From a once-in-a-century global pandemic, to wars in Europe and the Middle East, to the unchecked rise of AI and social media technologies, we are living in an age of threats against humanity that are profound, fast-moving, and interconnected.

On this episode, produced in collaboration with the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Dan Richards talks with two experts from very different fields about the interdisciplinary nature of “security studies”, how the COVID-19 pandemic has pushed experts to think about international security in new ways, and where they see some of the biggest threats to humanity today.

Guests on this episode:

• Rose McDermott is a political scientist and professor of international relations at the Watson School.
• Jennifer Nuzzo is a professor of epidemiology and director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University’s School of Public Health.

Learn more about the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Learn more about Brown University School of Public Health’s Pandemic Center

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DAN RICHARDS: From the Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University, this is Trending Globally. I'm Dan Richards. From a once in a century global pandemic to wars in Europe and the Middle East, to the unchecked rise of AI technologies, we are living in an age of threats against humanity that are profound, fast moving, and often interconnected. So how can scholars and experts help us to understand and hopefully reduce these threats?

In this episode, produced in collaboration with the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, we have two experts from different fields who both focus on threats to human security in different ways. We're going to talk about how they approach the study of these threats, what their respective fields may be able to teach each other, and what this all means for the evolution of the academic field known as security studies.

Rose McDermott, as listeners may remember, is a political scientist and professor of International and Public Affairs at the Watson School. Jennifer Nuzzo is a professor of Epidemiology and director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University's School of Public Health. Jennifer, Rose, thank you both so much for coming on to the show.

ALL: Thanks for having us.

DAN RICHARDS: So in some ways, this will partially build on a conversation you both started at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which hosted a conference this past winter on the future of security studies. But before we get into more of the meat of the discussion, I was wondering if you guys, for listeners who maybe aren't that familiar with the field or the subfield of security studies, what is security studies?

ROSE MCDERMOTT: Well, I think there's some debate about that. I don't think everybody agrees because some people have a more traditional understanding that focuses much more on things like war and conflict and battles and things that are directly related to violence.

And as the world has changed, many concepts that traditionally were understood as not part of security studies have been incorporated into it. So things like climate change, pandemic disease, which is Jennifer's area of expertise. And other areas now get incorporated into our notions of human security. I think a lot of that changed when 9/11 happened. And terrorism, which had previously been seen as of outlier became really central to the understanding of security studies.

DAN RICHARDS: So it really came out, as I understand, more of after World War II and during the Cold War and exploring military conflicts between great powers and nuclear security type threats--

ROSE MCDERMOTT: I think that's right. I mean, a lot of things changed at the end of the Second World War, and I think that one of the really big changes was a greater emphasis on human rights and humanitarian intervention and the fact that each life matters as opposed to the way that we think about conflicts happening in the Middle Ages, where it wasn't all about individual life. It was very different kinds of incentives around territorial goals and things like that. But the human rights part became much more salient at the end of the Second World War.

DAN RICHARDS: And Jennifer, as an epidemiologist, when or how did thinking about security or working or collaborating at all with the field of security studies enter into your work and thinking?

JENIFFER NUZZO: Yeah, I mean, it's an odd path to come to these conversations through the lens of public health. But for those of us who do engage in these conversations, it was really, I think, 9/11 that was the real impetus and the anthrax attacks that followed, and this observation that you could have these no notice events that not only pose health threats because they harm people, they sicken people, they disrupt health systems, but also threaten prosperity and security.

And so I got my start in this fieldwork initially as an epidemiologist in New York City in the aftermath of September 11. And I ultimately joined a research center that was an academic research center that was quite worried that were biological weapons to be used, that the people who'd be on the front lines of responding to that wouldn't be the traditional security sector parties like militaries. It would be civilians. It would be doctors and nurses and public health practitioners. And so for me, that was really the start of that conversation.

DAN RICHARDS: And just to be clear for listeners, while we're talking about the field of security studies, and at times we might talk about nuclear weapons, it's also there's a broader definition of security that's not just about weaponized threats, actors trying to intentionally hurt other actors, like in war. It's also about security effects of things that maybe weren't the result of weaponized conflict between groups like COVID, which we will be talking about in this conversation. It's a broader definition of security. Is that right?

JENIFFER NUZZO: Yes. So we are talking about biological weapons as one scenario. But this notion of health security, which is a field that I work in, is this idea that health emergencies can not only harm our lives, but that they could rise to the attention of national security threats or threats to global security.

And those may be just due to natural causes, but they could also be due to deliberate or accidental sources. And so I think COVID demonstrated to people the power of biology. A single virus can start to spread and spread across the globe, and suddenly you have not only extraordinary loss of life and harm to people, but disruptions in society, disruptions in military readiness. It really touched all of society.

And so it demonstrates the power that biology can have and why there is both human benefits to taking the harms off the table. But also you could see why from a strategic standpoint or a weapons standpoint, why those sorts of weapons might become more desirable for adversaries to use because they can see-- they see what they can do to societies.

ROSE MCDERMOTT: Yeah. I mean, the other thing I'll add to that is because you saw something like COVID becoming so rapidly ubiquitous and destructive, I think it highlighted the importance of surveillance efforts, such as what Jennifer does at the Pandemic Center.

And I think one of the problems with dealing with this in the traditional military security paradigm is that that tends to treat all weapons of mass destruction the same. Nuclear weapons are the same as chemical weapons are the same as biological weapons, and all of them are really bad. And all of them can kill lots of people.

But there's of default notion that the way that you would deter the use of nuclear weapons is not different than the way you would deter the use of intentional biological weapons. And I think one of the things that Jennifer's comments at the meeting we had in December were so important is to highlight the fact that they're actually different, that biological weapons are different than something like nuclear weapons, where they're in the ground, you know where they are. You may not want to use them, but it's not like there's a lot of surprise in that technology.

Traditional security studies treats the issue of how to prevent the use of nuclear weapons as being the same as how you would prevent biological weapons. And I think that that's not right. And I think that Jennifer has some really, really interesting and important insights about how it should be treated differently. Although traditionally, it's been treated as though they're equivalent.

DAN RICHARDS: So yeah, maybe, Jennifer, what are the key differences you see there?

JENIFFER NUZZO: Yeah, so-- I mean, first of all, a key difference is that we're talking about a biological weapon, we're talking about biology, and we're talking about self-replicating agents or organisms.

And so maybe if in the nuclear non-proliferation world, there's a lot of conversation about how many nukes a country has or how much material a country has access it's not really relevant for talking about biological weapons. If you can make a gram, you can make a kilogram, you can make a ton. So that idea of that self-replicating agent or organism I think is a clear distinguishing feature.

Another distinguishing feature is that it's inherently civilian exercise. If you think of what should a community, a nation state, do to protect itself against a nuclear weapon. It's largely a list of government actions. But if a biological weapon were to be deployed, it would be something that would be spreading if it were contagious among people. And the people on the front lines of responding to that would be largely civilians. And so the solution set is a largely civilian solution set.

Now that doesn't mean that there can't be government actions to prevent the development of biological weapons, to deter the use of biological weapons, to equip communities, to be able to respond so efficiently that we take off the table, their ability to harm. That may be a government exercise, but ultimately the locus of action is really a civilian one. And that's quite an important difference.

There's also a commercial enterprise. There are peaceful purposes for which you would be working on organisms or agents, and it makes it harder to detect offensive biological research versus defensive biological research. It's a very distributed enterprise, meaning there is some level of research that's happening in nearly every country on the planet. And that's just not the same with the materials and approaches that are used to develop other weapons of mass destruction.

DAN RICHARDS: Do you see any parallels, Rose, I guess in the world of nuclear research and nuclear testing balancing what are threats and what are types of research being done for more benign purposes?

ROSE MCDERMOTT: I think there are places where there's debates about the way that you use fissionable material for nuclear power versus nuclear weapons. There are degrees of enrichment where you could use them for both. But I think that the real difference is what Jennifer just highlighted about self-replicating mechanisms. Uranium does not self-replicate. And when it's used, it's gone.

And there can be debates about how much enrichment you need to achieve a dirty bomb to achieve some kind of missile system or whether or not in the dismantling of nuclear weapons, what happens to that uranium, whether it can be used for peaceful purposes. But with careful surveillance, you should know where all that uranium is and how it gets used. And that's the job of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

And there's of course, debates, within certain countries about whether they'll let the IAEA come in to do inspections. But it's not like with COVID, where you it's everywhere and you don't know who has it. And it's a very, very different level of risk and threat.

JENIFFER NUZZO: And maybe just to say-- I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think you could just walk out into nature and find a nuclear weapon. Whereas when we're talking about biological weapons very much can do that. You can walk out into nature and find a sick reindeer, and there's your anthrax that you could grow and make more of for a biological attack.

The other difference about biological weapons that I didn't mention that I do want to highlight is that, as far as a strategic threat, if we're talking about biological weapons that involve contagious organisms, we're talking about something that can spread between people, which is quite different from the other weapons of mass destruction.

And I can't think of something worse for a democracy than to have a weapon used that makes you fear your neighbor, that spreads between people, such that you don't know if your kid's teacher is what's going to harm your family or your religious leader--

ROSE MCDERMOTT: Or your doctor.

JENIFFER NUZZO: Or your doctor. Yeah, especially your doctor. So that aspect is, I think, what is quite unique about it, but also maybe why that makes biological weapons a completely different category.

ROSE MCDERMOTT: I think you also have this way in which biological weapons, to a lesser degree chemical weapons can be used against your own people. I mean, the people who are using it as a weapon can also be affected and harmed by it.

So there is some issue of how the wind blows with chemical weapons, but there's going to be some degree of geographical constraint around how far that's going to spread. With nuclear weapons, there's also some degree of geographical containment prior to escalation. I mean, once you reach a certain level of escalation, you're going to have environmental consequences like nuclear winter that will affect the entire globe.

But initially, there's at least some degree of geographical containment. But with biological weapons, we think about terrorists who actually infect themselves with diseases that can then get on a plane to infect lots of other people. It's going to affect the people who use the weapon as much as the people who become victims of those targeting.

JENIFFER NUZZO: Which some people have pointed out maybe a barrier to countries wanting to use it, that they're worried-- that the ability to harm their own people might be exactly the deterrent that's necessary. And I think that that's a reasonable argument. I mean, you could imagine countries may not want to harm their own people. One would hope.

That said, I think of COVID and I think of we were certainly as the United States, not the first to develop a vaccine against COVID. Russia and China were. And so just to say that it is also possible that if a country is working on offensive biological weapons development, that they could also be working on the antidote that could be used to protect their--

ROSE MCDERMOTT: Prior to use.

JENIFFER NUZZO: I also think the argument about blowback or civilian, harming your own civilian population as a deterrent, to me, I'm less assuaged by that now after I've seen countries engage in information warfare around vaccines. And that clearly shows a willingness to tolerate harm to your own population because if you wage a war against vaccines and vaccine information in other countries, there's no way to protect your population fully from that.

The information ecosystem is global. And so the harms of that kind of information warfare, that anti-vax information warfare is ultimately the global harms. And so we know that countries have engaged in that kind of informational warfare. And so, to me, it shows a tolerance of willingness to harm their own populations.

DAN RICHARDS: Jennifer, given all these differences you've outlined, then there are, of course, similarities too. But I wonder what do you both see as the most valuable ways that more traditional security studies type framing of threats can be helpful for thinking about biological threats? Why take an interdisciplinary kind of approach to these types of problems?

JENIFFER NUZZO: So it's an inherently interdisciplinary problem, which is thinking about the diplomacy that's necessary to negotiate among countries, to think about the laws and treaties that are needed to prevent the development and to deter the use of these weapons.

But then there's also the aspect of what do we do to prepare for them. And if we as a society, were able to be fully prepared to detect and respond to these events, such that they weren't able to harm people, that would functionally take them off the table as potential weapons.

That said, you can see that there are certain events that one would prepare for that they to happen aren't just health events. They become economic events. They become threats to peace and prosperity. They become potentially destabilizing in societies. And so it really takes an all of society approach.

And we saw that during COVID. I can't think of any aspect of our lives that wasn't touched by the COVID 19 pandemic. And although we've talked a lot about deliberate biological threats, something that would be perpetrated by a human actor. When those events happen, we don't really know what starts them usually.

And so we have to prepare for all sorts of biological events, whether they start deliberately, whether they start as an accidental release from a laboratory or whether they start because of an unfortunate development in mother nature. We have to prepare for them.

But if we get really good at detecting these events early and stopping them in their tracks, not only does that protect us from their harm, but it also becomes a deterrent for the use of biological weapons. Because if they can't harm, what's the point?

ROSE MCDERMOTT: Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And I think that that's the value of surveillance, early surveillance, early warning, not just for detection, but also for things like the development of vaccines, the development of treatments.

When I think about the security piece, a lot of it is about intelligence, too. You have this whole intelligence infrastructure to say, OK, which bad actors that we know have malign influence are seeking to do this kind of destruction and to have that intelligence, use that intelligence, but also exactly like Jennifer was saying, you have all these concomitant effects that are economic and political and social.

The destruction of the supply chain early in COVID, everybody needed to get toilet paper. And these kinds of resource deprivations are precisely what make people not only pitted against one another. So you get this sort of disillusion of democratic community, which I think we're all suffering from, certainly prior to COVID, but COVID exacerbated it.

But also the rise of authoritarianism. People fall into this, like, who's going to fix it? Who's going to take care of it? Let's retreat into our own tribal groups, whether that's defined by religion or ethnicity.

I think in the United States, it's partisan. Like, are you a Democrat? Are you Republican? And that undermines our ability to create the kind of cohesive society that allows us all to prosper.

JENIFFER NUZZO: And maybe just to add, because you mentioned development of vaccines and thinking of the scientific response. I mean, one of the highlights of COVID was that we were incredibly blessed that within a year to have multiple safe and effective vaccines.

Aided in part by the adoption of a new technology to develop vaccines, the mRNA technology. It's really interesting. There's been this political debate around mRNA-based approaches, but for people who have been worrying about future pandemics and future epidemic threats, not knowing what pathogens are specifically going to cause that, but knowing that if we had a vaccine, it would be a much different scenario than not having. It would be a much easier scenario to handle.

Looking at how you prepare for that, when you don't know exactly what the path the future disease threat is going to be, but knowing that having a vaccine will change the game mRNA has long been on the kind of wish list of tools because it's a flexible approach to developing vaccines.

There is a political kind of debate about it or I don't even know. It's really a debate so much as political attacks leveraged at the technology. But what's really been interesting to see is that although the US government, Department of Health and Human Services famously canceled about half a billion dollars of mRNA vaccine research and development contracts. The Department of Defense still invests in those technologies because the defensive benefits of mRNA based approaches for developing vaccines are quite clear.

ROSE MCDERMOTT: Yeah, and it's really interesting. I mean, I'm sure people listening have friends or relatives in the military.

And when you join, you get a lot of vaccines all in one day and people are really sick for a couple of days because you just have a lot of vaccines, but you get vaccines against anthrax, you get vaccines against all kinds of things that the regular civilian population doesn't get because they're not traditionally exposed to it. And so, this is something that the Defense Department is well aware of. European countries continue to invest in the mRNA vaccine technology.

JENIFFER NUZZO: And China. China is one of the biggest investors. They see the strategic benefits. And, it was interesting during COVID. The COVID vaccine that China did develop was not an mRNA-based vaccine. It was an older vaccine technology.

And many in the civilian population didn't want it. They wanted the vaccines that we're using here in the United States. And so I think China saw the benefits of it and is famously looking to invest more.

DAN RICHARDS: Rose, I wonder if there is anything about the lenses used in biosecurity that has changed or affected how you think about the security fields you work more in which is nuclear security.

ROSE MCDERMOTT: Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because the way that traditional security approaches things is very state-centric. It's about China or Russia or the United States or whatever it happens to be.

And my work's a bit of an outlier because I've always focused on individual level behavior. So individual leaders, individual action. And so, I think that a lot of the work that comes out of biosecurity is much more in line with the work that I've done at an individual level of analysis than the standard security stuff, which is at the level of what your regime is, what your country is what kind of economic production system you have and so on.

And so I think it's more aligned, but it also offers an opportunity for the new generation coming up to think about it in different ways than was thought about 50 years ago. And one of the important ways to think about it, I think, is in terms of the surveillance issues that are raised by biological weapons and biological models.

DAN RICHARDS: So, like, in what ways does surveillance need to get incorporated into nuclear security that it hasn't had before?

ROSE MCDERMOTT: Well, we have had surveillance, but obviously there's always countries, think about Iraq or Iran that refuse that surveillance. But I think it's not just surveillance. It's the issues around social media and the proliferation of the information wars that Jennifer just mentioned, where the lack of truth. Like, how do you what's true?

The deepfakes are now so incredible. Images are getting better and better. So how do you what's true? How do you know how to respond to that? And so I think that there's all these ways in which these new technologies have really disrupted the traditional ways of understanding security, and that that's really where the wars are going to be fought.

And there are certain people who are going to profit enormously off of that, not just the head of NVIDIA and the head of the social media companies, but those countries who want to pit individuals against each other within the society. And that's the easiest way to do it. You saw it really beginning with the Russian attempt of the American presidential election in Twenty Sixteen. I think that the Mueller report documents that very, very carefully.

DAN RICHARDS: Yeah, it seems like something that is clearly important in the realms of security that you both specialize in, and that we've talked about in this conversation is a variety of aspects of human psychology. There's surveilling the actual materials and the treaties and whatnot.

But when we look at either how individuals are reacting to each other and in communities and also how leaders are reacting, it plays such a huge role. And I wonder how you guys think about the role of human psychology in the fields you specialize as it relates to questions of security.

JENIFFER NUZZO: So I think it's enormously important. I'm in public health-- and public health, the root of that is people. And so as a field, we spend a lot of time thinking about behavior. And behavior, not just in terms of how people will respond in an event, but also whether our approaches to preventing, detecting, or responding to events are aligned with or consistent with human behaviors.

And I think this is something for instance, the global health field has long known, which is that if you want to know if an intervention, a public health intervention is going to work, you have to engage with communities and see if what you have planned for them works for their circumstances, but also is aligned with their behaviors or aligned with their values. And if it's not, you don't get to do it.

We didn't really do that in COVID, and I think that a lot of the struggles that we had during COVID, but certainly the situation we're in now politically stemmed from pursuing approaches that were not recognizing of or inclusive of where people were, where they found themselves.

ROSE MCDERMOTT: Yeah, I mean, I do love psychology. That's my work. I do political psychology. And so, one of the things that is key to that understanding is how people tend to divide themselves into in-groups and out-groups.

So under conditions where people feel under threat-- and it doesn't just have to be from a biological disease, but it can be from bombs that are falling on your head, whatever it is, those things tend to make people retreat even more into their in-group and then become increasingly hostile toward the out-group that they think is trying to hurt them, or in some instances, just take their resources.

I mean, when you're in of resource deprivation, resource scarcity, people tend to really not only retreat to their group, but become more aggressive toward the other groups. And so I think when you have these conditions of threat and people are scared. And they're angry, it's just a prescription for particular kinds of explosions of violence.

DAN RICHARDS: We've talked about how 9/11, in some ways, changed the field of security studies and how the pandemic affected how people think about biology as weapons and as security threats. And, I guess it gets to something that is maybe kind of obvious, but that often it takes a disaster to bring focus and awareness to a threat.

And I wonder if is there any way to get ahead of these type things that feel like emerging threats, or are we destined to need disasters, whether it's in the world of climate change or an AI technology? How do you think about getting ahead of threats rather than simply responding after a disaster?

JENIFFER NUZZO: It's interesting. I reflect a lot on the differences between our response to 9/11 and our response to COVID. As I said in the beginning, I-- very much 9/11 shaped my career. And I just remember the collective outpouring and the social cohesion that resulted from the loss, a sudden loss of 3,000 American lives and just how we committed as a nation to never again experience that.

Not only did we commit as individuals, but had a fairly robust commission that tried to investigate what happened and figure out how to make sure it never happened again. We've had none of that for COVID. In fact, COVID has left us in opposite corners, pointing fingers at each other more than anything.

There was a moment in the early days of COVID where I thought, never again am I going to have to try to convince people that infectious diseases not only pose threats to health, but they pose threats to security, that consciousness raising exercise was over, that people had just lived through it and they were just going to see, wow, this is really bad. And I just don't-- I want to make sure I never find myself in that situation again.

I don't think I have to convince people that infectious diseases can be bad as much as I once did. But that kind of collective, let's make sure it never happens again just hasn't happened.

The way I think you move forward at this point is, listen, we have to move away from a knee-jerk reaction where talking about preparing for these events is immediately seen as an exercise in taking away people's autonomy and taking away people's ability to make choices for themselves, their civil liberties. That's never the right approach.

Really, what we have to talk about is how we make our society more resilient in the face of these threats and a variety of other threats. And I think there's a lot of ways that we could do that. I mean, I think we earned a few things during COVID that we didn't have before.

The fact that you can test yourself in your own home is an enormous advantage. We have to talk about a future in which we are giving people new tools and new powers to make decisions for themselves and their families. That's coming from a place of empowerment.

Those tools are also important defenses against worst, hopefully rarer scenarios, but they will have day-to-day benefits. I'm a firm believer that you kind of root your protections in the day to day and to make life better.

I think there's many more things we could do with the discovery of infectious diseases and studying infectious diseases that not only could take them off the table as possibly the world's worst weapons, but also eliminate a lot of human suffering today.

And there's a lot of positive sides. And I choose to lead with that because I don't think at this point people want to hear about the threats and the things they don't get to do. I think they want to hear about being able to live a fuller, happier, and easier life.

ROSE MCDERMOTT: Yeah, I think that the contrast between COVID and 9/11 is so dramatic, because I also remember driving back from Ithaca to Cambridge right after 9/11 in every car on the road had an American flag attached to their radio antenna. And you just can't imagine anything like that now.

And I remember when it happened, my mother said that the only time in her life, she had seen something like that was after Pearl Harbor. So you have these moments where the society comes together against a clearly identified threat.

But that didn't happen with COVID. You got exactly the kind of division that Jennifer just explicated. And I think part of it has to do with how difficult it is to define the enemy. It's much easier when it's a bomb that goes off in a city than if it's an indigenous virus.

But the other piece that I just thought of while she was speaking was, I think the other piece that's challenging for us is how broken the American medical system is in general.

There's an important trade off there that I think is worth paying attention to politically, that the amount of time we have to invest in a system that's broken without real attempts to actually change that system in a way that works for everybody, keeps people distracted from the larger political project that other people who are leaders benefit from financially as well as in terms of power.

It's interesting. I spoke to a lot of people during the pandemic, a lot of people initially about the virus and then about the vaccine, people from really all corners of the country and beyond, all different types of affiliations and groups.

And I will say, I very often heard from people who were seeking information or just had concerns that they were trying to check, I guess. They say something like, well, we just don't know who to trust. And in the beginning I did the thing that we teach people in public health to do, which is something I have absolutely stopped doing because it's the most pointless, stupid thing ever. Which is, I would say, 'Well, do you think you could talk to your doctor?'

And let me tell you, almost nearly every single time it was, 'I don't have one.' And on some of these issues we talked about the information online, it's no wonder that people are sent to the corners of the internet to try to find help. Unfortunately, what they find there is not the help they need.

DAN RICHARDS: I feel like at multiple times in this conversation, circled back to just the importance to all these bigger questions of security on what seemed like more kind of daily, everyday fundamental challenges in our society, and that the questions people may be exploring and trying to work in security have they really do oftentimes come back to things like accessible health care and quality education.

JENIFFER NUZZO: I mean, I think of it as what are our vulnerabilities. And I look at the American situation right now, and I think we have a population that has experienced extraordinary drop in life expectancy. We've barely recovered our life expectancy. We lag--

DAN RICHARDS: From the pandemic-- as a result of--

JENIFFER NUZZO: Those historic drop in life expectancy during the pandemic. It's come back, but it's barely recovered. The United States still lags other countries in terms of-- peer countries in terms of life expectancy. So we're not great on that front.

We're not great on that front. We are experiencing the largest, deadliest outbreak of measles that we have had in over 25 years. And that should not be-- that should not be the case.

And I can't think of a better signal to America's adversaries that we are vulnerable to a biological attack than our inability to control measles, a disease that we previously eliminated and a disease for which we have ample supply of safe and effective vaccines that are extraordinarily good at keeping people safe.

If you're looking at the United States right now, you're going to see a place that's quite vulnerable in a way that we have not been in decades. It's really stunning to me. Again, practice of public health after September 11th was really rudimentary. And there was remarkable bipartisan determination to come together and say never again, but also let's make ourselves stronger and more protected than we've ever been.

And there was a remarkable investment in modernizing health-- public health departments, making sure we had the tools that we need. And as we got away from that event as memories faded and then as other competing priorities happened, a lot of those protections that were put in place specifically were eroded.

And then the ones that managed to survive-- I mean, many of those things have also since been dismantled. And one thing that was quite stunning is there was this big push after September 11th to modernize public health laws because many of these laws had been written in the Eighteen Hundreds.

But the thought was, hey, if there's a biological attack on American soil, we would need to act swiftly, and we would need to act decisively. And so there was an attempt to modernize public health laws so that were there to be an attack, governors and their health personnel could act swiftly to blunt the impact of those attacks.

Many of those laws were undone following COVID as part of a larger take the power away from the public health agencies, which, again, I understand the grievances that were behind that. But some of that was done ignorant of why it was put there in the first place, which it was put there in the first place to protect the country.

ROSE MCDERMOTT: Yeah, I'll just say I really like Jennifer's framework of vulnerabilities because I think about that too, but from a different perspective.

DAN RICHARDS: Yeah, it was actually going to be my last question as we wrapped up. What do you see as some vulnerabilities or how do you think--

ROSE MCDERMOTT: So I feel like America is managing to defeat itself in a way that no other country has ever been able to do. So we have this-- still the most powerful military in the world doesn't mean it's always successful, but that has as much to do with strategy and targeting as it does with sheer physical force.

But the problem is that we have divided our own population so that an adversary doesn't have to divide and conquer us. We've divided ourselves. And so no external country has been able to destroy America, but America has managed to do it to ourselves. And that vulnerability has to do with not just lack of trust in government and other public institutions, but lack of trust in each other.

And so our internal divisions are what, in my mind, is our biggest vulnerability and our biggest weak point. And I think it's very challenging to think about how to reconstruct those civil and community-based institutions that will allow us to come together to actually fight whatever external or biological threats we might confront.

DAN RICHARDS: Well, I think that might be a whole other podcast, thinking about how we can address those. But I think it's such a helpful way to think about the broader sense of security and what it means for a country to be secure, for people to be secure. And thank you both so much for coming in and helping us think through all of these ideas.

ROSE MCDERMOTT: Thank you, Dan.

JENIFFER NUZZO: Yeah, thank you. It's a great conversation.

[THEME MUSIC]

DAN RICHARDS: This episode was produced by me, Dan Richards and Juliana Merullo. Special thanks again to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for collaborating with us on this episode. If you want to learn more about the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, we'll have a link to their website in the show notes.

Our theme music is by Henry Bloomfield, with additional music by Blue Dot Sessions. If you enjoyed this episode, leave us a rating and review on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you haven't subscribed to the show, please do that too.

If you have any questions or comments or ideas for guests or topics for the show, send us an email at trendingglobally@brown.edu. Again, that's all one word trendingglobally@brown.edu. We'll be back soon with another episode of Tending Globally. Thanks