Building the next nuclear community

This viewpoint takes stock of the changes in the strategic nuclear landscape in recent decades and reflects on its consequences on the policy community. It finds that the number and scope of issues have expanded considerably; they have manifested themselves in many more regions of the world; and they have become deeply politicized and polarized. The consequences have been twofold: the nuclear policy field has seen the development of an increasingly diverse expert community composed of highly specialized functionalists and regionalists, and it has become ever more divided into two entirely separate ideological camps—one that believes in deterrence, the other in disarmament. The stove-piping of expertise and the widening gap between deterrence and disarmament ideologies are immensely problematic because, in different ways, they stand in the way of the emergence of a better and safer nuclear future. Looking ahead, it is critical to “bust the silos of expertise” and to build bridges between the deterrence and disarmament ideological camps. Only such a community-building effort will help solve today’s and tomorrow’s nuclear challenges.     

INTERNATIONAL SECURITY ON THE ROAD TO NUCLEAR ZERO

The disappointingly slow pace of progress on efforts to prevent proliferation, reduce nuclear weapons, and eliminate nuclear risks has many causes. The factor that might be easiest for individuals in the arms control and nonproliferation community to change stems from their own ambivalence about major questions that must be addressed on the road to reducing the number of nuclear weapons in the world to zero. This essay explores how ambivalence about four key issues—strategic stability, alliance relations, institution-building, and nuclear energy—often leads community members to take positions that play well at home and within their like-minded group but raise unintended impediments to achieving their own long-term goals. The author suggests alternative ways to handle these questions to improve the prospects for domestic and international agreement on practical measures that would eliminate, not perpetuate, nuclear risks.     

THE LAST TO DISARM?

France still sees its nuclear arsenal as essential both as insurance against future major risks and as support for an independent foreign policy. There is a wide consensus in the country to maintain a nuclear deterrent, both among political parties and the general public. A modernization program is under way that will ensure the continued efficacy of the French nuclear force well into the 2030s, and France has adopted a fairly restrictive interpretation of its disarmament commitments under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. This suggests that the likeliest future direction of France's nuclear policy is conservatism. However, other scenarios remain possible, especially in the domain of transatlantic and/or European cooperation.     

INDIA AND THE NEW LOOK OF U.S. NONPROLIFERATION POLICY

U.S. nuclear export policy has undergone major transformations since 1945, and the most recent change, as expressed in the July 18, 2005, India-U.S. Joint Statement, represents an especially significant shift in policy. The document reverses more than a quarter century of U.S. declaratory policy, suggesting that the current U.S. administration regards nuclear proliferation to be both inevitable and not necessarily a bad thing. This article investigates this policy shift, looking at the history of U.S. nuclear export policy and the potential ramifications of the new policy on the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). The author also touches on the potential effects of the Joint Statement on Indian-Pakistani relations. Finally, it is suggested that it is not too late for India and the United States to change the new policy with more consideration for the NPT and the Nuclear Suppliers Group Initiative.     

The defence firm of the future

This paper offers the personal view of a senior executive in the Defence Procurement Agency about the future requirements of the defence industry’s principal UK customer. The focus here is on trying to identify the type of corporate behaviour and range of skill sets that the UK Government will need from defence suppliers, both primes and supply chain companies in the future. The concluding message from this ‘Customer View’ is that there is likely to be a continuing market for the company that specializes in delivering defence capability. It will be a company that will be looking for a long‐term relationship, with a specialist knowledge of its various national customers and a willingness to work openly and closely with them. It will be agile in its ability to bring together diverse technologies, to package them as a system and to deliver them either as hardware or as a service. Such suppliers will also need to innovate and to adapt at least as rapidly as the threats that they seek to counter.     

ARE USA CITIZENS AT RISK OF TERRORISM IN EUROPE?

This paper analyzes the determinants of the probability of US citizens being victims of terrorist attacks in European countries, taking into account uncontrolled heterogeneity of the data. The analysis employs ITERATE data from February 1968 to December 2002 to ascertain significant characteristics that influence the probability (e.g. location, type of casualties, type of attack, and type of terrorists). To deal with the unobserved heterogeneity a random‐parameter logit model (mixed logit) is used. Some policy implications are presented.     

新疆少数民族教育政策的发展历程研究

新中国成立以来,党和国家采取了一系列特殊政策和措施,促进民族教育事业快速发展,取得了举世瞩目的成就,为各少数民族培养了数以百万计的各级各类专业人才。本文对新中国成立以来的新疆少数民族教育政策作了分阶段的梳理,总结了民族教育政策的发展变化及特点,并结合当前民族教育政策存在的问题,提出了完善新疆少数民族教育政策的对策建议。     

Dynamic regulation on innovation and adoption of green technology with information asymmetry

This study investigates a regulator's dynamic policy to motivate firms' research on and adoption of green technology. In the proposed model, a firm makes unobservable efforts and can hide the technology's arrival from the regulator to avoid adoption costs. We find that the optimal policy follows a simple structure and induces part-time efforts, rather than the maximal effort reported in previous studies. In particular, the regulator should offer no subsidy before the arrival of a technology report, provide a one-time subsidy contingent upon that report, and always set a termination deadline. At the deadline, the firm is forced to select an external option that is associated with social costs. The optimal report-based subsidy decreases with time. Under the optimal policy, the firm works until an effort deadline, makes no effort thereafter, and reports the technology as soon as it arrives. This study also characterizes the necessary and sufficient conditions under which the optimal policy reduces to one that leads, in terms of throughout time, to effort that is maximal or minimal. Our results indicate that policymakers should implement a policy that compensates firms more in the present and less in the future.     

系统UUT诊断策略设计的工程化原则与实践

分析了型号系统研制中推广应用“被测对象(UUT,unit under test)测试点与诊断策略设计与分析技术”的必要性和重要性。重点介绍了一种对UUT测试点与诊断策略进行设计与分析的简便有效的工程化方法,以及在应用中的实践经验与体会。     

Performance evaluation of a production/inventory system with periodic review and endogenous lead times

This paper considers a discrete time, single item production/inventory system with random period demands. Inventory levels are reviewed periodically and managed using a base‐stock policy. Replenishment orders are placed with the production system which is capacitated in the sense that there is a single server that sequentially processes the items one at a time with stochastic unit processing times. In this setting the variability in demand determines the arrival pattern of production orders at the queue, influencing supply lead times. In addition, the inventory behavior is impacted by the correlation between demand and lead times: a large demand size corresponds to a long lead time, depleting the inventory longer. The contribution of this paper is threefold. First, we present an exact procedure based on matrix‐analytic techniques for computing the replenishment lead time distribution given an arbitrary discrete demand distribution. Second, we numerically characterize the distribution of inventory levels, and various other performance measures such as fill rate, base‐stock levels and optimal safety stocks, taking the correlation between demand and lead times into account. Third, we develop an algorithm to fit the first two moments of the demand and service time distribution to a discrete phase‐type distribution with a minimal number of phases. This provides a practical tool to analyze the effect of demand variability, as measured by its coefficient of variation, on system performance. We also show that our model is more appropriate than some existing models of capacitated systems in discrete time. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2007