Weeks after an organized cyberattack on the Baltic nation of Estonia, security experts in Silicon Valley and elsewhere are assessing its impact and asking the obvious question: Can it happen here? The good news, they say, is that a similar attack would be less likely to succeed in the United States because of the immense size and breadth of the Internet networks here. But the same methods could be employed in new ways to wreak havoc here, and so experts say the private sector and the government have to work harder at shoring up Internet defenses.
A congressional committee took major steps this week toward financing the Bush administration's controversial program to build new generations of nuclear warheads, roughly doubling the budget for the design of the new weapons while reducing the money for maintaining the old stockpile.
After struggling in recent years to redefine U.S. nuclear policy, Congress turned the country in a new direction this month by giving millions of dollars for a program aimed at producing a smaller arsenal of more reliable warheads.
The author analyzes how the U.S. policy of protesting the development of nuclear weapons technology in some states like Iran or North Korea but not in others like Brazil or Pakistan has undermind the global norm against nonproliferation.
Congress, with only a limited debate, has given the Bush administration a green light for the biggest revitalization of the country's nuclear weapons program since the end of the Cold War, leaving many Democrats and even some hawkish Republicans seething.
Arms control experts warn that North Korea and Iran appear to have succeeded in mounting clandestine programs for enriching uranium for weapons by breaking through a number of legal and technological safeguards with the help a shadowy new "proliferation ring," or distribution network, involving a number of less developed countries.