Contributors

The director of Argonne National Laboratory wants to elevate the quality of the current debate on nuclear energy. “Neither a nihilistic perspective nor plain boosterism” is the answer, Robert Rosner (right) warns in “Making Nuclear Energy Work.” A theoretical physicist, he hopes to jump start the nuclear industry by enhancing both its image and its performance. Taking a page from the aerospace engineering canon, Rosner favors expanding the use of computer simulation to test new nuclear plant designs as well as to evaluate the safety of existing facilities. This method was instrumental in restoring the public's trust in commercial aviation after it suffered a series of well-publicized disasters, and it might quell some of the anxiety nuclear plants provoke. “My hope is that readers will walk away with a sense that there is a path forward,” said Rosner.

As more countries look into the use of nonlethal chemical agents in counter-terrorism, bioregulators (body chemicals that control everything from mood to heart rate) are gaining the attention of both scientists and defense researchers. The convergence of biology and chemistry in bioregulator research interested Jonathan B. Tucker, a James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies senior fellow. “Despite the frustrations of dealing with an emerging technology whose policy implications are hard to grasp at an early stage, it is exciting to think about a cutting-edge security problem before it fully materializes,” he told us. Dramatic advances are underway in the life sciences–some come with serious risks, some with tremendous benefits. In “The Body's Own Bioweapons,” Tucker charts the terrain.

Extraordinary circumstances call for extraordinary measures. For John Stein-bruner, an international security expert and a professor of public policy at the University of Maryland, new threats and the growing necessity for international cooperation demand a fundamental rethinking of security policy. In “Consensual Security,” he reimagines security policy, from nuclear weapons to global warming. “The established fundamentals of security policy are intrinsically defective and will have to be altered if human societies are to flourish, even survive. If one entertains that belief, motivation is not a problem,” Steinbruner told us.

Almost two decades after the Cold War, the United States and Russia still have thousands of nuclear weapons on high alert and no one seems to know what to do about it. Janne Nolan, a former State Department official and scholar of the politics of nuclear policy, and James Holmes, a professor of strategy at the Naval War College and a senior research fellow at the University of Georgia, teamed up to explore how ingrained habits prevent significant changes in nuclear policy–with the hope that the next administration will do things differently. Change, they explain in “The Bureaucracy of Deterrence,” will require maneuvering within the existing “culture” of nuclear strategy: “Shifting the course of large institutions such as the Pentagon is not a simple matter of installing new appointees and telling them to take a new approach. Forceful leadership and management are what's necessary to change the prevailing culture.”

COVER ARTIST: Milton Glaser

In the mid 1970s, the “I ♥ NY” logo anchored a campaign that helped to unite famously fractious New Yorkers and reframe a city recovering from decline as the epicenter of the civilized, fun-loving world. Three decades later, its creator, Milton Glaser, the dean of American graphic designers, turns his attention to another enduring and unifying symbol: the Doomsday Clock. Glaser has had one-man shows at the Museum of Modern Art and the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris, cofounded Pushpin Studios and New York magazine, and now heads his own studio–Milton Glaser, Inc. But, as with the pro bono effort of the New York logo, Glaser relishes a different sort of challenge. He told The Believer, “When you do something that you really feel is useful–when you have a positive social effect–it makes you feel great.” For our first 2008 cover, Glaser wanted to underscore the Clock's immediacy: “Since it was always thought of as being analog, it seemed obvious to make it more contemporary,” he told us. The Clock's digital portrayl had the added effect of an implied countdown, intensifying the Clock's underlying gravitas. “My hope is the same as the Bulletin's: That the time to deal with nuclear issues is now.”

The notion of nuclear disarmament has been dismissed as woefully naive. So when a single op-ed challenged the disarmament taboo, J. Peter Scoblic, executive editor of The New Republic, went looking for the larger story. In “Disarmament Redux,” he follows nuclear disarmament efforts from Hiroshima to twenty-first century Palo Alto. He found support across partisan lines and in unlikely places–including with California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Scoblic told us: “It is worth discussing the world we want to live in, in addition to the world we do live in–and people shouldn't be punished for doing so.”

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR/PUBLISHER Kennette Benedict
EDITOR Jonas Siegel DEPUTY EDITOR and WEB EDITOR Josh Schollmeyer ASSOCIATE EDITOR Kirsten Jerch ASSOCIATE EDITOR Stuart Luman ART DIRECTOR Joy Miller	DIRECTOR OF FINANCE and ADMINISTRATION Barb Netter DIRECTOR OF DEVELOPMENT and OUTREACH Kendal Gladish DIGITAL PUBLISHING DIRECTOR Jim Grisius ADMINISTRATIVE and DEVELOPMENT ASSOCIATE Anjanette Harris	LEGAL COUNSEL Daniel 1. Schlessinger NTERNS Christina Dennaoui Jake Wertz
CONTRIBUTORS	Gordon Adams David Albright Catherine Auer Malcolm Dando Richard Garwin Hugh Gusterson Theresa Hitchens	David Hollo way John Isaacs Laura H. Kahn Hans M. Kristensen Jeffrey Lewis Gerald Marsh Priscilla Johnson McMillan	Laura Neack Robert S. Norris Pavel Podvig Dingli Shen Jessica Stern Frank von Hippel
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