NSDM: Overview: Intersection of Cyber War and Statecraft
Summary:
With other means: an overview of the evolving nature of cyber warfare and its role in achieving the goals of statecraft. Joseph Shelby, on NSDM staff.
Description:
Cyber warfare represents not just an evolution of how we conduct warfare, but also a potent new tool in the statecraft arsenal. This discussion will focus on the intersection between foreign policy and cyber warfare, using a few key events, such as the Stuxnet attack on Iran, as case studies. The presentation will also be exploring the nature of this new threat, and what it means for how we will continue to both wage war and conduct our diplomatic affairs well into the future. Presented by Joseph Shelby of the National Security Decision Making Game staff.
NSDM: Preparing for a Pandemic: 2016 Rio Olympics.
Summary:
Reviews professional exercise simulating a pandemic starting at Rio Olympics. Participants played officials & groups affecting outbreak response. Insights from the game. Doug Samuelson, NSDM staff.
Description:
Case Study: Preparing for a Pandemic, the 2016 Rio Olympics. Review of a professional exercise focused on preparations, possibilities and potentials of a pandemic starting at a major public event. Participants took on the roles of key officials and groups that could influence the response to an outbreak. Lecture will review insights gained from gaming how mass gatherings of people can affect world health. Presented by Doug Samuelson of the National Security Decision Making Game staff.
Accidents, weapons: radiation is real, but effects dramatized? Fact v. fiction, potential. Capt. Mark McDonagh, USN/ret., physicist, 12 years’ Naval War College experience, NSDM staff.
Description:
Nuclear reactor and weapons accidents, radiological assassination tools and weapons of mass destruction, fallout from nuclear tests and combat, hazards of medical waste. Radiation is real, but how much of the threat is dramatized or fictionalized by authors and screenplay writers, or demagogued activists with agendas? Lecture discusses the history and the potential, and attempts to separate the facts, engineering and science from the science fiction. Capt. Mark McDonagh, USN/ret., a physicist with 12 years’ experience at the Naval War College, currently on the National Security Decision Making Game staff.
Two nuclear explorers share photos, videos & stories from their trips to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, including a peek inside the Sarcophagus. With Ryan Pierce & Elizabeth Koprucki, NSDM staff.
Description:
Does your dream vacation packing list include disposable bunny suits, respirators, gloves, boot covers, head lamps, and lots of Geiger counters? Ryan Pierce and Elizabeth Koprucki were into Chernobyl before the HBO miniseries made it cool, travelling there in 2013, ’15, and ’16. They will share photos, videos and stories from areas not accessible on most public Chernobyl tours, such as the hospital basement, contaminated vehicle graveyards, the unfinished Unit 5 reactor building and cooling towers, abandoned laboratories, and areas inside the power plant, such as the Unit 2 control room, pump halls, turbine hall, and a journey inside the Sarcophagus to visit the Unit 4 control room where the fatal safety test that caused the meltdown happened. Presented by Ryan Pierce and Elizabeth Koprucki of the National Security Decision Making Game staff.
NSDM: Verne, Wells, etc.: Future Seen from 19th Century
Summary:
Jules Verne, H.G. Wells and others, and the future as they envisioned it in the Victorian Era. What they got right and what they got wrong, at least so far. Panel discussion by the NSDM staff.
Description:
Island of Dr. Moreau, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, The Time Machine, From the Earth to the Moon, The World Set Free. These are just a few of the works of prolific authors Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, projecting scientific achievement ahead into the future, while making tangential social and political commentary on their society and times. Generally considered the fathers of science fiction, and often informed by the state-of-the-art technologies of their day, they got a lot right, a lot wrong, and a lot somewhere in-between. And it is informative to see the way that their own perspectives mirror those of the day in the class struggle, the trajectory of the industrial revolution, the spoils of colonialism and imperialism, nationalism, militarism, religion, and how new orders in their utopian visions were to address these. Presented by the National Security Decision Making Game staff.