OUR PICKSAI Drug Discovery & Chemical Weapons | Ransomware & Agriculture | Emerging Technology & Arms Control
· AI Drug Discovery Systems Might Be Repurposed to Make Chemical Weapons, Researchers Warn
· How Many Nuclear Weapons Does Russia Have in 2022?
· Documents Reveal Bin Laden’s Bid for American Support
· UK Neo-Nazi, 19, Sentenced for Inciting Terrorism Against Jews
· Canadian Military Not Doing Enough to Detect, Prevent Extremism in the Ranks: Report
· Four Unanswered Questions About the Intersection of War and Nuclear Power
· How Emerging Technology Is Breaking Arms Control
· Ransomware Attacks on Agricultural Cooperatives Potentially Timed to Critical Seasons
AI Drug Discovery Systems Might Be Repurposed to Make Chemical Weapons, Researchers Warn (Rebecca Sohn, Scientific American)
A demonstration with drug design software shows the ease with which toxic molecules can be generated.
How Many Nuclear Weapons Does Russia Have in 2022? (Hans M. Kristensen and Matt Korda, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)
Russia is in the late stages of a decades-long modernization of its strategic and nonstrategic nuclear forces to replace Soviet-era weapons with newer systems. In December 2021, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu reported that modern weapons and equipment now make up 89.1 percent of Russia’s nuclear triad, an increase from the previous year’s 86 percent.
Documents Reveal Bin Laden’s Bid for American Support (Elizabeth Germino, CBS News)
New translations of Osama bin Laden’s personal documents show that the intention behind 9/11 was not only to kill Americans, but to incite U.S. protests, like those seen during the Vietnam War. These documents, first recovered in the 2011 raid on bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, have been declassified since 2017, but were unorganized and mostly untranslated, until now. The letters offer one of the closest looks yet into the mind of America’s most infamous terrorist. In her new book, “The Bin Laden Papers,” author and Islamic scholar Nelly Lahoud distills nearly 6,000 pages of the personal notes, letters, and journals taken from bin Laden’s compound. She spoke with 60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi about the al Qaeda leader’s motivation behind 9/11. “He thought that the American people would take to the streets, replicate the anti-Vietnam War protests, and they would put pressure on their government to withdraw from Muslim majority states,” Lahoud told Alfonsi on the broadcast. It was a huge miscalculation. A Gallup poll from October 2001 showed 88% of Americans approved of the military action in Afghanistan. According to Lahoud, bin Laden’s papers revealed a disconnect between his ambition and capability.
