.
The ministry has said the health effects of either approach would be minimal, estimating it would result in between 0.052 and 0.62 microsievert annually for a discharge into the ocean, and 1.3 microsieverts if released into the atmosphere. That compares with the 2,100 microsieverts people are exposed to daily in a normal living environment, according to the ministry.
Other methods the subcommittee has considered include injecting the water deep into the ground, solidifying and burying it, and extracting only the hydrogen and releasing it into the atmosphere.
Meanwhile, the ministry stressed the importance of gaining the understanding of the local community before making a decision, and of preventing the spread of misinformation that would raise undue fears.
The amount of the water is increasing by about 150 tons per day and Tepco is fast running out of tanks to store it in. The utility is looking to expand capacity to 1.37 million tons by the end of 2020, but has no plans beyond then.
An employee of Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) holds a geiger counter to measure radiation on the top floor of the company’s reactor Number 3 at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Okuma, Fukushima prefecture.
Japan panel finds Fukushima nuclear plant water release to sea is best option
A Japanese government panel on Friday roughly accepted a draft proposal for releasing into the sea massive amounts of radioactive water now being stored at the tsunami-wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant.
The economy and industry ministry’s draft proposal said releasing the water gradually into the sea was the safer, more feasible method, though evaporation was also a proven method. The proposal in coming weeks will be submitted to the government for further discussion to decide when and how the water should be released.
Nearly nine years after the 2011 meltdowns of three reactor cores at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant, it was a small step toward deciding what to do with the water and follows expert recommendations.
It is meant to solve a growing problem for the plant’s operator stuck between limited storage space for the water and an imminent backlash from the public and possibly neighbouring countries.
A Japanese government panel on Friday said releasing into the sea massive amounts of radioactive water now being stored at the tsunami-wrecked the nuclear plant was the safer, more feasible method.
Fishermen and residents fear possible health effects from releasing the radioactive water as well as harm to the region’s image and fishing and farm industry.
The water has been treated, and the plant operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), says all 62 radioactive elements it contains can be removed to levels not harmful to humans, except for tritium. Experts say there is no established method to fully separate tritium from water, but it is not a problem in small amounts. Government officials also say tritium is routinely released from existing nuclear power plants around the world.
In Friday’s proposal, the ministry said the controlled release to the sea is superior because its travelling route is predictable and easier to sample and monitor. The method, however, could immensely impact Fukushima’s still-struggling fishing industry.
The report acknowledges the water releases would harm industries that still face reluctant consumers despite diligent safety checks. It promised to reinforce monitoring of tritium levels and food safety checks in order to address safety concerns.
In 2011, three of Fukushima Dai-ichi’s reactor cores melted down following a tsunami.
TEPCO currently stores about 1.08 million tonnes of radioactive water and only has space to hold up to 1.24 million tonnes, or until the summer of 2022. The water — leakage of cooling water from damaged reactors mixed with contaminated groundwater — has accumulated since the accident.
The report ruled out long-term storage outside the plant — a method favoured by many Fukushima residents. It cited difficulties obtaining permission from landowners and transportation challenges, as well as the risk of leakage from corrosion, a tsunami or other disasters and accidents.
February 1, 2020
Posted by dunrenard |
Fukushima 2020 | Fukushima Daiichi, Radioactive Water, Sea release |
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People worry about the possible coronavirus and completely forget the Fukushima radiation present in Tokyo, especially the radioactive contamination of the food, which risk to affect in various mannersTokyo 2020 Olympics’ visitors and athletes health.
The 2020 Olympics would have never been attributed to Tokyo if not some paid bribery to the Olympics committee high ranking officials and the lies that Tokyo was safe by PM Abe who needed the Olympics coming so as to whitewash the ongoing Fukushima nuclear disaster to the face of the whole world.
A man stands in front of a Tokyo 2020 poster created by artist Tomoko Konoike, one of 20 officially selected for the Olympics and Paralympics.
January 31, 2020
War has been the only reason to prevent previous modern Olympics but revelations over Wuhan outbreak pose problem
Qualifiers have already been moved outside of China but scale of movement around region and visitor numbers add layers
Human to human contact at the Games is unavoidable. The fans are packed in tight at stadiums, athletes come into contact in the sports and, as we know from the rise in condoms given out at the athletes village at every Olympics, often outside of sporting events. No wonder that the president of the German Olympic Sports Confederation, Alfons Hormann, has called the virus “the biggest risk” ahead of the Tokyo 2020 Summer Games. “This is a serious problem because no other part of life is so dependent on international exchange than sport,” he said in Frankfurt at a meeting. Hormann also called on “affected countries and international sport to do everything possible” to find a solution. He pointed to Zika, a mosquito-borne virus, that overshadowed the run-up to the 2016 Rio Olympics. In the end, Zika was of limited concern when Brazil hosted the Games but the potential for the Wuhan coronavirus is much worse. … Olympic boxing qualifiers have been moved from Wuhan to Amman, while the women’s AFC football event was first moved to Nanjing and then to Sydney. Meanwhile, the women’s basketball has been taken from Foshan to Belgrade. The move to Sydney for the women’s football had a deeper effect on the China team. They headed to Australia without star player Wang Shuang and starting midfielder Yao Wei. The pair are both from Wuhan and spent the Lunar New Year in the city visiting their families.
In the long history of the Olympics the Summer Games has been cancelled three times.
On each occasion since the Modern Olympics returned in 1896, it was because of war. The first world war accounted for 1916 and the second world war took out both the 1940 and 1944 Games and their sister Winter Games.
Now, as we near six months out from the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, which run from July 24 to August 9 in the Japanese capital, it might be time to think that another one of the four horseman of the apocalypse – pestilence – could claim the next Games.
This is fuelled by revelations around the ongoing global spread of the deadly Wuhan coronavirus, fuelling fears of a global pandemic.
The first of those is a report published in the medical journal, The Lancet, on January 24. This study, written by researchers and doctors on the ground in Wuhan, suggests that what we all thought we knew might not be the case at all.
They are still understanding the virus and its origins. An article on Vox citing the findings reported in The Lancet suggests that the first patient was not only ill much earlier than previously published but that they had no contact with the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market that had been assumed to be the epicentre.
Who knows how many people have been carrying the virus and to where since its inception?
Add to that, the number of people from Wuhan who spent their Lunar New Year in Japan, a country whose largest visitor numbers come from Chinese tourists. That’s not to mention that Wuhan mayor Zhou Xianwang said some five million of the 11 million populace left the city during the festive period.
Zhou has also admitted that mistakes were made at the outset when it came to this virus, while Pulitzer winning journalist and virus expert Laurie Garrett pointed out that the virus “could have been controlled fairly easily” but “now it’s too late”.
We are yet to see the aftermath of the world’s largest annual human migration that is China’s Lunar New Year celebrations but it is sure to be a factor in the spread of the disease.
Human to human contact at the Games is unavoidable. The fans are packed in tight at stadiums, athletes come into contact in the sports and, as we know from the rise in condoms given out at the athletes village at every Olympics, often outside of sporting events.
No wonder that the president of the German Olympic Sports Confederation, Alfons Hormann, has called the virus “the biggest risk” ahead of the Tokyo 2020 Summer Games.
“This is a serious problem because no other part of life is so dependent on international exchange than sport,” he said in Frankfurt at a meeting.
Hormann also called on “affected countries and international sport to do everything possible” to find a solution.
He pointed to Zika, a mosquito-borne virus, that overshadowed the run-up to the 2016 Rio Olympics. In the end, Zika was of limited concern when Brazil hosted the Games but the potential for the Wuhan coronavirus is much worse.
Zhong Nanshan, the Chinese scientist who revealed the scale and severity of the Sars epidemic in 2002-03, believes the Wuhan coronavirus epidemic is likely to reach its peak in “a week or 10 days”. Hong Kong University’s predictions put the potential peak at either late April or early May.
It seems the one thing we do know is that no one yet trulyknows the scale and severity of this outbreak.
That and it is already having an effect.
Olympic boxing qualifiers have been moved from Wuhan to Amman, while the women’s AFC football event was first moved to Nanjing and then to Sydney. Meanwhile, the women’s basketball has been taken from Foshan to Belgrade.
The move to Sydney for the women’s football had a deeper effect on the China team. They
headed to Australia without star player Wang Shuang and starting midfielder Yao Wei. The pair are both from Wuhan and spent the Lunar New Year in the city visiting their families.
China need to finish in the top two of their group to advance to the final play-off and the silver medallists of 1996 would be better served with two of their best with them in Australia.
Other Chinese athletes might also miss out on qualifying.
The Asia wrestling qualifiers, which are scheduled for Xi’an from March 27-29, could yet be moved to “Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and South Korea,” according to International Wrestling Federation President Nenad Lalovic.
He also told AFP in the same interview that should the qualifying event move then Chinese wrestlers would need to be “in quarantine” in order for them to compete.
There are many more sporting events around the region to come before the Summer Games in Tokyo but as they drop the fear is that the biggest of them all is at real risk.
February 1, 2020
Posted by dunrenard |
Fukushima 2020 | 2020 Olympics, Coronavirus, Fukushima Radiation |
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AI, CYBERSPACE, AND NUCLEAR WEAPONS. WSJ, JAMES JOHNSON AND ELEANOR KRABILL, JANUARY 31, 2020
COMMENTARY “……… A new generation of
AI-augmented offensive cyber capabilities will likely exacerbate the military escalation risks associated with emerging technology, especially inadvertent and accidental escalation. Examples include the increasing vulnerability of nuclear command, control, and communication (NC3) systems to
cyber attacks. Further, the challenges posed by
remote sensing technology,
autonomous vehicles, conventional
precision munitions, and
hypersonic weapons to hitherto
concealed and hardened nuclear assets. Taken together, this trend might further erode the survivability of states’ nuclear forces.
AI, and the state-of-the-art capabilities it empowers, is a natural manifestation — not the cause or origin — of an established trend in emerging technology. the increasing speed of war, the shortening of the decision-making timeframe, and the co-mingling of nuclear and conventional capabilities are leading states to adopt destabilizing launch postures.
The AI-Cyber Security Intersection
AI will make existing cyber warfare capabilities more powerful. Rapid advances in AI and increasing degrees of military autonomy could amplify the speed, power, and scale of future attacks in cyberspace. Specifically, there are three ways in which AI and cyber security converge in a military context.
First, advances in autonomy and machine learning mean that a much broader range of physical systems are now vulnerable to cyber attacks, including, hacking, spoofing, and data poisoning. ………
Second, cyber attacks that target AI systems can offer attackers access to machine learning algorithms, and potentially
vast amounts of data from
facial recognition and intelligence collection and analysis systems. These things could be used, for example, to cue precision munitions strikes and support intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions.
Third, AI systems used in conjunction with existing cyber offense tools might become powerful force multipliers, thus enabling sophisticated cyber attacks to be executed on a larger scale (both geographically and across networks), at faster speeds, simultaneously across multiple military domains, and with
greater anonymity than before.
………. the speed and scope of the next generation of AI cyber tools will likely have destabilizing effects……..
A significant risk in the operation of autonomous systems is the time that passes between a system failure (i.e., performing in a manner other than how the human operator intended), and the time it takes for a human operator to take corrective action. ……..
New Risks to the Security of Nuclear Systems
It is
now thought possible that a cyber attack (i.e., spoofing, hacking, manipulation, and digital jamming) could infiltrate a nuclear weapons system, threaten the integrity of its communications, and ultimately (and possibly unbeknown to its target) gain control of both its nuclear and non-nuclear command and control systems………..
Pathways to Escalation
AI-enhanced cyber attacks against nuclear systems would be almost impossible to detect and authenticate, let alone attribute, within the short timeframe for initiating a nuclear strike. According to open sources, operators at the North American Aerospace Defense Command have
less than three minutes to assess and confirm initial indications from early-warning systems of an incoming attack. This compressed decision-making timeframe could put political leaders under intense pressure to make a decision to escalate during a crisis, with incomplete (and possibly false) information about a situation……..
Advances in AI could also exacerbate this cyber security challenge by enabling improvements to cyber offense. Machine learning and AI, by automating advanced persistent threat (or “hunting for weaknesses”) operations, might dramatically reduce the extensive manpower resources and high levels of technical skill required to execute advanced persistent threat operations, especially against hardened nuclear targets.
Information Warfare Could Lead to Escalation……….
Conclusion
Rapid advances in military-use AI and autonomy could amplify the speed, power, and scale of future attacks in cyberspace via several interconnected mechanisms — the ubiquitous connectivity between physical and digital information ecosystems; the creation of vast treasure troves of data and intelligence harvested via machine learning; the formation of powerful force multipliers for increasingly sophisticated, anonymous, and possibly multi-domain cyber attacks.
AI systems could have both positive and negative implications for cyber and nuclear security. On balance, however, several factors make this development particularly troublesome. These include the increasing attacks vectors which threaten states’ NC3 systems, a new generation of destabilizing, AI-empowered cyber offensive capabilities (deepfakes, spoofing, and automated advanced persistent threat tools), the blurring of AI-cyber offense-defense, uncertainties and strategic ambiguity about AI-augmented cyber capabilities, and not least, a competitive and contested geo-strategic environment.
At the moment, AI’s impact on nuclear security remains largely theoretical. Now is the time, therefore, for positive intervention to mitigate (or at least manage) the potential destabilizing and escalatory risks posed by AI and help steer it toward bolstering strategic stability as the technology matures.
The interaction between AI and cyber technology and nuclear command and control raises more questions than answers. What can we learn from the cyber community to help us use AI to preempt the risks posed by AI-enabled cyber attacks? And how might governments, defense communities, academia, and the private sector work together toward this end?
James Johnson is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies (MIIS), Monterey. His latest book project is entitled, Artificial Intelligence & the Future of Warfare: USA, China, and Strategic Stability. Twitter:@James_SJohnson
Eleanor Krabill is a Master of Arts in Nonproliferation and Terrorism candidate at Middlebury Institute of International Studies (MIIS), Monterey. Twitter: @EleanorKrabill https://warontherocks.com/2020/01/ai-cyberspace-and-nuclear-weapons/
February 1, 2020
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
2 WORLD, weapons and war |
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