Rocky Mountain Institute : Library

S95-21, Nonproliferation: Now a Workable Idea (PDF-48k): Civilian nuclear power is now known to be a peculiarly convenient route to bomb making. All civilian fuel cycles involve unaccountably vast flows of materials, including plutonium extractable from power reactor fuel, that can make powerful bombs. This article, by Amory Lovins and Hunter Lovins, appeared in the The Christian Science Monitor (27 April 1995).

S93-23, Security Without War—A Post-Cold War Foreign Policy (PDF-1.5MB): Security Without War, completed around 1990, first published by Westview Press (www.westviewpress.com) in 1993, and long out of print, is reposted here as timely and seminal. It first rigorously linked military, political, economic, and environmental dimensions of security, and explicated the "new security triad" of conflict avoidance or prevention, conflict resolution, and nonprovocative defense. Together, these three elements of a new vision of security, built from the bottom up, can let all people be safe and feel safe in ways that work better and cost less than present arrangements. By Michael Shuman and Hal Harvey (1993).

S91-39, Why America Beat Iraq but Loses to Japan (PDF-48k): The primary reason so many commentators overestimated the number of American casualties was that the Pentagon abandoned its traditional attrition-based strategy for a time-based strategy. Similarly, the Japanese use fast-innovation, flexible manufacturing to out-compete traditional mass production techniques widely used in this country (1991).

S91-15, Drill Rigs and Battleships Are the Answer! (But What Was the Question?) (PDF-220k): This paper examines how the efficient use of energy, particularly of oil, can help to create and smooth a transition beyond oil. It analyzes the dynamics of how the United States used efficiency to improve its oil supply/demand balance throughout the period 1977–1985. It also explains the unusual events that in 1986 reversed this steady decline in oil imports. Finally, it quantifies the approximate size and cost of the least-cost technical and policy options available to reduce or eliminate oil imports while stretching domestic resources in the years and decades ahead. Oil Efficiency, Economic Rationality, and Security, Chapter 7 of The Oil Market in the 1980's: Challenges for a New Era (1991).

S90-26, Make Fuel Efficiency Our Gulf Strategy (PDF-68k): Are we putting our kids in tanks because we didn't put them in efficient cars? Yes: we wouldn't have needed any oil from the Persian Gulf after 1985 if we'd simply kept on saving oil at the rate we did from 1977 through 1985. Improving America's 19-mile-per-gallon household vehicle fleet by 3 miles per gallon could replace U.S. imports of oil from Iraq and Kuwait. Another 9 miles per gallon would end the need for any oil from the Persian Gulf and, according to the Department of Energy, would cut the cost of driving to well below pre-crisis levels without sacrificing performance. This op-ed was invited by The New York Times, published 03 December 1990 (03 December 1990).

S87-25, Energy: The Avoidable Oil Crisis, The Atlantic (PDF-230k): The United States, having pumped more oil for longer than any other country has largely depleted its cheapest oil. More oil can be found, but only at higher cost and in more remote and fragile places. Foreign oil now costs less to find and extract than ours, and despite American technological prowess, the cost gap will gradually widen. Only three responses to this trend seem to be available at present: protectionism, trade, and substitution. This article, by Amory Lovins and Hunter Lovins, appeared in The Atlantic, December 1987, Volume 260, No. 6 (December 1987).

S80-01, Nuclear Weapons and Power-Reactor Plutonium (PDF-72k): With modest design sophistication, high-burn-up plutonium from power-reactors can produce powerful and predictable nuclear explosions. There is no way to 'denature' plutonium. Power-reactors are not implausible but rather attractive as military production reactors. Current promotion of quasi-civilian nuclear facilities rests, dangerously, on contrary assumptions. This article, by Amory Lovins, appeared in the February 1980 issue of Nature (28 February 1980).

Security Archives