National security issues

Perl, R. 2004. Terrorism and national security Issues and trends. CRS Issue Brief IB10119. Washington, DC Congressional Research Service. 

The global economy today is driven by politics and not by the global market converting energy supplies into a national security issue with energy independence becoming a top priority of every nation. 

The general societal benefits of all of these basic advances are substantial. Indeed, it can be argued that the overall value to our society will extend well beyond national security issues and will far exceed the initial investments, because many of these advances will result in improved quality of life and health for all of society. 

And who knows As with the large changes in predicted oil prices illustrated in Figure 2.1, some unforeseen event could lead to a rapid reevaluation of our current supply projections. It may be that a country with vast coal reserves, such as China - recognizing the inherent national security issues associated with a growing demand for oil - would be the first country to have cars fueled with hydrogen produced from coal. 

Despite the end of the Cold War, the United States still faces a range of serious national security issues. One at the forefront is the issue of the proliferation of biological weapons, and the accelerated development of the capabilities to design and produce biological weapons on the part of many Third World nations.17 The Committee on Armed Services of the U.S. House of Representatives, in their Special Inquiry Into the Chemical and Biological Threat, concluded that despite the demise of the Soviet Union, with its sizable chemical and biological arsenal, the threat has increased in terms of widespread proliferation, technological diversity, and the probability of use.1... 

Looking towards the future, the science and engineering worltforce issue is probably our number one national security issue...we have to be concerned at the number of very smart people showing up in so many other places... 

The exact number heavily depends on factors that are not usually considered scientific (energy independence, price of cmde oil, national security issues... 

Professor Whitesides selected the top down approach and asked, what are the current areas of importance One that used to be important, and is no longer, are national security issues. We are less concerned with dropping explosives on cities from ballistic trajectories, and there is less need for Ae wonderful "stealth" technology. The preeminent position of this concern has now been assumed by another concern, namely manufacturing, since the production of consumer goods is the plane at which nations now compete. Other problems that remain very much with us are health, information and communications, and environment. 

At the national level, this move up-market leaves the domestic supply of basic essential medicines reliant on imports, which may not be sustainable at current low prices, and which may not reach rural areas as effectively as local suppUes (Mujinja et al., 2014). The government official quoted at the beginning of this chapter saw this trend as a national security issue. 

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