This paper explores the influence of the Indian nationalist movement on the formation of British social history by highlighting the intellectual and social bonds between key nationalists and the Thompson family (Edward Thompson and his sons Frank and E. P. Thompson). A twentieth-century preoccupation with Byron, whose Romantic views of freedom and nation were shaped by the period of colonial conquest, hangs over the joint intellectual and political history of Indian nationalism and British socialism. Besides the Thompsons, Mohandas Gandhi, T. E. Lawrence, George Orwell, Rabindranath Tagore, and Jawaharlal Nehru are key figures in this web of influences and homages. Tracing this intellectual inheritance exposes the fundamentally anti-historical nature of Perry Anderson’s recent critique of the ‘Indian Ideology’, particularly of its religiosity. The study reveals how the colonial and orientalist context in which Romanticism, nationalism, and the historical discipline took shape continues to colour our ideal and expectations of ‘secular modernity’.
A shadowy terror group smuggles a crude nuclear bomb into the United States, then detonates it right in the heart of Washington D.C., setting off a 15 kiloton explosion.
Eighty thousand Americans are killed instantly, including the president, vice president and most of the members of Congress, and more than a hundred thousand more are seriously wounded.
News outlets are soon broadcasting a message they’ve all received from a group claiming responsibility.
It says there are five more bombs hidden in five different cities across the America, and one bomb will be set off each week for the next five weeks unless all American troops based overseas are ordered to immediately return to the U.S. homeland.
The nation is thrown into chaos, as millions scramble to flee the cities, clogging roads and choking telecommunications systems.
The stock market crashes, before trading is halted altogether.
Martial law is declared, amid widespread looting and violence.
That was just one of the nightmare scenarios for a potential nuclear disaster that former U.S. Secretary of Defense William J. Perry vividly described as he delivered the Center for International Security and Cooperation’s annual Drell Lecture on Wednesday.
“My bottom line is that the likelihood of a nuclear catastrophe today is greater than it was during the Cold War,” Perry said.
Most people were “blissfully unaware” of the danger that simmering conflicts in geopolitical flash points around the globe – including Russia, China, North Korea, Iran and Pakistan – could easily turn nuclear, Perry told the Stanford audience.
A new nuclear arms race with Russia
Perry said he had tried to foster closer cooperation between the U.S. and Russia when he headed the Pentagon during the mid ‘90s and helped oversee the joint dismantling of four thousand nuclear weapons.
“When I left the Pentagon, I believed we were well on the way to ending forever that Cold War enmity, but that was not to be,” he said.
William J. Perry shares a video depicting the threat of nuclear terrorism with a Stanford audience.
Since then, relations between the West and Russia have soured badly, prompting Russia to modernize its nuclear arsenal and assume a more aggressive nuclear posture.
“They’re well advanced in rebuilding their Cold War nuclear arsenal, and it is Putin’s stated first priority,” Perry said.
“And they have dropped their former policy of no first use of nuclear weapons, and replaced it with a policy that says nuclear weapons will be their weapon of choice if they are threatened.”
While Perry said he believed Russian president Vladimir Putin did not want to engage in a military conflict with NATO forces, he said he was concerned about the possibility of Russia making a strategic miscalculation and stumbling into a conflict where they might resort to the use of tactical nuclear weapons.
“If they did that there’s no way of predicting or controlling the escalation that would follow thereafter,” Perry said.
Chinese economic problems increasing tensions
In Asia, a slowing Chinese economy could exacerbate domestic political tensions over issues such as wealth inequality and pollution, and encourage Chinese leaders to divert attention from problems at home by focusing on enemies abroad.
“China has had more than 10 percent growth now for almost three decades, but I think there’s trouble ahead,” Perry said.
“The time-proven safety valve for any government that’s in trouble is ultra-nationalism, which in the case of China translates into anti-Americanism and anti-Japanese.”
China has seen a major growth in military expenditures over the last decade, and it has used that investment to build a blue water navy and develop effective anti-ship missiles designed to drive the U.S. Navy hundreds of miles back from the Chinese coastline.
One potential flash point for a conflict between China and the U.S. are the artificial islands that China has been building in the disputed waters of the South China Sea.
“In a sense, China is regarding the South China Sea as a domestic lake, and we regard it and most other countries regard it as international waters, so their actions have been challenged by the U.S. Navy and will continue to be challenged,” Perry said.
North Korea’s growing nuclear threat
Meanwhile, China’s neighbor North Korea has continued to defy the international community and conducted another nuclear test in January.
“North Korea is today building a nuclear arsenal, and I would say clearly it’s of the highest priority in their government, and they have adopted outrageous rhetoric about how they might use those nuclear weapons,” Perry said.
William J. Perry delivers the Drell Lecture in an address entitled "A National Security Walk Around the World."
North Korea followed up its latest nuclear test with a satellite launch earlier this month – an important step towards developing an intercontinental ballistic missile that could threaten the United States mainland.
“These missiles today have only conventional warheads that are of no significant concern, but they are developing nuclear warheads,” Perry said.
“They already have developed a nuclear bomb, and the latest test, as well as tests to come, will be designed to perfect a bomb small enough and compact enough and durable enough to fit into a warhead. If they succeed in doing that, then the bluster will become a real threat.”
Perry said he hoped China and the United States could combine forces and adopt a “carrot and stick” diplomatic approach to force North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program – with the United States offering aid and international recognition, and China threatening to cut off supplies of food and aid.
He said he expected to see “more acting out” from the North Korean regime in the coming months, in the form of further nuclear and rocket tests.
Like it or not, the Iran deal is the only deal we’ll get
The landmark deal reached last year, where Iran agree to curtail its nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions, was a better resolution than Perry had expected to the negotiations, but it has met with significant resistance from groups he described as “strange bedfellows.”
“The opposition in Israel and the United States opposed the deal because they fear it will allow Iran to get a bomb,” Perry said.
“Whereas the opposition in Iran opposed the deal because they fear it will prevent Iran from getting a bomb. Both cannot be right.”
Many Republican presidential hopefuls have publicly stated on the campaign trail that they would withdraw from the deal if they got elected to the White House, but Perry said that would be a strategic mistake.
“The opposition in the United States has a simple formula – we should withdraw from the deal, we should reinstate sanctions, and we should renegotiate a better deal,” Perry said.
“Let me be as blunt as I can, this is a pure fantasy. There is not the remotest possibility that the sanction could be reapplied if the United States withdraws from this deal, because the day we withdraw from the deal, our allies are gone, the sanctions are gone, there will be no renegotiations without sanctions, so this deal, like it or not, is the only deal we will ever get.”
Another “Mumbai” attack could spark regional nuclear war
Nuclear rivals India and Pakistan have more than a hundred nuclear weapons on each side, as well as the missiles to deliver them, and a conventional military conflict between them could quickly escalate into a regional nuclear war, Perry said.
Another large-scale terror attack, like the coordinated assault in Mumbai that killed more than 163 people in 2008, could lead India to retaliate militarily against Pakistan (which India blames for encouraging the terror groups operating in Pakistani territory).
Perry said he was concerned that Pakistan would then use tactical nuclear weapons against invading Indian troops, and that India might then respond with a nuclear attack of its own on Pakistan.
“So this is the nightmare scenario of how a regional nuclear war could start,” Perry said.
“A nightmare that would involve literally tens of millions of deaths, along with the possibility of stimulating a nuclear winter that would cause widespread tragedies all over the planet.”
A ray of hope
Despite all the potential for nuclear disaster in the current geopolitical environment, Perry said he was still hopeful that nuclear catastrophe could be avoided.
"While much of my talk today has a doomsday ring to it, that truly is not who I am,” Perry said.
“I’m basically an optimist. When I see a cloud, I look for a ray to shine through that cloud.”
One important step toward reducing the nuclear threat would be improving relations between the U.S. and Russia, he said.
“My ray of sunshine, my hope, is I believe we can still reverse the slide in U.S. Russia relations, he said.
“We must begin that by restoring civil dialog. We must restore cooperation between the United States and Russia in areas where we have mutual interest…If we succeed in doing that, then we can work to stop and reverse the drift to a greater and greater dependence on nuclear weapons.”
Perry ended his speech by urging the audience to keep striving to rid the world of the threat of nuclear weapons.
“We must pursue our ideals in order to keep alive our hope – hope for a safer world for our children and for our grandchildren,” he said.
We explored the potential to colocate solar installations and agriculture.
Water use at solar installations are similar to amounts required for desert plants.
Co-located systems are economically viable in some areas.
Colocation can maximize land and water use efficiency in drylands.
Solar energy installations in arid and semi-arid regions are rapidly increasing due to technological advances and policy support. Although solar energy provides several benefits such as reduction of greenhouse gases, reclamation of degraded land, and improved quality of life in developing countries, the deployment of large-scale renewable energy infrastructure may negatively impact land and water resources. Meeting the ever-expanding energy demand with limited land and water resources in the context of increasing demand for alternative uses such as agricultural and domestic consumption is a major challenge. The goal of this study was to explore opportunities to colocate solar infrastructures and agricultural crops to maximize the efficiency of land and water use. We investigated the energy inputs/outputs, water use, greenhouse gas emissions, and economics of solar installations in northwestern India in comparison to aloe vera cultivation, another widely promoted and economically important land use in these systems. The life cycle analyses show that the colocated systems are economically viable in some rural areas and may provide opportunities for rural electrification and stimulate economic growth. The water inputs for cleaning solar panels are similar to amounts required for annual aloe productivity, suggesting the possibility of integrating the two systems to maximize land and water use efficiency. A life cycle analysis of a hypothetical colocation indicated higher returns per m3 of water used than either system alone. The northwestern region of India has experienced high population growth in the past decade, creating additional demand for land and water resources. In these water-limited areas, coupled solar infrastructure and agriculture could be established in marginal lands with low water use, thus minimizing the socioeconomic and environmental issues resulting from cultivation of economically important non-food crops (e.g., aloe) in prime agricultural lands.
Following her signing of an open letter registering concerns about potential privacy abuses with Digital India and her op-ed "How to Think About Modi's Visit to Silicon Valley," Stanford historian Priya Satia addresses the hate mail and criticism those actions precipitated, ironically enough from defenders of India's Hindus' "particular tolerance."
As Silicon Valley prepares to welcome Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Stanford historian Priya Satia argues that Indians and Americans should remember the state-abetted violence and intolerance of minorities in the recent past as enthusiasm for "Digital India" overwhelms concerns of religious and individual freedom in the September 18, 2015 edition of The Huffington Post.
India celebrates the 10th anniversary of its Emergency Management and Research Institute (EMRI), the world's largest ambulance service that is saving the lives of the poorest Indian residents free of charge. Stanford Medicine experts, who trained responders in emergency medical procedures, joined EMRI to celebrate the program's success. Read More
Demographic and socioeconomic changes such as increasing urbanization, migration, and female education shape population health in many low- and middle-income countries. These changes are rarely reflected in computational epidemiological models, which are commonly used to understand population health trends and evaluate policy interventions. Our goal was to create a “backbone” simulation modeling approach to allow computational epidemiologists to explicitly reflect changing demographic and socioeconomic conditions in population health models.
Methods
We developed, evaluated, and “open-sourced” a generalized approach to incorporate longitudinal, commonly available demographic and socioeconomic data into epidemiological simulations, illustrating the feasibility and utility of our approach with data from India. We constructed a series of nested microsimulations of increasing complexity, calibrating each model to longitudinal sociodemographic and vital registration data. We then selected the model that was most consistent with the data (i.e., greater accuracy) while containing the fewest parameters (i.e., greater parsimony). We validated the selected model against additional data sources not used for calibration.
Results
We found that standard computational epidemiology models that do not incorporate demographic and socioeconomic trends quickly diverged from past mortality and population size estimates, while our approach remained consistent with observed data over decadal time courses. Our approach additionally enabled the examination of complex relations between demographic, socioeconomic and health parameters, such as the relationship between changes in educational attainment or urbanization and changes in fertility, mortality, and migration rates.
Conclusions
Incorporating demographic and socioeconomic trends in computational epidemiology is feasible through the “open source” approach, and could critically alter population health projections and model-based evaluations of health policy interventions in unintuitive ways.
William J. Perry shares a video depicting the threat of nuclear terrorism with a Stanford audience.
William J. Perry delivers the Drell Lecture in an address entitled "A National Security Walk Around the World."
