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This paper deals with re-emergence and threat posed by infectious diseases around the world. Since World War II, public health strategy has focused on the eradication of microbes. During the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund devised investment policies based on the assumption that economic modernization should come first and improved health would naturally follow. In the fall of 1994 the New York City Department of Health and the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service took steps to prevent plague-infected passengers from India from disembarking at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport. Population expansion raises the statistical probability that pathogens will be transmitted, whether from person to person or vector --insect, rodent, or other--to person. Urbanization and global migration propel radical changes in human behavior as well as in the ecological relationship between microbes and humans. Almost invariably in large cities, sex industries arise and multiple-partner sex becomes more common, prompting rapid increases in sexually transmitted diseases. The estimated direct and indirect costs of the disease are expected to top $500 billion by the year 2000, according to the Global AIDS Policy Coalition at Harvard University. The pneumonic plague epidemic in Surat, India vividly illustrated three crucial national security issues in disease emergence: human mobility, transparency, and tensions between states up to and including the threat of biological warfare.

The article presents a response to an essay entitled "The Rise of U.S. Nuclear Primacy," by Keir Lieber and Daryl Press. The original paper claimed that the Pentagon structured the United States' nuclear arsenal to a goal of deterring nuclear attack on the United States, which the author claims is a mischaracterization of U.S. policy. Declassified documents and public statements from individuals including Defense Secretaries Robert McNamara and Clark Clifford are used to support the author's assertion.

The article presents a response to an essay entitled "The Rise of U.S. Nuclear Primacy," by Keir Lieber and Daryl Press. The author refutes the original paper's assertions that United States nuclear policy is geared towards making the U.S. the world's supreme nuclear power, alleging that the U.S. Air Force is actively upgrading its nuclear arsenal to make it more lethal. The United States Department of Defense counteracts this assertion by claiming that improvements to nuclear weapons are designed to make them safer rather than deadlier.