The Chinese and Asian impact on Russian nuclear policy

Asia, where nuclear powers already interact (including North Korea), exerts a growing influence on the thinking and policy underlying Russia's current and future nuclear (and overall defense) posture. China's rise is forcing Russia into a greater reliance on strategic offensive weapons and tactical nuclear weapons. These in turn will reinforce its opposition to US missile defenses, not only in Europe but also in Asia. Russia must now entertain the possibility of nuclear use in regional conflicts that would otherwise remain purely conventional. It cannot be postulated blindly that nuclear weapons serve no discernible purpose other than to deter nuclear attacks by other nuclear powers. The strategic equation in Asia and in the Russian Far East convincingly demonstrates the falsity of this approach. Nuclear weapons will be the essential component of Russia's regional defense policy if not of its overall policies – and this also includes contingencies in Europe.     

Optimal retail assortments for substitutable items purchased in sets

We consider the problem of optimizing assortments in a multi‐item retail inventory system. In addition to the usual holding and stockout costs, there is a fixed cost for including any item in the assortment. Customers' preferences for items include both probabilistic substitution patterns and the desire to purchase sets of complementary items. We develop a demand model to capture this behavior, and derive tractable approximations that allow us to formulate the optimization problem as a 0–1 mixed integer linear program. Numerical examples are solved to illustrate key insights into how both complementary and substitute items affect the optimal assortment and the expected profit. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 50: 793–822, 2003.     

Large deviations of the winsorized mean of an exponential distribution

An asymptotic representation for large deviation probabilities of the Winsorized mean of a sequence of independent, identically distributed exponential random variables is derived. The Winsorized mean, a linear combination of exponential order statistics, is first transformed into a weighted sum of exponential random variables, and then a large deviation theorem for weighted sums can be applied. The representation obtained is then compared with results already known for the mean and the median, the two extreme cases of the Winsorized mean.     

A note on the extension of a result on scheduling with secondary criteria

A result of Smith previously published in this journal [3], on the use of secondary criterion in scheduling problems is extended, and an example presented.     

Defence and firm performance in the UK

The UK Ministry of Defence is British industry's largest single customer and a number of firms and industries are highly dependent on defence sales. Various hypotheses have been proposed about the impact of defence procurement on firms and these are investigated using four performance indicators: financial structure, investment, productivity and profitability. With regard to the borrowing ratio, capital investment and the rate of return, there is no statistically significant difference between the mean financial ratios for low and high dependence firms. However, non‐dependents appear to have a higher level and rate of growth of labour productivity than dependents.     

The Importance of Safeguards Culture

International safeguards is the system of measures put in place by the International Atomic Energy Agency and states to ensure nuclear programs remain dedicated to peaceful purposes. This international safeguards system consists of agreements, inspections, and evaluations that have never considered the safeguards culture of a state or facility. Neither a common definition nor an understanding of safeguards culture is internationally recognized. This article provides an analysis of the concept of safeguards culture and gauges its value to the international safeguards community. The authors explore distinctions among safeguards culture, safeguards compliance, and safeguards performance, and suggest possible indicators of safeguards culture and methods to promote a strong, positive safeguards culture.