Iran’s quest for the development of nuclear program has been marked by enormous financial costs and risks. It is estimated that the program’s cost is well over $100 billion, with the construction of the Bushehr reactor costing over $11 billion, making it one of the most expensive reactors in the world. The Federation of American [...]
Image courtesy of Shutterstock This week, FAS released a new issue brief, “Sanctions and Nonproliferation in North Korea and Iran,” co-authored by Mr. Daniel Wertz, Program Officer at the National Committee on North Korea, and Dr. Ali Vaez, former Director of the Iran Project at FAS, which offers a comparative analysis of U.S. policy towards [...]
This week the State Department released the unclassified version of a report on specific countries’ “Adherence to and Compliance with Arms Control, Nonproliferation, and Disarmament Agreements and Committees” (henceforth referred to as the Compliance Report). One section of this report covers compliance issues with the Biological and Toxins Weapon Convention (BWC, aka BTWC). The Compliance [...]
The final biosecurity panel of the day was an extended Q&A session with a panel of seven participants from the US government and industry. The panel discussed countermeasures to biological threats, and offered an interesting contrast between where the two sides agreed and differed on the issues.
The third session of the BIO biosecurity conference focused on agricultural biosecurity. If it sometimes seems difficult to defend major population centers against attack, that challenge is only magnified when considering the geographic scale, and economic importance, of the food supply.
The BIO Biosecurity conference is underway, with an opening session featuring a number of senior Obama Administration officials. This event marks perhaps the highest profile Industry-sponsored look at biosecurity issues, and the Administration appears to be committed to making sure that the discussion gets off to a productive start.
A report in PLOS Pathogens last week has produced new details about an unusually virulent fungal infection caused by Cryptococcus gattii, which has emerged recently in the Northwest US and Canada.
A new report by the UPMC Center for Biosecurity suggests that the US remains unprepared for the task of decontaminating the site of a major biological weapon attack. Decontamination after the comparatively small-scale Anthrax attacks of 2001 is estimated to have cost hundreds of millions of dollars, while shuttering some facilities for as long as two years. By comparison, the costs of a larger scale attack on a major city could be staggering.