A new united nations report recommending the most sweeping reform in the institution's history offers a global vision of collective security for the 21st century that is as committed to development in poor nations as it is to prevention of nuclear terrorism in rich ones.

The point is, according to the report's research director, Stephen Stedman, a threat to one is a threat to all in today's world. "Globalization means that a major terrorist attack anywhere in the industrial world would have devastating consequences for the well-being of millions around the developing world," the document states. The report's value lies in putting forward a comparative framework of collective security that addresses all the compelling threats of the day, Stedman explained. "The recommendations really are the most important possible makeover of the institution in 60 years," he said. "I think something is going to come out of it." Stedman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at the Stanford Institute for International Studies (SIIS), was recruited a year ago by U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan to direct research for the High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change. Stedman is an expert on civil wars, mediation, conflict prevention, and peacekeeping.

Annan created the 16-member blue-ribbon panel, made up mostly of former government leaders and ministers, in the wake of widespread heated criticism of the United Nations following the U.S.-led war in Iraq. In Annan's annual report to the General Assembly in 2003, he said, "Rarely have such dire forecasts been made about the U.N. ... We have reached a fork in the road ... a moment no less decisive than 1945 itself, when the U.N. was founded." The panel was charged with analyzing global security threats and proposing far-reaching reforms to the international system.

On December 2 the panel, chaired by former Thai prime minister Anand Panyarachun, issued its 95-page report: "A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility." The document identifies six major threats to global security:

-War between states;

-Violence within states, including civil wars, large-scale human rights abuses, and genocide;

-Poverty, infectious disease, and environmental degradation;

-Nuclear, radiological, chemical, and biological weapons;

-Terrorism; and

-Transnational organized crime.

Although states do not face these threats equally, a collective security system must take all member states' threats seriously and deal with them equitably, the report noted. It specifically mentioned the world's appallingly slow response to AIDS.

The report makes 101 recommendations for collective prevention and response to the threats, including ways to reform the United Nations. Annan described these in a December 3 editorial in the International Herald Tribune as "the most comprehensive and coherent set of proposals for forging a common response to common threats that I have seen."

The document also reaffirms the right of states to defend themselves-even preemptively-when an attack is imminent, and it offers guidelines to help the Security Council decide when to authorize the use of force. Stedman said other significant proposals involve improving biosecurity, strengthening nuclear nonproliferation, and defining terrorism. Panel members agreed that any politically motivated violence against civilians should be regarded as terrorism and condemned.

The panel was very critical of the Human Rights Commission, a body that has often harmed the United Nations' reputation by permitting the membership of some of the worst human-rights violators, including Cuba, Libya, and Sudan. The report also discussed the need for new institutions, such as a peace-building commission, that would support countries emerging from conflict.

Scott Sagan, co-director of CISAC, described the report as hard-hitting, although he said he would have tried to extend the withdrawal clause of the nonproliferation treaty from three months to a year. "I think it's the beginning of some major changes that will be helpful," he said. "We need to get states to work together to reform the U.N. rather than sniping at it."

CISAC was closely involved in the panel's work and was named in a cover letter accompanying the report from Panyarachun to Annan. Co-director Chris Chyba served on the panel's 30-member resource group, providing expertise on nuclear nonproliferation and bioterrorism. Bruce Jones, a former CISAC Hamburg Fellow, acted as Stedman's deputy, and Tarun Chhabra, a graduate of CISAC's undergraduate honors program and recent Marshall Scholarship recipient, worked as a research officer. Political science Professors David Laitin and James Fearon, and SIIS Senior Fellow David Victor, provided, respectively, expertise on terrorism, civil wars, and the environment, Stedman said. "There is an immense amount of Stanford influence in the report," he added.

CISAC also hosted a nuclear nonproliferation workshop for the panel on campus last March and helped organize a meeting during the summer in Bangkok. SIIS co-hosted a conference on governance and sovereignty on campus in April and a meeting at Oxford University in June. CISAC provided workspace to give the research team a quiet place to focus on writing the report's first draft in August.

The report has attracted intense international media interest in part because it calls for expanding the U.N. Security Council, its top decision-making group, from 15 to 24 members. The panel was unable to agree on one proposal and offers two options that would make the council more representative and democratic. "I believe either formula would strengthen the legitimacy in the eyes of the world, by bringing its membership closer to the realities of the 21st century-as opposed to those of 1945, when the U.N. Charter was drafted," Annan wrote in the International Herald Tribune.

According to Stedman, the media has highlighted the Security Council's proposed expansion because so many nations have a stake in it. "But in the absence of a new consensus on international peace and security, expansion of the council will not be effective," he explained.

In March, Annan will use the report to inform a series of proposals he will present to the 191 U.N. member states. These, in turn, will be submitted to a summit of world leaders before the General Assembly convenes next September in New York. Stedman said he has been asked to stay on for another year as a special advisor to the secretary general to keep the United Nations "on message" during negotiations.

Engagement by the United States, which has openly questioned the institution's relevance, will be critical to implementing the report's recommendations, said Stedman, who added that the superpower can benefit from a revamped United Nations. "Putting threats to the United States into a global framework makes it more secure," he said.

Stedman noted that one of the most disturbing aspects of the panel's consultations was listening to government representatives from civil-society organizations dismiss the seriousness of bio- and nuclear terror threats against the United States. "They were essentially denying this as a real threat to American security," he said. "I said it's as real a threat to the U.S. as other threats are to you."

When Stedman accepted the job, he thought he would spend 80 percent of his time on research and writing and 20 percent on consultations and negotiating. In fact, he said, it was the other way around. "It's unlike anything I've ever done," he said. "It's been a blast." In contrast to academia, where a researcher presents his or her best findings and defends them, Stedman was faced with 16 people who would push back, reject, or accept his work. "I had to work to change language to include their concerns," he said. "My biggest concern at the beginning was that the report would be based on the lowest common denominator. It's not."

Stedman said the panel members remained open-minded throughout the year. "They showed flexibility, listened to arguments, and changed their minds," he said. "Our job was to be as persuasive, rigorous, and comprehensive in our analysis as we were able to achieve."

In the end, Stedman said, the report belongs to the panel. "Parts of what the exercise shows is that access to those making policy is really important," he said. "If you do really good work and you have access, you have a chance of being heard. Kofi Annan gave me that opportunity."

While the anthrax scare at Washington Post offices this year proved to be a false alarm, it was a reminder of how vulnerable Americans are to biological terrorism. In general, two threats are viewed as the most dangerous: anthrax, which is as durable as it is deadly, and smallpox, which is transmitted very easily and kills 30 percent of its victims.

But there is a third possibility that, while it seems far more mundane, could be just as deadly: terrorists spreading a toxin that causes botulism throughout the nation's milk supply.

Why milk? In addition to its symbolic value as a target--a glass of milk is an icon of purity and healthfulness--Americans drink more than 6 billion gallons of it a year. And because it is stored in large quantities at centralized processing plants and then shipped across country for rapid consumption, it is a uniquely valuable medium for a bioterrorist.

For the last year, a graduate student, Yifan Liu, and I have been studying how such an attack might play out, and here is the situation we consider most likely: a terrorist, using a 28-page manual called "Preparation of Botulism Toxin" that has been published on several jihadist Web sites and buying toxin from an overseas black-market laboratory, fills a one-gallon jug with a sludgy substance containing a few grams of botulin. He then sneaks onto a dairy farm and pours its contents into an unlocked milk tank, or he dumps it into the tank on a milk truck while the driver is eating breakfast at a truck stop.

This tainted milk is eventually piped into a raw-milk silo at a dairy-processing factory, where it is thoroughly mixed with other milk. Because milk continually flows in and out of silos, approximately 100,000 gallons of contaminated milk go through the silo before it is emptied and cleaned (the factories are required to do this only every 72 hours). While the majority of the toxin is rendered harmless by heat pasteurization, some will survive. These 100,000 gallons of milk are put in cartons and trucked to distributors and retailers, and they eventually wind up in refrigerators across the country, where they are consumed by hundreds of thousands of unsuspecting people.

It might seem hard to believe that just a few grams of toxin, much of it inactivated by pasteurization, could harm so many people. But that, in the eye of the terrorists, is the beauty of botulism: just one one-millionth of a gram may be enough to poison and eventually kill an adult. It is likely that more than half the people who drink the contaminated milk would succumb.

The other worrisome factor is that it takes a while for botulism to take effect: usually there are no symptoms for 48 hours. So, based on studies of consumption, even if such an attack were promptly detected and the government warned us to stop drinking milk within 24 hours of the first reports of poisonings, it is likely that a third of the tainted milk would have been consumed. Worse, children would be hit hardest: they drink significantly more milk on average than adults, less of the toxin would be needed to poison them and they drink milk sooner after its release from dairy processors because it is shipped directly to schools.

And what will happen to the victims? First they will experience gastrointestinal pain, which is followed by neurological symptoms. They will have difficulty seeing, speaking and walking as paralysis sets in. Most of those who reach a hospital and get antitoxins and ventilators to aid breathing would recover, albeit after months of intensive and expensive treatment. But our hospitals simply don't have enough antitoxins and ventilators to deal with such a widespread attack, and it seems likely that up to half of those poisoned would die.

As scary as this possibility is, we have actually been conservative in some of our assumptions. The concentration of toxin in the terrorists' initial gallon is based on 1980's technology and it's possible they could mix up a more potent brew; there are silos up to four times as large as the one we based our model on, and some feed into several different processing lines that would contaminate more milk; and the assumption that the nationwide alarm could go out within 24 hours of the first reported symptoms is very optimistic (two major salmonella outbreaks in the dairy industry, in 1985 and 1994, went undetected for weeks and sickened 200,000 people).

What can we do to avoid such a horror? First, we must invest in prevention. The Food and Drug Administration has some guidelines - tanks and trucks holding milk are supposed to have locks, two people are supposed to be present when milk is transferred - but they are voluntary. Let's face it: in the hands of a terrorist, a dairy is just as dangerous as a chemical factory or nuclear plant, and voluntary guidelines are not commensurate with the severity of the threat. We need strict laws - or at least more stringent rules similar to those set by the International Organization for Standardization in Geneva and used in many countries - to ensure that our milk supply is vigilantly guarded, from cow to consumer.

Second, the dairy industry should improve pasteurization so that it is far more potent at eliminating toxins. Finally, and most important, tanks should be tested for toxins as milk trucks line up to unload into the silo. The trucks have to stop to be tested for antibiotic residue at this point anyway, and there is a test that can detect all four types of toxin associated with human botulism that takes less than 15 minutes. Yes, to perform the test four times, once for each toxin, on each truck would cost several cents per gallon. But in the end it comes down to a simple question: isn't the elimination of this terrifying threat worth a 1 percent increase in the cost of a carton of milk?

One other concern: although milk may be the obvious target, it is by no means the only food product capable of generating tens of thousands of deaths. The government needs to persuade other food-processing industries - soft drinks, fruit juices, vegetable juices, processed-tomato products - to study the potential impact of a deliberate botulin release in their supply chains and take steps to prevent and mitigate such an event.

Americans are blessed with perhaps the most efficient food distribution network in history, but we must ensure that the system that makes it so easy to cook a good dinner doesn't also make it easy for terrorists to kill us in our homes.

While the improving U.S. economy remains the engine of growth for the world economy, an underlying trend involving "huge imbalances and risks" should be cause for serious alarm, Paul Volcker warned Feb. 11 during a speech on campus. Americans have virtually no savings, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve said, and the nation is consuming more than it is producing. Furthermore, Social Security and Medicare are threatened by the retirement of millions of baby boomers and skyrocketing health care costs. More broadly, he continued, the world economy is lopsided.

"Altogether, the circumstances seem as dangerous and intractable as I can remember," Volcker said during a keynote address at the second annual summit of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. "But no one is willing to understand [this] and do anything about it."

Volcker spoke at the end of a daylong conference that attracted about 450 corporate leaders, entrepreneurs, policymakers and academics. The event included discussions on the stability of the global economy, the U.S. economic outlook and the role of the Internet in helping to level the competitive playing field worldwide. The conference also featured sessions on outsourcing, Medicaid and Medicare, technology policy and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which was implemented in 2002 to restore investor confidence in corporate America following a series of bankruptcies and far-reaching accounting scandals.

During a morning session, William J. Perry, a former secretary of defense and a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for International Studies, gave a chillingly stark assessment of the crisis of terrorism that was reinforced by George Shultz, a former secretary of state.

"I fear that we're headed toward an unprecedented catastrophe where a nuclear bomb is detonated in an American city," Perry said. "The bomb will not come in a missile at the hands of a hostile nation. It will come in a truck or a freighter at the hands of a terror group."

Perry, who holds the Michael and Barbara Berberian Professorship, said the "awesome military capability" of the United States has had unintended consequences in that it has increased the incentive for a hostile power, unable to compete in conventional warfare, to acquire weapons of mass destruction and launch terror attacks against America. U.S. military superiority is not particularly effective against such tactics, he said. "There exist terror groups, of which al Qaeda is the most prominent, that have the mission, the intent to kill Americans," Perry said. "They have the capability to do so; they have the resources to do so." A truly nightmare scenario would involve a terror group using nuclear weapons acquired clandestinely, he said: "After 9/11 that threat seems all too real."

Such a catastrophe is preventable, but the United States is not taking the necessary measures to avert it, Perry warned. Important steps should include a major expansion of the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program with the support the G-8 group of industrialized nations. The program was created in 1991 to reduce the threat posed by the legacy of the Soviet nuclear arsenal and succeeded in dismantling and destroying weapons in Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Belarus. Furthermore, Perry said, a clear strategy of "coercive diplomacy" should be used against North Korea and Iran, followed by a major diplomatic initiative to convince other nuclear powers that the threats posed by terrorists are real and not just directed at Americans. "While America must show real leadership in dealing with this problem, [it] cannot deal with it alone," he said.

Shultz, the Thomas W. and Susan B. Ford Distinguished Fellow at the Hoover Institution, said the United States faces a huge problem in combating Islamic radicals intent on using terror to achieve their goals. "Eventually, what they want is to change the way the world works by creating a unified Islamic theocratic state," he said. "It's a worldwide agenda."

Shultz argued that the United States must help supporters of mainstream Islam understand the fundamental nature of the problem so they will take action against the radicals themselves.

"That's why Iraq is of such overwhelming importance," he said. "Here we have a country in the heart of the Middle East where there is a chance. If Iraq can emerge as a sensibly governed country--that's a gigantic event in the Middle East and in this war on terror. Our enemies recognize that just as well as we do, and that's why we're having so many problems."

Other measures that Shultz said should receive greater support include efforts to set up independent media in countries such as Iraq, as well as a revival and expansion of the U.S. diplomatic service, which he said was allowed to atrophy after the end of the Cold War. "We have developed an awesome military capability," he said. "We need a diplomatic capability that is as every bit as good." Shultz also stressed the need to reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil. "We are out of our cotton-picking minds not to be doing much, much more to figure out how to use much, much less oil," he said to applause from the audience.

In the afternoon, Thomas Friedman, a columnist at the New York Times, also called for greater efforts to develop alternative energy supplies. This should be the "moon shot of our generation," he said.

Friedman discussed how the convergence of personal computers, cheap telecommunication and workflow software has changed the way the world works. In his upcoming book, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century, Friedman explained that the world has shrunk to the point where individuals, not countries or companies, are increasingly able to think and act globally. "And it's not just a bunch of white Westerners," he said. "It's going to be driven by individuals of every color of the rainbow."

Friedman told the audience that these technological advances quietly unfolded just as the 9/11 terror attacks, the Enron collapse and the dot-com bust grabbed America's attention. "People thought globalization was over but actually it turbo-charged globalization; it drove it overseas," he said. "9/11 completely distracted our administration, and then there was Enron. We have hit a fundamentally transformative moment and no one is talking."

In this new scenario, people anywhere in the world will be able to "innovate and not emigrate" if they have the required skills, Friedman said. This means that engineers in India and China will be able to compete on a level playing field with people in this country. "When the world goes flat, everything changes," he said.

To address this challenge, Friedman said the United States must radically improve science, mathematics and engineering education and encourage young people to enter these fields. "We're not doing that," he said. "In the next two years, five years, it won't matter. In 15 years, which is the time it takes to build an engineer, it will matter. We will not be able to sustain our standard of living."