Reconciling custom,citizenship and colonial legacies: Ni‐Vanuatu tertiary student attitudes to national identity

Nation‐building remains a key challenge in Vanuatu. From the origins of this new nation in 1980, it was clear that creating a unifying sense of national identity and political community from multiple languages and diverse traditional cultures would be difficult. This paper presents new survey and focus group data on attitudes to national identity among tertiary students in Vanuatu. The survey identifies areas of common attitudes towards nationalism and national identity, shared by both Anglophone and Francophone Ni‐Vanuatu. However, despite the weakening ties between language of education and political affiliation over recent years, the findings suggest that there remain some key areas of strong association between socio‐linguistic background, and attitudes to the nation, and national identity. These findings cast new light on the attitudes of likely future elites towards regional, ethnic, intergenerational and linguistic fault lines in Vanuatu and the challenges of building a cohesive sense of political community and national identity.     

Does my bomb look big in this? Britain's nuclear choices after Trident

The United Kingdom's present strategic nuclear deterrent, the Trident submarine-based system, has been in full operation for less than four years. But the government will have to consider questions about the follow-on to this system before the end of this parliament and its successor government will almost certainly have to start taking, and implementing, decisions before 2008–9. In the past, political and public debates about the UK's nuclear weapons tended to flow forward on their own technical momentum, backed by the strategic imperatives of the Cold War. The next successor decisions, however, will be made in an era where both the technical questions and the strategic environment will be radically different. There may or may not be another vigorous public debate, but the present, and next, government will face some fundamental     

Surveying for Mars Analogue Research Sites in the Central Australian Deserts

In anticipation of a future crewed mission to Mars, the international non‐profit organisation known as the Mars Society is currently establishing four mockup bases at which planetary surface operations simulations, equipment testing and personnel training exercises will be conducted over the next decade. These should provide valuable design data for, and raise public awareness about, plans to explore the red planet. One of these bases, which are organised around a habitat of the kind that is likely to serve as shelter for surface‐dwelling astronauts, is to be sited in central Australia under the name MARS‐OZ. To find a suitable location, the Mars Society Australia has conducted a ground‐truth survey of 15 potential sites as practical scientific analogues of the Martian surface, recording these in a specialised database. Each site was assessed on a set of geomorphic, science/engineering, logistic and visual analogue criteria. Six circular exploration zones 200 km in diameter were identified as clusters of the most significant, observed, comparative planetological features. These zones were then ranked to recommend a series of ‘landing sites’, at which future field seasons of exploratory science may be conducted.