Extremist Radicalization Among Veterans | The Myth of the “Poor Man's Atomic Bomb” | Securing Democracy in the Digital Age, and more

“Shot in the Arm” Shows How Disinformation Can Be Deadly  (Lipi Roy, Forbes)
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), measles vaccination prevented an estimated 31.7 million deaths globally. Unfortunately, despite vaccine safety and efficacy, measles outbreaks are threatening the health and safety of people all over the U.S. and the world.
So, why is there so much apprehension and outright hostility regarding immunizations which have saved the lives of so many children and adults worldwide?
“Mostly because the anti-vaccine movement in the United States has shifted its focus to health freedom propaganda and politics,” explains Peter Hotez, MD, PhD, and Co-Director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development. “It first geared up around phony autism claims, and that’s how I got involved.” Dr. Hotez wrote a book about his daughter’s experience with autism titled, Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism.
Shot in the Arm also explores the erosion of the sanctity of science and specifically the dissolution of trust in scientists, experts and public health professionals who have devoted their careers to the pursuit of medical innovations to keep people safer and healthier. “Vaccines have been a victim of their own success,” states director, Scott Hamilton Kennedy, pointing out that people today have not witnessed the devastation of smallpox or polio. While skepticism in science is not new, the Covid-19 pandemic created a fertile breeding ground for social and technological phenomena to join forces and amplify both disorder and distrust.
“Data doesn’t matter. It’s the culture,” states Paul Offit, MD and Director of the Vaccine Education Center, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia….  “When the polio vaccine came out, people universally embraced it. Now … [vaccine refusal] has nothing to do with safety. We live in a more cynical and divisive time. People don’t trust institutions.”
Much of this mistrust, as Hamilton Kennedy and executive producer Neil deGrasse Tyson painstakingly detail, is fueled by a relentless campaign by anti-vaccine propagandists like Robert Kennedy Jr. and Del Bigtree. Both have partnered with disgraced gastroenterologist and researcher, Andrew Wakefield, whose 1998 Lancet paper hypothesizing a connection between the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism was retracted (albeit eight years post-publication). Unfortunately, the damage had already been done – despite 18 different studies published after Wakefield’s paper debunking any link between autism and MMR immunization. What Wakefield did – and Kennedy and Bigtree continue to do – is the “lowest of the low,” as Dr. Offit declares in the film: “He took advantage of a desperate parent’s desire to help their child.”

The Myth of the “Poor Man’s Atomic Bomb”: Knowledge, Method, and Ideology in the Study of Chemical, Biological, and Nuclear Weapons  (Biejan Poor Toulabi, Journal of Global Security Studies)
Chemical and biological weapons (CBWs) have often been characterized as a “poor man’s atomic bomb”: a cheap and easy to acquire alternative to nuclear weapons that is particularly appealing to so-called Third World states. This idea is also reflected in Western government and expert estimates that have long exaggerated the spread of CBWs, especially among states in the Global South. In this article, the author breaks down the ways in which the idea that the spread of CBWs is prevalent and that it primarily happens among states in the Global South has come to exist and persist. By dissecting an oft-cited dataset on CBW spread, he unravels frequently occurring methodological flaws—such as conceptual confusion, misinterpretation of sources, and a bias toward proliferation charges originating from the US government—that breed and sustain inflated estimates and faulty allegations. Subsequently, the article shows that a dominant cognitive framework that centers on the metaphorical use of the terms “proliferation” and “poor man’s atomic bomb” primes analysts and policymakers to interpret the history and future of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons as being characterized by inevitable spread, particularly among the non-Western “Other.” In conclusion, the article offers ways to counter the orthodoxies of this ideology in teaching, research, and policy.

White Supremacists Might Be to Blame for an Uptick in Power Grid Attacks in the PNW  (John Ryan, Conrad Wilson, NPR)
Neo-Nazi groups have launched several plots to take out the U.S. grid in recent years. They’ve even put out how-to manuals to make it easier to attack vulnerable parts of the nation’s critical infrastructure.