FSI researchers consider international development from a variety of angles. They analyze ideas such as how public action and good governance are cornerstones of economic prosperity in Mexico and how investments in high school education will improve China’s economy.
They are looking at novel technological interventions to improve rural livelihoods, like the development implications of solar power-generated crop growing in Northern Benin.
FSI academics also assess which political processes yield better access to public services, particularly in developing countries. With a focus on health care, researchers have studied the political incentives to embrace UNICEF’s child survival efforts and how a well-run anti-alcohol policy in Russia affected mortality rates.
FSI’s work on international development also includes training the next generation of leaders through pre- and post-doctoral fellowships as well as the Draper Hills Summer Fellows Program.
This study seeks to understand the conflict and tension arising from a territorially divided nation with a strong legacy of ethnic homogeneity, using the Korean case for consideration. In doing so, the authors rely on a recent development in social identity theory to explore the dynamics and conflict inherent in intra-group social identification.
Based on interviews with participants and research in newly opened archives, the book reveals how the American atomic monopoly affected Stalin's foreign policy, the role of espionage in the evolution of the Soviet bomb, and the relationship between Soviet nuclear scientists and the country's political leaders.
also in Franklin A. Long, Donald Haffner, and Jeffrey Boutwell (eds.), Weapons in Space, W.W. Norton & Co., 1986, pp. 257-278; exerpted in P. Edward Haley and Jack Merritt (eds.) Strategic Defense Initiative: Folly or Future?, Westview Press, 1986, pp. 139-150
The development of thermonuclear weapons marked one of the major turning points in the history of Soviet-American strategic arms competition. In his book The Advisors Herbert York enhances our understanding of this turning-point by showing that the first Soviet thermonuclear device, which was exploded on 12 August 1953, was not a superbomb but had a different configuration and a substantially lower yield. York's analysis is important because it makes it possible to assess more accurately the progress of the Soviet nuclear weapons development in the 1950s, and to understand more clearly the nature of Soviet-American strategic arms competition.
The object of this note is to make public a document which gives more detailed information about Soviet nuclear weapons test in the 1950s. The data given here support York's analysis.