After Globalization Future Security in a Technology Rich World

摘要

Over the course of the year 2000, five one-day workshops were conducted by the Center for Global Security Research at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on threats that might come against the US and its allies in the 2015 to 2020 timeframe due to the global availability of advanced technology. These workshops focused on threats that are enabled by nuclear, missile, and space technology; military technology; information technology; bio technology; and geo systems technology. In December, an Integration Workshop and Senior Review before national leaders and experts were held. For each workshop the process of analysis involved identification and prioritization of the participants' perceived most severe threat scenarios (worst nightmares) , discussion of the technologies which enabled those threats, and ranking of the technologies' threat potentials. We were not concerned in this exercise with defining responses, although our assessment of each threat's severity included consideration of the ease or difficulty with which it might be countered. At the concluding Integration Workshop and Senior Panel Review, we brought the various workshops' participants together, added senior participant/reviewers with broad experience and responsibility, and discussed the workshop findings to determine what is most certain, and uncertain, and what might be needed to resolve our uncertainties. This document reports the consensus and important variations of both the reviewers and the participants.