It possesses nuclear weapons and missiles to deliver them, and despite some progress, it is by no means clear that the ongoing six-party talks will be able to reveal the full extent of the country's nuclear activities, much less persuade Pyongyang to give them up.

The United States maintains tens of thousands of forces on the Korean peninsula in support of its commitments to the Republic of Korea (South Korea), a country with which the North is still technically at war. And the peninsula sits in a strategically vital region, where the United States, China, Russia, Japan, and South Korea all have important interests at stake.

All of this puts a premium on close attention to and knowledge of developments in North Korea. Unfortunately, Kim Jong-Il's government is perhaps the world's most difficult to read or even see. This Council Special Report, commissioned by CFR's Center for Preventive Action and authored by former CISAC co-director Paul B. Stares and Joel S. Wit, focuses on how to manage one of the central unknowns: the prospect of a change in North Korea's leadership. The report examines three scenarios: managed succession, in which the top post transitions smoothly; contested succession, in which government officials or factions fight for power after Kim's demise; and failed succession, in which a new government cannot cement its legitimacy, possibly leading to North Korea's collapse. The authors consider the challenges that these scenarios would pose-ranging from securing Pyongyang's nuclear arsenal to providing humanitarian assistance-and analyze the interests of the United States and others. They then provide recommendations for U.S. policy. In particular, they urge Washington to bolster its contingency planning and capabilities in cooperation with South Korea, Japan, and others, and to build a dialogue with China that could address each side's concerns.

With Kim Jong-Il's health uncertain and with a new president in the United States, this report could not be more timely. And with all the issues at stake on the Korean peninsula, the subject could not be more important. Preparing for Sudden Change in North Korea is a thoughtful work that provides valuable insights for managing a scenario sure to arise in the coming months or years.

Threat-reduction programs with former Soviet states can serve as models to create new, peaceful jobs for the North's cadre of nuclear scientists and bomb makers.

In the aftermath of a terrorist attack political stakes are high: legislators fear being seen as lenient or indifferent and often grant the executive broader authorities without thorough debate. The judiciary's role, too, is restricted: constitutional structure and cultural norms narrow the courts' ability to check the executive at all but the margins. The dominant "Security or Freedom" framework for evaluating counterterrorist law thus fails to capture an important characteristic: increased executive power that shifts the balance between branches of government. This book re-calculates the cost of counterterrorist law to the United Kingdom and the United States, arguing that the damage caused is significantly greater than first appears. Donohue warns that the proliferation of biological and nuclear materials, together with willingness on the part of extremists to sacrifice themselves, may drive each country to take increasingly drastic measures with a resultant shift in the basic structure of both states.

“Laura Donohue’s sophisticated and complex analysis of counterterrorism law in Britain and the United States warns of the risks to fundamental individual rights when democracies establish counterterrorist regimes. Although governments frame their initiatives in terms of a choice between security and freedom, Donohue challenges this logic. Loss of liberty is not necessarily balanced by gain in safety. Compromises intended to be temporary turn out to be permanent. Leaders and citizens of democracies would be well advised to heed this pointed and timely warning.”

- Martha Crenshaw, Senior Fellow, Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), Stanford University

An ambitious argument against the "Security or Freedom" framework, which is the dominant paradigm for thinking about counterterrorist law. The first book to compare the history of both British and American counterterrorist law. Argues that counterterrorist law is a danger to the rights central to liberal democracy: life, liberty, property, privacy and free speech.

"Without a doubt, the U.S.-India nuclear deal presents a serious challenge to the NPT. But it also presents an opportunity to strengthening the regime and its most important, relevant elements."

The tenth anniversary of India’s and Pakistan’s 1998 nuclear tests enables scholars to revisit the issue of South Asian proliferation with a decade of hindsight. What lessons do the intervening years hold regarding nuclear weapons’ impact on South Asian security? Some scholars claim that nuclear weapons had a beneficial effect during this period, helping to stabilize historically volatile Indo-Pakistani relations. Such optimistic analyses of proliferation’s regional security impact are mistaken, however. Nuclear weapons have had two destabilizing effects on the South Asian security environment. First, nuclear weapons’ ability to shield Pakistan against all-out Indian retaliation, and to attract international attention to Pakistan’s dispute with India, encouraged aggressive Pakistani behavior. This, in turn, provoked forceful Indian responses, ranging from large-scale mobilization to limited war. Although the resulting Indo-Pakistani crises did not lead to nuclear or full-scale conventional conflict, such fortunate outcomes were not guaranteed and did not result primarily from nuclear deterrence. Second, these Indo-Pakistani crises led India to adopt a more aggressive conventional military posture toward Pakistan. This development could exacerbate regional security-dilemma dynamics and increase the likelihood of Indo-Pakistani conflict in years to come. Thus nuclear weapons not only destabilized South Asia in the first decade after the nuclear tests; they may damage the regional security environment well into the future.

The Long Shadow is the first comprehensive, systematic examination of the roles and implications of nuclear weapons in the dramatically different post–Cold War security environment. Leading experts investigate the roles and salience of nuclear weapons in the national security strategies of twelve countries and the ASEAN states, and their implications for security and stability in a broadly defined Asian security region that includes the Middle East.

The study also investigates the prospects for nuclear terrorism in Asia.

Nuclear energy is a clean and relatively economical source of electricity, generating nearly one-sixth of the world’s electricity today. It represents one of the few technologies that have the potential for significant scale-up to meet the growing global demand for energy without exacerbating global climate change. Yet, the power derived from splitting the nucleus can be used not only to electrify the world but to destroy it. Managing the balance between the promotion of peaceful uses of atomic energy and its destructive potential has been a major challenge since the first nuclear explosion in 1945. For the most part, this balance has been managed successfully during the growth of commercial nuclear power over the past 50 years.

The possibility for a substantial global expansion in civilian nuclear power in the coming decades, with attendant increases in uranium enrichment capacity and spent-fuel reprocessing and possibly growth in plutonium trade, gives rise to important security concerns. These expansions create both a challenge and an opportunity to strengthen the international system for monitoring and controlling the nuclear power enterprise.

To examine these concerns and opportunities more critically, and to consider options for mitigation, a workshop was held September 19–21, 2007, at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), involving 45 experts from the nuclear and security communities. The workshop focused on the security implications associated with expanding nuclear power worldwide.

This report is not a consensus document but rather an attempt to summarize salient issues and observations put forward at the meeting, as augmented by the authors’ research. This report hopefully will contribute to a broader dialogue and help shape discussions of efforts to control, by both technical and political measures, the security risks associated with a global expansion in the use of nuclear power.

Finally, a workshop and report whose focus is specifically on the security concerns associated with nuclear power necessarily will have a negative tone, and perhaps even seem antinuclear. This was not our intention. Seen in a wider context, nuclear power may help alleviate global warming, foster development, contribute to energy security, and perhaps provide an arena for political cooperation. Finding comprehensive answers to a problem with this many dimensions was beyond the scope of both the three-day Stanford workshop and this report.

Few U.S.-Russian cooperation efforts are more popular and less controversial than the "Megatons to Megawatts" program, also known as the HEU-LEU deal, which converts Russia's highly enriched uranium (HEU) from nuclear weapons into low-enriched uranium (LEU) for U.S. nuclear power reactors. Under the agreement that the countries signed in 1993, Moscow made a commitment to eliminate 500 metric tons of HEU--probably more than one-third of the total HEU stock that the Soviet Union produced during the Cold War. About 340 metric tons of HEU has already been converted into LEU, and the Russian uranium currently provides one-half of U.S. nuclear power, or about 10 percent of the country's electricity supply.

If 30 metric tons of HEU is downblended each year, the program will reach its goal in 2013, the year the initial agreement is set to expire. This raises the question, "What next?" In the United States, the HEU-LEU deal is universally viewed as a great success. Therefore, it's not surprising that there's been no shortage of proposals to accelerate the rate of downblending or to extend the program beyond its original deadline.

But because the U.S.-Russian HEU-LEU deal is implemented in a way that substantially increases the risk of theft of weapon-grade material, extending it would be wrongheaded.