Introduction
However bipartisan the history and intentions of U.S. nonproliferation policy, it is inevitable that commentators focus on new opportunities and choices at a time of imminent political change in Washington. The inauguration of Barack Obama will be seen around the world as signaling an era of new possibility. The President-elect has of course announced that he will make “the goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons a central element in our nuclear policy.” This will have raised many expectations. No doubt many will be muddled and unrealistic, but also based upon genuine good will. There is, consequently, a risk of permanent disillusion with U.S. leadership (indeed, a general loss of faith in the possibility of effective leadership from any quarter over control of weapons technologies) if hopes of progress over arms control and nonproliferation are effectively dashed.

Historical context matters. The new U.S. administration will replace one that pungently deprecated negotiated treaties and international supervisory institutions or processes in favor of reliance on U.S. military strength. Those judgments, and their presentational style, have increased skepticism around the world, particularly among liberal internationalists, about how far U.S. security policies leave room for wider international interests. This will take years to turn around, even in the best case. But it has also left the rest of the world painfully aware of the strength of political tendencies in the United States that could oppose change in its proliferation policies. So there is little purpose, and a strong sense of futility, in a European commentator now pressing for a new set of U.S. government decisions that would prove unsustainable in U.S. political terms and lead to bitter disputes about the alleged weakening of American military power.

Moreover, arms control and nonproliferation can only be a subset of national security policy. For new U.S. policies in these fields to be effective, they will have to dovetail closely with Washington’s overall global intentions. Attempts to resolve the Iranian nuclear compliance problem, for example, and all that it might mean for the world’s nuclear future, will rest on a wider calculation of U.S. foreign policy considerations, resources, and the acceptability of various bargaining positions and endpoints. Since nonproliferation choices frequently involve trade-offs between military and diplomatic considerations, it is pointless for outsiders to argue in the abstract for privileging one set of advantages over the other.

Commentators from closely allied nations can, however, usefully offer reflections on the possibilities which the Obama administration could take up in the nonproliferation field, and the overall risks to well disposed international opinion if they are ignored. On specific issues, where positions are still in flux, the more ideas that flow in from all sources, the greater the chances of credible and well considered policies from like-minded states. There are never enough promising new policy options. Almost all the proliferation or arms control events that I have ever attended have concluded with a ritual call for new “out-of-the-box” thinking. It is from this perspective that I have prepared this commentary.

Perhaps we can start from the proposition that much can, in fact, be said for the globally stabilizing potential of U.S. military power, and a new U.S. administration may prove better able to argue it convincingly. U.S. military capability, if it is designed far-sightedly, deployed non-provocatively, and leveraged intelligently, should be a vital resource for global nonproliferation. It provides reassurance to allies, friends, and even neutral states that a uniquely endowed hyper-power is capable of deterring, resisting, and, if necessary, reversing and punishing regional aggression, including attacks with weapons of mass destruction (WMD). John Steinbruner’s recent piece in Arms Control Today made a powerful case, for example, for systematically considering the potential contribution of extended security assurances as a systematic military political tactic to reinforce global stability. [1] An examination of these possibilities should form part of the Obama team’s planning.

To save confusion, misrepresentation, disappointment and recrimination, it would be desirable if the Obama team establishes and indicates early on the balance it chooses between untrammelled freedom of action and reliance on national military power on one hand and faith in risk-taking international solutions on the other. Speeches and media briefings will, of course, claim that the president and his secretaries of State and Defense will settle for nothing but a comprehensive and unified policy that achieves the best of both worlds. But some hard choices will be unavoidable, and conclusions will rapidly be drawn from statements, leaks, and reportage that indicate the preferences and relative strengths of the Pentagon, State Department, and National Security Council staff.

Enhancing international credibility for U.S. policies should be a resource and force multiplier for Washington-led attempts to limit proliferation and achieve disarmament. A definite, if hard to measure, connection exists between progress on arms control and the long-term possibilities of nonproliferation. If most of the world comes to believe that there is no longer any prospect of limiting, reducing, and perhaps eventually eliminating WMD and offensive delivery systems, it will become still harder to expect increasingly skeptical national leaderships to subordinate national military and economic interests and refrain from purchasing, developing, or selling new technologies.

Major improvements can be attained in public diplomacy, and Washington’s overall ability to point out to the rest of the world just how much it has, in fact, done to live up to its obligations under the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). More vivid and internationally sensitive advocacy, from a more credible source, could be considerably more effective in conveying a numerical story that is not discreditable. U.S. Government fact sheets can point out that “in 2004, President George W. Bush unilaterally signed a directive to cut the entire U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile in half by 2012. That goal was met five years early by NNSA and the Department of Defense. In December 2007, President Bush announced a further reduction of nearly 15 percent in the overall stockpile by 2012. When that is completed, the overall U.S. stockpile will be less than one-quarter its size at the end of the Cold War.” [2]

U.S. diplomats dutifully brief these figures to the UN First Committee, the IAEA, and the rest of the disarmament archipelago. But I would be very surprised if many experts or opinion formers in the rest of the world, or indeed many Americans, were aware of them. Substance has been drowned out by repetitive public insistence upon the indispensability of U.S. military strength, and inadequately dispelled rumors of the intended development of bunker busters and the deployment and testing of far reaching anti-satellite weaponry.

What is Entailed by the Quest for Nuclear Zero?
The nuclear agenda is politically dominant. It is, overall, immensely difficult. Some early choices, however, are entirely obvious, if immediate accusations of nuclear hypocrisy are not to arise. They are the familiar features of disarmament activists’ annual wish-lists: U.S. ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), successful resumption of strategic nuclear reductions talks with Russia; national commitment to the search for a verifiable Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty (FMCT); renunciation of a new generation of deep penetration warheads,; and avoidance of any unilateral and irreparable militarization of space. Some convincing initiatives will rapidly need to be internally agreed, internationally coordinated, and resoundingly launched if the NPT Review Conference in 2010 is not to be a disaster.

Other requirements are more diffuse. It will also be essential, for example, to ensure the United States maintains good prolonged relations with the other major nuclear powers. Otherwise, nuclear reductions processes will be held hostage to exacerbated great power rivalries if the decades roll into Another Bloody Century.

That may be beyond the Obama Administration’s abilities to engineer. It may simply not be possible at all. [3] But if the international political climate does turn out to allow the prospect of deep reciprocal nuclear reductions to be taken seriously, and the idea of “global zero” to have any political purchase, issues of verification will become salient. This will raise once again the endlessly thorny problem of small, mobile theater nuclear warheads, easily hidden from satellites and the weapon of choice for the most murderously ambitious terrorists. That immediately foreseeable obstacle alone will, in turn, necessitate serious early scientific consideration of what has now become more possible technically in verification (which may be surprisingly little) as well as discussion with international experts to discover what progress might be made, as, for example, in current UK-Norwegian work on nuclear decommissioning.

Verification, Transparency and the Accountability Obligation
If the U.S. government decides on a serious national attempt to achieve significant progress toward complete nuclear disarmament, verification and compliance will become more important and more highly politically charged. An important supporting opportunity is available for U.S. leadership through transparency. The U.S. attitude to nuclear threat reduction has evolved in recent years with the proliferation of initiatives, such as the Global Threat Reduction Initiative and the Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism. Part of their purpose has explicitly been to build and then strengthen international norms. The same could be achieved within the verification field, where an opportunity also exists for a determined and principled U.S. agenda to improve the verifiability of treaties and confidence that those who sign them will not escape judgment on their compliance. “Leadership in Widening Transparency” could become a plausible and internationally popular slogan that transformationists and incrementalists within the administration could both support (for one thing, it would echo “Trust but Verify” from the Reagan years). A serious initiative to widen transparency may not achieve immediate or definite results, but persisting with it would reveal those countries that actually oppose creating the conditions in which disarmament would become possible.

In the nuclear field, the United States could display its determination to end production of fissile material by intensifying efforts for a robustly verifiable Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty. It might be necessary to consider very seriously the unprecedented step of sidestepping Chinese or Pakistani jamming tactics in Geneva and leading an Ottawa-style process that does not rely on consensus. Such a move would undoubtedly be denounced, but it would also attract considerable support. It would also vividly demonstrate that the United States was no longer prepared to contribute to global immobilism in such a vital area by accepting the self-interested obstruction of spoiling states, or by insisting that no arrangements could be negotiated that would allow anything to be deduced about the operating parameters of sensitive reactors, including U.S. ones.

Specifically on nuclear power, hundreds of new reactors may be built in the next few decades with obvious implications for potential illicit weaponization. Their numbers will exacerbate the risk of breakout that is now such an evident vulnerability of the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. A sensible and consistent U.S. policy would, as a result, be to extend a national, and Western, concern for effective verification by building support for what I would call a general Accountability Obligation: that all questionable, and purportedly non-military activities, when raised to the diplomatic level, must be explained to the satisfaction of other concerned states.

It is profoundly important as a general objective to end international toleration of states under suspicion of shielding clandestine WMD activities that persistently refuse to provide not only physical access but also any technically plausible narrative of the non-military purpose behind suspicious programs that is open to expert questioning based upon available evidence. Terse and selective lists of unconnected factual points are not enough. It should no longer be internationally acceptable to claim that considerations of commercial secrecy, including the economics of nuclear power generation, preclude a general explanation of reactor design or the overall shape of a national nuclear power program.

New Fields for Nonproliferation?
The nonproliferation agenda also needs to develop in tune with or ahead of the relevant science. Therefore, it may not be too early to begin to consider nonproliferation approaches to at least two kinds of emerging technologies:

Thermobaric (or Volumetric) Munitions
Initial technical intelligence reports of this class of weapon were heavily classified. For years, even after they were initially mentioned in the media, it seemed best that as little public mention should be made of them as possible to delay their incorporation into terrorist arsenals. But now a glance at Wikipedia or a Google search effortlessly shows the destruction of which they are capable, including displays of Russian military sales videos for shoulder-fired weapons. Since Thermobarics are being brought into service by major armies, banning them is unlikely, even if a satisfactory definition could be found for them. The restriction of supply of weapons, technologies, and expertise, however, seems a very worthwhile objective. I suspect, for example, that very little of central Belfast would have been left standing if these weapons had been available to Irish Republican terrorist groups in the 1970s and 80s.

Nanotechnology
This is undoubtedly looking a very long way ahead but nanotechnology experts are already arguing that “in the absence of some type of preventative or protective force, the power of molecular manufacturing products could allow a large number of actors of varying types – including individuals, groups, and nations – to obtain sufficient capacity to destroy all unprotected humans. The likelihood of at least one powerful actor being insane is not small.” [4] The solutions to this problem are not easy to conceptualize, though they may overlap with biotechnology with its intrinsically dual capable nature. Nevertheless, early attention, analysis, and outreach to create the beginnings of an international response may pay dividends against inherently unpredictable threats decades hence. More certainly, in the shorter term, it would indicate responsible U.S. leadership in addressing the whole spectrum of future problems facing the world, using the vantage point of its overall scientific knowledge base. That perception would help dispel suspicions that U.S. nonproliferation policy is little more than an excuse to perpetuate its present military advantages over radically hostile regimes.

Resources, Attention and Allocation Choices
The world is not short of nonproliferation mechanisms, groupings, and expenditure schemes. Recent years have witnessed a largely commendable flurry of U.S.-led counterproliferation initiatives such as the Global Partnership, the activities associated with UN Security Council Resolution 1540, the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI), and the Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism (GICNT). The intention has been deliberately to build up a set of norms, expectations, and networks among decision-makers worldwide, particularly aimed at nuclear terrorism, while avoiding the potential inertia and obstruction of institutionalized international bureaucracies. While they have been of some value, it is almost certainly time to consider whether all these separate but often overlapping activities are contributing adequately to global nonproliferation efforts. Expanding memberships of these new groups, perhaps to placate U.S. or Western enthusiasms, should not necessarily be mistaken for genuine commitment and serious devotion of attention and resources. The new presidential team should consider whether it may soon be time for a guided Darwinian extinction, or even conceivably the emergence of new, better fitted counterproliferation organisms.

An increased need for reconsideration also exists because the environmental niche for these activities is likely to become much less richly nourished. In a global financial recession inflicting a worldwide “politics of pain,” is it still going to appear the wisest and most implementable collective choice for the rich nations to contribute $20 billion for the safety and security of Soviet legacy WMD material, and to spread it around as currently planned? Is the difference between the amounts devoted nuclear and biological prevention logically justifiable? Quantification of relative success in avoiding ugly counterfactual futures may remain impossible. But is there scope to develop some kind of methodological agreement on assessing what works best or most cost effectively to counter the worst proliferation threats? It may be significantly more difficult for Washington to hold international donors, regulators, and police forces to their promises if no progress is made in measuring and demonstrating just what additional security their money, or the limited time of their experts, actually buys. Conversely, including others in a discussion about effectiveness and priorities may increase commitment.

Biotechnology: Getting To Good Enough Global Overwatch
The importance of biotechnology and the toxic but suppressed disagreements about the best way to achieve global assurance that could prevent, or at least minimize, its malicious misuse justify an extended treatment in the remainder of this article.

Biotechnology is one area for which most experts would concede the possibility of tens of thousands, or conceivably millions, of human beings could be put at risk by malicious misuse of science – what Barry Kellman refers to as “bioviolence.” [5] This threat will not disappear for the rest of advanced human civilisation. (An international meeting of experts on Global Catastrophic Risk this year assessed the possibility of a single man-made pandemic killing at least 1 million people worldwide by 2010 at around 30 percent - compared to 15 percent for all acts of nuclear terrorism. The probability estimates for the deaths of 1 billion people from these causes were rated at 10 percent and 1 percent respectively.) [6]

To improve the coherence of global responses to this huge and open-ended problem, Washington and others should consciously adopt a distributed but determined control approach to future efforts which I tentatively designate “Good Enough Global Overwatch.” I propose the qualifier “good enough” because strict effectiveness is not internationally achievable in foreseeable circumstances, and because the idea of a “good enough” standard implies flexibility over time: if the threat and consequent political salience of biological weapons tangibly increases, the measures thought adequate to control them must evolve and strengthen. More would then become possible.

Good enough is the best we can realistically hope for at present because no consensus currently exists on the present seriousness of the bioviolence threat relative to other problems. Nor is there agreement on the effectiveness or acceptability of proposed measures, especially intrusive or regulatory measures, to deal with it. Indeed, the ability to mobilize support for any strong measures in the biotechnology area may be declining. This is probably because we now have to think through policy, regulation, and resourcing in the unsatisfactory interregnum between the ominous shoe that dropped in 2001 with the “Amerithrax” letters and the next bioterrorist event.

This situation leads to a wide range of questions about the seriousness and tractability of the dark potential of biological sciences. Some people’s hair (particularly in U.S. intelligence and homeland defense circles) is reported to be permanently on fire. Others tacitly conclude that biological weapons (BW) are far from a top priority and that scarce intelligence resources and diplomatic efforts should be concentrated on more rewarding or pressing matters, especially in the nuclear field. They point out that few states can now hope to develop test, equip, train, and plan to use BW on a basis that would be militarily worthwhile without being detected, or plausibly diplomatically coercive in a crisis. The number of countries of concern is consequently seen as falling.

Historians – at least if they are ever able to obtain access to records disclosing the real predisposition of enemies to get hold of BW – may find that counterproliferation efforts of the last 10 to 15 years have been a textbook example of the ambitious strategy of dissuasion. Terrorists, too, go on failing to conduct the transformative bioattack that specialists have been speculating about for over 10 years. Al Qaeda’s behavioral repertoire remains obstinately kinetic and based on bombs and bullets.

The further determinant of what may be good enough in the biological nonproliferation field is the menu of available proposals. This issue is overshadowed by the memory of the failed BWC Protocol, which died in 2001 in circumstances of considerable diplomatic acrimony. Today, seven years later, decision-makers who matter observably show insufficient belief that such a measure is worth resuscitating and fighting for. Widespread doubts exist on whether the kind of central panoptic and institutional arrangements proposed in the Protocol draft could detect enough, and could be sufficiently discriminatory, to avoid compromising legitimate national or commercially sensitive information and yet avoid implicitly endorsing questionable activities by creating the judicial right to conduct challenge investigations without sufficient promise of practical success.

A “Global Oversight” model involving central monitoring and inspection institutions, therefore, is not now a realistic governance solution. The pragmatic alternative is deliberately to maximize synergies available from a Global Overwatch process. The difference from Oversight is that the governance and security process need not depend upon an unattainable continuous central register or overall institution. Instead, security and enforcement would rely on the totality of various distributed worldwide systems or networks. It would operate by exception, using the alerted potential of companies, lawyers, industrial associations, academics, universities, markets, courts, states, and international authorities to make themselves aware, or inform others, of doubtful developments. Such entities would also then be looked at to exert pressure for explanation, and, if necessary, corrective intervention, closure, legal pursuit, and punishment. Obviously, for Overwatch to be effective, when alerts are raised, firm action must be forthcoming, using all possible pressures, incentives, and leverages, to insist on resolving them. It is possible to think through, in the abstract and in advance, how best to maximize alert opportunities. But no design can guarantee that the will to follow up will be forthcoming.

Constituent Elements of Good Enough Global Overwatch?
Any governance system good enough to respond to the threat of bioviolence would have to be, at least:

• flexible and evolutionary (to fit such a dynamic, expanding industry);
• capable of offering – or at least not foreclosing – development gains, so that the overall regime appears friendly to the Third World;
• capable of encouraging resource transfers to build worldwide monitoring capacity;
• able to avoid excessive international regulatory burdens which industry simply will not tolerate;
• able to build on existing work such as the development of codes of conduct and Hippocratic oaths for biologists; and,
• able to maintain existing arrangements for coordinating export control regimes, such as the Australia Group.
  

International Level
The potential for effective concerted action will depend on the overall degree of order in the international system. Pursuing the goal of biosecurity will always be one national objective among many. It is, understandably, most strongly felt by rich and technically sophisticated status quo nations, such as the United States, Australia, and the members of the European Union, and NATO. At the elite level, one could expect useful support from the media and specialist engineers. But it is most unlikely this will matter so much to other categories of states interested in commercial and scientific catch-up, especially if they find themselves in a competitive or confrontational security environment and opposing the main international enforcers of world order and biosecurity. Ideally, we have to hope that the overall political and security climate will permit a widely based international commitment to maintaining and strengthening the BW taboo.

Many lines of action may help in that:

• pressing to extend the BWC to all remaining states;
• pressing member states to improve their compliance reporting;
• offering increased practical assistance and advice through the development of the BWC Implementation Support Unit; and,
• a high profile international declaration by as many countries as possible, before the next BW attack, that they commit themselves to ensuring that in the event of BW use there would be no gains from bioviolence and no sanctuary for biomurderers.
  

Here, as in arms control and counterproliferation matters generally, a great need exists at the political and media levels for what I have described above as an Accountability Obligation. Inspections could not be the sole or principal investigatory instrument to resolve suspicion - though they should never be ruled out. Technically plausible narratives in the biotechnology field may be more important than anywhere else. For example, the various Iraqi Full Final and Complete Declarations famously failed to be full, final, or complete. The refusal of the Iraqi authorities to explain the expensive biosecurity installation for the alleged single cell protein production facility at Al Hakim was decisive for the UN investigation. Similar refusals should not be accepted in future investigations.

As with the IAEA in the nuclear field, it would also be desirable if the world could call in a body of technically respected and discrete experts to undertake repetitive questioning and analysis of dubious biotechnology work, ideally face-to-face with those responsible for it. It is worth remembering that, during the prolonged Iraqi compliance crises, Saddam persistently refused to produce his scientists without minders who disrupted questioning when it got too difficult. Any future international biological investigatory panel would also need to be sufficiently eminent to be trusted not to divulge justifiably confidential commercial or military information. Both the UN Secretary General’s mechanisms to investigate alleged use of WMD and the BWC’s Article 5 consultation and cooperation process could be enhanced to assist this.

At the National Level
Worldwide scrutiny of suspicious activities by intelligence organizations of countries interested in enforcement will continue under any circumstances. From the point of view of global governance and global biosecurity, it is very desirable that it should do so. But national collection and analysis abilities inevitably differ widely and set limits on the ability to share information. Sharing should be encouraged wherever possible, but it cannot be expected ever to be easy, particularly when commercial advantage might be at stake.

Resolving concerns about questionable biological activities in private or allegedly private entities within other states, or about suspected state-sponsored programs, will always have to take its place among contending national and diplomatic priorities. Demanding explanations or remedial action from the responsible governments, however discretely, will usually have costs in terms of political relationships and potential commercial contracts. There will be no single best way of making these approaches. They might be handled confidentially through intelligence channels or discrete diplomatic demarche, or publicly by blacklisting dubious firms or public action either in the Security Council or possible structures that may develop from the BWC. It is very likely, however, that diplomacy will benefit from joint action with like-minded states. Discrete tip-offs to firms or universities about the risks of association with countries or enterprises of concern might very well also be important and effective.

In extreme cases, with defiant, shameless, isolated or hostile states, kinetic action by enforcing countries should not be ruled out, as the Israelis anonymously proved in the doorstep assassination of Gerard Bull and the Americans by the cruise missile attack on the suspected facility in Sudan at Al Shufa. But kinetic action is very likely to reduce the degree of international consensus that will, in turn, be a key determinant of the world’s ability to come to grips with the biosecurity problem.

At the Economic Level
Markets, firms, and investors should receive incentives to become increasingly important potential monitoring and enforcement actors. Their roles could be encouraged and strengthened, perhaps by legislation or legal action to generate precedents that bring out the potential liability costs of involvement with questionable government contracts or shady firms. Due diligence and reputational risks should be increasingly important considerations for the international biotechnology industry.

Etel Solingen’s work on nuclear logics convincingly highlights the importance of a government’s desire to integrate into the global economy as a major determinant of its choice of nuclear acquisition or abstinence. [7] BW capabilities are almost always a lesser priority than nuclear ones. We should, therefore, be interested in raising the trade and other economic costs of refusal to resolve international anxieties about specific biotechnology activities or the adequacy of national standards of regulation.

National Capacities for Policing and Regulation
Law enforcement powers obviously must be developed where they are currently lacking. They could be fostered by intelligently self-interested resource transfers to help build capacities in poorer countries across the world. Money here may be at least as well spent as in the destruction of legacy stocks of chemical weapons. Further development of precise criteria for suspicious activities would enhance law enforcers’ abilities to detect criminal activity and improve police understanding of wrongful conduct and how to identify it. It should contribute to multilateral cooperation by injecting objectivity in an area affected by innuendo.

International Structures for Alert, Enforcement, Education and Pressure
The requirement, then, is for a wide variety of groupings and structures. They would have to range from those with wide composition, full legitimacy, but no intelligence access, like the Conference on Disarmament, to those of narrow membership, good information, and effective operation but little legal legitimacy, like the Proliferation Security Initiative or the Australia Group. Problems could then be pursued through the most appropriate grouping. It is also worth re-emphasizing the importance of emerging regional biosafety and biosecurity groupings involving industry. They can compile registers, build connections, and spread the intimate local knowledge essential for self-regulation. They can address biosecurity as part of the spectrum of natural and man-made risks to public safety and security from the life sciences, ranging from endemic or emerging infectious diseases through laboratory accidents and lack of awareness. This could be the ideal context to assess, raise, and, as far as possible, quietly resolve emergent concerns.

Making It Work Well Enough
The potentially available set of interlocking and reinforcing levers, systems, organizations, and networks would work best by systematically:

• fostering necessary international attitudes and professional cultures;
• advocating, and then normalizing the Accountability Obligation: giving incentives for transparency, and diminishing tolerance of opacities to the absolute commercial and security minimum;
• supporting self-organizing organizations like the biosecurity/biosafety associations;
• lubricating and intensifying information flows of questions and answers;
• removing political and commercial blockages , including by third-party intervention where that can be effective;
• preserving the options for international action represented by organizations like the Australia Group, or evolving new ones as necessary;
• conducting diplomatic dealings discretely but firmly with an appropriate level of priority, backed by the plausible threat of economic sanctions or worse; and,
• mobilizing diplomatic and commercial attention through widely shared consistent patient demands, based upon the Accountability Obligation, for technically plausible explanations when causes of concern arise.
  

Prospect
Even if it were, in fact, good enough, Global Overwatch would be no panacea. It could only be an anxious, indefinitely long-term, large-scale collective work, constantly in progress. The total potential of the global arrangements set out here (although some of them are in many respects already evolving) may never be as rapid, directed, and enforceable as desired. Moreover, all these interlocking activities will be hostage to wider political perturbations. They will need considerable political subtlety and a close liaison with academic, legal and commercial actors. The unavoidable connectivity with the intelligence world may have to be very discrete indeed. But the total complex ensemble is likely to be the best we will get. The new U.S. administration, perhaps more than any other, has an interest in ensuring that, by consistent diplomacy, sensible resource decisions, close attention to the various system indicators, and determined responses when necessary, it will over time remain good enough.

Paul Schulte – London School of Economics