national security

Issues like climate change and sustainability were a major theme in this year's Aspen Ideas Festival, which concluded in early July.

Aspen sang this year with pleas for the next president to make climate change --and the protection of dwindling resources -- the centerpiece of his foreign policy, thus fusing in a very concrete way America's national interest with that of the wider world. There was clearly a yearning for a new, more elevated brand of American patriotism that co-opted these global issues as national security interests - which indeed they are. Americans have always been a people of the frontier, and just as civil rights constituted a new frontier of enlightened patriotism in the 1960s, tackling environmental challenges looks like the new frontier of this and future decades.

A Nuclear Family Vacation is published by Bloomsbury.

The opening scene of the newest Indiana Jones film is set in Nevada in 1957, possibly during Operation Plumbbob, an actual nuclear-test series in which the U.S. measured the response of humans and physical structures to nuclear blasts. Satellite images give a hint of what's left: a pockmarked brown landscape of craters and broken buildings. There are smashed reinforced-concrete domes, shattered windows, as well as iron rails and bridges that the heat and explosion have twisted. It looks, I am told, like a place where Superman (or perhaps Uri Geller) had given himself over to a fit of rage.