The author concludes that strategy posited on the unchanging character of the differences that have separated Russia and the West is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The trouble with a status quo strategy is that it offers no vision of the opportunities available to construct a
security system in which power is constrained not just by countervailing power but by the exercise of democratic control over national decisions. Security in Europe is not just a question of military limitations and reductions. The essence of European security and the key to achieving a stable peace lies in the process of creating an inclusive community of
democratic nations.

As a result of the rapid changes following the breakup of the Soviet bloc, there were suddenly new markets of hundreds of millions of people, covering a large portion of the earth, containing large fractions of many of the world's natural resources, possessing extensive research and production capacity, with a highly educated workforce, and utilizing many advanced technologies. Russia contained a large fraction of these factors, especially those oriented toward high technology, and hence it behooves international companies to formulate and implement strategies for doing business in Russia.

This particular study was undertaken because the quest for cooperative ventures has been a major portion of the strategy of many Russian defense enterprises and U.S. companies in addressing these changes. We deemed it important to gain a better understanding of the factors affecting companies' and enterprises' decisions regarding cooperative ventures and some of the determinants of success, as well as to analyze strategies for U.S. companies and Russian enterprises contemplating or participating in cooperative ventures.

The conclusions in this report are based on case-study interviews with companies and enterprises engaged in cooperative ventures. All of the Russian enterprises in our study, with the exception of some start-ups, had been heavily involved in military work; the American companies were from both the military and civilian sectors.

Scott D. Sagan notes that the question of why states seek to build nuclear weapons has scarcely been examined, although it is crucial to efforts at preventing proliferation. He challenges the traditional realist assumption, accepted uncritically by many scholars and policymakers, that states seek to acquire or develop nuclear weapons primarily for military and strategic reasons. Sagan examines alternate explanations for the demand for nuclear weapons.

Revised and updated versions of this article also appear as "The Causes of Nuclear Proliferation," Current History (April 1997), pp. 151-156; as "Why Do States Build Nuclear Weapons?" in Victor Utgoff, ed., The Coming Crisis: Nuclear Proliferation, U.S. Interests, and World Order (MIT Press, 1999), p. 17-50; and as "Why Do States Build Nuclear Weapons? Three Models in Search of a Bomb," in New Global Dangers: Changing Dimensions of International Security (International Security Reader, July 2004).

By developing a strategic approach to the implementation of peace accords in civil war, the United Nations can better the odds for ending a war and fostering development in the long run. Recent attempts at implementation have suffered from recurring difficulties: incomplete, vague and expedient agreements; lack of coordination between implementing agencies; lack of sustained attention by the international community; incomplete fulfillment of agreements by warring parties; and the presence of 'spoilers' who seek to destroy and incipient peace. To overcome these difficulties, the UN must encourage the parties to choose political, cultural, social and economic security-building measures during the negotiation phase and systematically apply confidence-building measures to the military components of implementation. This demands a reconsideration of peace making in a civil war to include a long-term international commitment to the development of war-torn societies.

Given that organized violence within states is currently more widespread and destructive than war among states, many advocate expanding the concept of security to include elements of political and personal security at the domestic level. Since individuals generally look to governments to provide this security, deadly violence--whether by insurgents, polite forces, or criminal networks--can undermine the stability and legitimacy of state authorities. Unfortunately, democratization has accompanied increases in such violence in many parts of the world.

In a case study of contemporary Benin that has much broader implications, Bruce Magnusson argues that democratizing states must solve simultaneous and interrelated threats to public security in order to survive. At the level of the state, leaderships must safeguard democratic institutions from violent overthrow, particularly by disaffected militaries. At the level of society, democratic legitimacy rests on protection from criminality and from the arbitrary exercise of public and police authority. These challenges must be met jointly within a democratic constitutional framework: domestic order is key to averting military takeover, and likewise constitutionality provides the central guarantee for individual rights and civil liberties.

Information warfare is a relatively new rubric, which is receiving increasing attention within the United States from both the government and the general population. Recent studies and Congressional hearings have discussed the vulnerability of the U.S. civil infrastructure to information sabotage, perpetrated by both state and non-state actors. Most recently, President Clinton established the President's Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection to identify vulnerabilities in the nation's overall infrastructure and to recommend policy actions to reduce them. One of the areas that the Commission will investigate is the nation's information infrastructure. For instance, the armed services foresee new uses for digital systems to enhance military capabilities, but they also recognize the growing U.S. vulnerability that might be exploited with the techniques of information warfare.

The existence of softer and perhaps more critical homeland targets is creating interest in information warfare at a strategic level. That interest has two very different themes: new weapons the United States might use against an adversary and, in the hands of others, new threats to U.S. civil information-system-dependent infrastructure. The latter, the defensive concern, is currently receiving the larger measure of public attention.

The size of the defense industry in Russia has been a primary concern for policymakers and scholars interested in international security and arms control, as well as for students of Russian politics and economy more generally. For an issue attracting so much apparent
interest, however, there appears to be remarkably little quantitative information available on the scope of the military production sector and, particularly, on the extent to which it has changed in recent years. Analysts of the military-industrial complex (MIC)1 have either
combined the scraps of information derivable from official reports to try to form an overall picture (e.g., Cooper (1991a and 1991b), Despres (1995), Gaddy (1994), Sapir (1994), Sanchez-Andres (1995) and most of the published literature in Russian language), or they have been limited to detailed case studies of just a few firms, eschewing any attempt to measure the sector as a whole (e.g., Bernstein (1994)). Both approaches have contributed substantially to our qualitative understanding of the organizational structure of the military industry and of recent changes in the operation of some of its enterprises. But neither provides quantitative answers to the following questions: How large is Russian defense industry? What is the magnitude of decline in military production since reforms began?
What are the sources of the change? To what extent are resources being released for civilian purposes? Yet the answers have important implications for international security and for the design of foreign aid and domestic policies to assist the conversion and industrial
restructuring processes.

The Center for International Security and Arms Control (CISAC) at Stanford University convened a workshop that dealt almost exclusively with software groups from the military-industrial complex. It also excludes any examples of software initiatives in Russia that are currently directed at the Russian market; however, it is the author's undocumented impression that there is not yet much commercial activity in this area.

This report is based primarily on the presentations and discussions at the workshop and secondarily on additional case data. The process of selecting cases for the workshop was not geared to find these failures as easily as those cases in which there is an ongoing activity. Nonetheless, the tendency toward success in software ventures versus
manufacturing ventures in the enterprises that are included is compelling.

Nuclear war is generally believed to bring risks of destruction out of proportion to any gain that may be secured by the war, or to any loss that may be averted, except perhaps for the loss of national independence and group survival. Nuclear-armed states, however, continue to project military force outside their own territory in order to carry out rivalries for power and influence. Will these rival power projections lead to war, as they often did in the past? If not, how will they be resolved? This paper makes the case that, because of the recognized destructiveness of nuclear weapons, rivalries among major nuclear-armed states for power and influence outside their own territory are not likely to lead to central war among them, but that definite lines separating zones of exclusive security influence, such as prevailed during the Cold War, will reappear where circumstances prevent
other compromises. This conclusion does not hold in the case of nuclear powers that are centrally vulnerable to conventional attack from each other: in that case, nuclear deterrence is less likely to be stable. Where lines are established, they may facilitate rather than prevent cooperation in dealing with the next century's global problems.