ASP’s CEO, Brigadier General Stephen A. Cheney, USMC (ret.) was featured on PBS’s The Open Mind hosted by Alexander Heffner. In the episode entitled “Defcon U.S.A.,” which aired August 8, 2017, BGen Cheney discussed national security issues surrounding nuclear weapons, cyber capabilities, and climate change.

On climate change, BGen. Cheney described climate change as a long-term, non-partisan issue that should be addressed like any other similar security issue: “Don’t think tomorrow, don’t think next week, next month, next year. Think next decade, next century, and [about] what [climate change] is going to cost to our country….”

ASP has strongly supported the need for a greater focus on energy security in the United States to ensure domestic security in an increasingly destabilized world. BGen Cheney linked the national security implications of climate change with the need for energy security:

We’ve got a very unusual circumstance today in this country on energy security, and it’s a good one. Because of the shale revolution, we now are awash in oil and natural gas. So we’ve [got] some breathing room here to pursue alternative energy sources and stop polluting the atmosphere, stop creating this environment that causes climate change.

In the latter half of the program BGen Cheney discussed at length the complexities of the nuclear weapons dilemmas that currently exist in both Iran and North Korea. Cheney insisted that both situations are incredibly complex. He used the discussion of these nuclear weapons programs to highlight the dangers posed by cyber capabilities. Cyber weapons themselves are extremely dangerous in the hands of both state and non-state actors. When cyber weapons are used in an environment that contains nuclear weapons capabilities or energy sources, however, the dangers are even greater.

To view the entire episode of The Open Mind, please follow this link.

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