This article sets out the constraints of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 (the “Act”), which generally prohibits active enforcement of civilian laws by the military, and describes the discretion of the military commander to assist civilian law enforcement in protecting America’s information infrastructure against computer-assisted attack. A primary purpose of this article is to help legal advisors to commanders and DoD civilian officials better understand the boundaries of command discretion so that commanders and officials can feel free to exercise proper command discretion to assist law enforcement according to military interests and their professional and personal ethics and ideals. Another primary purpose of the article is to appraise Congress of the Act, its prohibitions, and its application to assist in framing the policy debate about how to constrain or expand the discretion of commanders and other officials to most productively serve the American public.

The Soviet Union placed a high priority on science and technology and built a huge assembly of research institutes, educational programs, design bureaus, and production enterprises embodying some measure of science and/or technology. This assembly concentrated overwhelmingly on military applications. Approximately three-quarters of this complex was located in Russia, but essential elements of many programs were located in other republics.

Starting in the Gorbachev regime there was a recognition that the economy was deteriorating and that it was necessary to reduce military expenditures and increase the civilian economy. A major element of this has been the attempt to direct a much greater effort toward the development of commercial products and services based upon technologies and skills developed in the military-industrial complex (MIC). This commercialization of Soviet and Russian military technology has been attempted by the Russians both independently, through conversion programs, and in cooperation with foreign partners. The conversion programs have had very limited success. The success of attempts at cooperative commercialization by U.S. companies and Russian enterprises have also been modest, but they illustrate workable models that could be utilized by other cooperative ventures. These cooperative commercialization ventures are the primary subject of this report.

This research is based primarily on the study of several cases of cooperative attempts by U.S. companies and Russian enterprises to commercialize Russian technology. Additional information has been gathered through participation in workshops and conferences including sessions or presentations on technology commercialization. There is no attempt to determine the total amount of such activity, but foreign investment of all types in Russia has been very small. These cases may not be representative of what is going on at many defense enterprises, especially those that do not have foreign partners. They do, however, show models of what can be achieved, as well as some of the problems encountered in technology commercialization.

Gail Lapidus of Stanford University assesses the factors leading to Moscow's decision in December 1994 to use military force to crush Chechnya's resistance to the authority of the Russian leadership. Exhaustively researched and documented, Lapidus's study traces the evolution of the secessionist struggle through six stages. At the heart of the conflict, she says, was the Chechens' growing desire for sovereignty and territorial integrity sparked by Mikhail Gorbachev's political liberalization initiatives and further fueled by the establishment of a number of new states after the breakup of the Soviet Union. Lapidus also considers the role of Western governments and international institutions first in preventing the outbreak of hostilities and then in mitigating and, finally, terminating the conflict. She concludes that when the behavior of a major power is at issue, the potential for outside intervention is limited, which in turn raises a host of troubling questions about the prospects for future internal conflict resolution.

If high-performance computing (HPC) export control policy is to be effective, three basic premises must hold:

This study applies and extends the methodology established in Building on the Basics [1]. Its objective has been to study trends in HPC technologies and their application to problems of national security importance to answer two principal questions:

· Do the basic premises continue to be satisfied as the 20th century draws to a close?

· In what range of performance levels might an export-licensing threshold be set so that the basic premises are satisfied?

The study concludes that export controls on HPC hardware are still viable, although much weaker than in the past. In particular, while applications of national security interest abound, it is increasingly difficult to identify applications that strongly satisfy all three basic premises, i.e. are of extreme national security importance and would likely be effectively pursued by countries of national security concern and would be severely retarded without levels of computing performance that could be effectively controlled.

From the preface:

"Events in recent years have caused heightened concern about the security of weapons-usable nuclear material. The possibility of illicit trafficking in, or seizure of, such material, leading to nuclear terrorism, is a worry for all states and their citizens. And given the relatively small quantities required, material obtained in one part of the world could be made into a weapon in another and threaten lives in a third. It is truly a global problem.

Since the beginning of the nuclear era, the physical protection of fissile material has been a responsibility of the individual states possessing the material. These states have different organizational approaches for providing physical protection; and while cognizant of recommended general standards, they tend to follow their own practices, shaped by custom, costs, and threat perception. Moreover, the existence of military as well as civil programs in some states adds another dimension
to the physical protection issue.

Because physical protection is a sovereign matter and not part of an international regime (except for transit of civil material across borders), there has been less attention in much of the world community to the issues of physical protection than to the other elements of nuclear safeguards and controls. (An important exception to this situation is the effort being made to assist the states of the former Soviet Union in the disposition of their weapons-usable nuclear materials.) The lack of a general dialog about a problem of growing concern motivated us to hold a three-day workshop at Stanford University to develop a better understanding of some of the important underlying questions and issues, and to undertake a comparative examination of states' approaches to physical protection. We were pleased to have knowledgeable participants from a number of the countries and regions where physical protection of fissile materials is, or will become, a day-to-day matter.

The results of the workshop are reported in these Proceedings. It is our hope that this work will stimulate further analysis and discussion, and lead to greater interest in international standards, cooperation, and supporting programs.

James E. Goodby
1996-1997 Payne Distinguished Lecturer
Stanford University

Ronald F. Lehman II
Director of the Center for Global Security Research
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

William C. Potter
Director, Center for Nonproliferation Studies
Monterey Institute of International Studies"

Georgia--The Search for State Security

David Darchiashvili's working paper traces the attempts of the modern Georgian state to deal with issues of national security since independence. Darchiashvili outlines the nature of contemporary national security dilemmas for post-Soviet Georgia. The paper examines Georgia's present security threats, as well as its current relationships with Russia and the other countries of the region. The paper also presents an in-depth discussion of the situation of civil-military relations in Georgia and the impact of these relations on state security. The author analyzes the roots of Georgia's problems in developing a coherent and practical security policy. He proposes that the ad hoc character of current security policy has resulted in passivity in dealing with threats such as ethnic conflicts, including the war in Abkhazia. In his conclusion Darchiashvili makes a recommendation for the elaboration of a consistent national security concept for Georgia. The author proposes that this security concept will need to include a framework for relations between society and the military. According to Darchiashvili, in order to attain this goal Georgia needs to maintain internal stability and to secure support from international institutions.

European Security and Conflict Resolution in the Transcaucasus

Nerses Mkrttchian's working paper examines the issue of security in the Transcaucasus since the fragmentation of Europe's international landscape, and the emergence of a new cooperative European security system that followed the disappearance of the continent's political line of separation. Mkrttchian proceeds to analyze the security issues in the Transcaucasus region within broader European, Eurasian, and post-Soviet contexts. The paper examines the current security structure of Europe, its relationship to Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), and how these new security structures can affect the regional conflicts in the Transcaucasus. Mkrttchian analyzes the prospects for establishing regional cooperation on security issues in the Transcaucasus, and the role of international organizations in this process. The author points to the need for the development of "cross-dimensional" cooperation as a way to resolve conflicts in the region.

There is a growing logjam of arms control treaties waiting for approval in both the Russian State Duma and the U.S. Senate. Without decisive action, this logjam will probably prevent approval by the world's two largest military powers of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START II) of 1993, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty of 1996 (CTBT), amendments to the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, and the protocols of the Treaty of Pelindaba (creating an African nuclear-weapon-free zone (NWFZ)) and the Treaty of Rarotonga (creating a South Pacific NWFZ) before the end of the century. It will also prevent progress towards START III and further bilateral nuclear reductions.

Whether China can achieve its economic and political goals depends very much upon whether PRC's domestic stability can be maintained and large-scale devastating military conflict, either internally with Taiwan or externally with major foreign powers, can be avoided. This article will speculate on China's security role in the region and in the world ten to fifteen years hence, and assess China's likely intentions, capabilities, and strategies in domestic and foreign affairs, in light of the changes in China's geopolitical environment.

Since Brazil and West Germany surprised the world by announcing that they had reached the nuclear "deal of the century" in 1975, many national and international observers have feared that Brazil sought to develop atomic weapons. Brazilian rejection of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Tlatelolco treaties, insistence on its legal right to develop so-called peaceful nuclear explosives (PNEs), aspirations to great power status, authoritarian military government, and tacit nuclear rivalry with Argentina aroused concern that this ambitious program of reactor construction and technology transfer would mask an effort to reach the bomb.

Although difficult financial circumstances derailed this program in the late 1970s, by the early 1980s press reports began to emerge indicating that a secretive "parallel" nuclear program under military direction was underway. Transition to democratic rule in 1985 failed to clarify the nature and objectives of this second effort, and provocative statements by senior military officers intensified concerns. This second effort persevered in the face of the severe economic conditions that made the 1980s a "lost decade" for Latin American countries, increasing international stress on nonproliferation, and protests from domestic anti-nuclear and environmental groups, as well as a 1990 investigation by the national congress.

By 1991, however, Brazil had formally renounced PNEs, agreed to establish bilateral safeguards with Argentina and to accept International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspection of formerly secret nuclear facilities, and committed to ratifying the Treaty of Tlatelolco. This marked the apparent reversal of a long trajectory toward the proliferation threshold, and thus assuaged apprehension within and outside the country. Yet military involvement in nuclear technological development continued essentially unaltered, and Brazil now enjoys the distinction of being one of the few states with the indigenous capacity to produce fissile material necessary to construct atomic weapons.

This paper seeks to answer two questions: Given limited resources and domestic and foreign opposition, how did the Brazilian military succeed in developing this capacity? Given their determined effort and enduring role in nuclear development, why did the armed forces stop short of the bomb?

This study answers these two questions through investigation of domestic political processes, which involve the formation and maintenance of programmatic coalitions that marshal human, material, and political resources for technological development. Such coalitions encounter constraints which include competition for scarce human and financial capital, international technological denial, and domestic and international opposition. Such programs must be either effectively insulated from domestic challenges, or politically defended and normatively legitimated in spite of them.