National Security Online Resource Center

by P. E. Hodgson

When I first became interested in the applications of nuclear physics I was most concerned by the coming shortage of energy. Since then it has become clear that this is not the main problem. There is plenty of energy for the next few hundred years: enormous deposits of coal, substantial amounts of oil and natural gas, and the likelihood of increasing contributions from nuclear power.

The main concern is now the effects on the world’s climate from the pollution of the atmosphere from fossil fuel power stations. It will be many decades before fossil fuel power stations can be replaced by non-polluting sources such as nuclear and renewable energy, and all that time the pollution will increase. Detailed studies by the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change show that the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is inexorably increasing and the evidence for its effects on the climate is steadily becoming more convincing. In addition, the predicted rise in sea level will have catastrophic effects on low-lying countries.

It is now becoming clearer that the principal danger is not the effects of gradual changes in the climate but the possibility of rapid and irreversible changes. We tend to think of the earth and its climate as a reliable and generally stable system where the weather remains more or less the same when averaged over long periods. There is now increasing evidence that this may not be true, that there is a distinct possibility of large, unexpected, and irreversible changes that quite rapidly have catastrophic consequences.

The study of climate changes is fraught with serious difficulties. Since time immemorial the weather has fluctuated unpredictably, with cold and hot periods, heavy rainfall and droughts, hurricanes, and earthquakes. How can the changes due to man’s activities be distinguished from these natural changes? It is notoriously difficult to establish the presence of a new trend in a fluctuating quantity, and the difficulty is compounded when the fluctuations are on several different timescales, as is the case for climate. There are changes from year to year and ice ages on a much longer timescale. If a trend over a few decades is established, how do we know whether it is soon to be reversed by a major change acting on a longer timescale? more

by Brian Domitrovic

Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies by M. Stanton Evans (New York: Crown Forum, 2007)

Washington used to be a nice town, the reminiscence goes. Before our own day, when “the personal is political,” time was when the partisan fighting was fierce at the Capitol, but everyone played by the rules and went out for drinks together after all the wrangling was done. This is one of the most intransigent clichés in American politics.

In February 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin made a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, in which he said he had a list of fifty-seven names of Communists working in the State Department. The next month, a Senate committee chaired by Maryland’s Millard Tydings convened to discuss the McCarthy list. The committee did not devote itself to investigating the accuracy of McCarthy’s list, much less to forming policy about what to do about the situation if it were true. Rather, its effective purpose was to frame McCarthy in a criminal act. more

by Paul Gottfried

The Truth About Leo Strauss: Political Philosophy and American Democracy, by Catherine and Michael Zuckert (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

In The Truth About Leo Strauss, Catherine and Michael Zuckert, both professors holding endowed chairs at the University of Notre Dame, have set out to vindicate the reputation of their mentor Leo Strauss. The results reveal both a detailed and sympathetic knowledge of Strauss’s teachings and the choice of eminently deserving targets for criticism.

The Zuckerts develop a far more plausible picture of Strauss than the caricatures offered by leftist critics in the national press and by two widely quoted academic writers of censorious volumes about Strauss, Anne Norton and Shadia Drury. The Zuckerts remind us that those who should know better, like Alan Wolfe, have ascribed to Strauss a bogus “fascist” lineage. In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Wolfe condemned Strauss and his disciples for, among other blunders, being associated with me in some unexplained fashion, because of my authorship of a book on Strauss’s supposed teacher, Carl Schmitt. Wolfe, a sociologist, does not document his assertion, a task that would be impossible since the assertion is baseless. more

by Richard J. Bishirjian

In Summer 2004 Modern Age published my case for a realistic American foreign policy grounded in pursuit of the national interest. 1 The essay had a long gestation— about twenty-five years. 2 At the time this essay was prepared for publication I hoped that President Bush was pursuing a foreign policy aimed at preserving the national interest of the United States. If not, I argued, “this country may become something other than it is now,” a revolutionary nation (not unlike the French nation of Napoleon), and a disruptive influence on the world stage, a threat to itself and to the stability and the order of traditional cultures, and world politics. 3 President Bush’s Second Inaugural and subsequent statements by him and his Secretary of State and other Administration spokesmen are clearer evidence that Wilsonian liberalism has been renewed and American foreign policy is in a steep spiral from which there is no escape. more

by Ellis Sandoz

In the following commentary I want to pose this question to the readers of Modern Age: What is the proper role of the United States in world affairs? My answer is that it must be what it has always been: To serve liberty and justice as best we can while defending our security and national interests. None of these terms is susceptible of tidy definition, of course. more