The second nuclear nonproliferation conference sponsored by the Nuclear Threat Initiative and the Russian Academy of Sciences was held in Moscow, March 18-20, 2009. The first was held Oct. 23-25, 2002, a year after the 9/11 attacks. Much of the global security focus at that time was, understandably, on terrorism. In fact, the tragic Dubrovka Theater siege took place during the conference. A principal message of the first conference was not to forget the dangers of nuclear proliferation while the world responded to the growing potential of nuclear terrorism. The proceedings of the first conference are available on request from aedawson@stanford.edu.

Since 2002, the Libyan nuclear program and the AQ Khan network have been exposed; the Iranian covert uranium enrichment program has been discovered and found to have made significant technical progress; North Korea has withdrawn from the NPT and tested a nuclear device; and Syria has built a plutonium-producing reactor.

March 2009 was a propitious time to hold the second conference. US-Russian relations have deteriorated in recent years, reaching their nadir in August of 2008 with the invasion of Georgia. Now a new American administration is determined to "reset" relations between the two former superpowers. There are some reasons for cautious optimism leading toward a possible turning point in US-Russian relations. Cooperation on nuclear matters is crucial in this context and the events of the past seven years have demonstrated that such partnerships are necessary to make the world a safer place.

Research Summary
Although researchers began to assemble open-source terrorism event databases in the late 1960s, until recently most of these databases excluded domestic attacks. This exclusion is particularly misleading for the United States because, although the United States is often perceived to be the central target of transnational terrorism, the domestic attacks of foreign groups targeting the United States are often ignored. We began this article with 53 foreign terrorist groups that have been identified by U.S. State Department and other government sources as posing a special threat to the United States. Using newly available data from the Global Terrorism Database composed of both domestic and transnational terrorist attacks, we examined 16,916 attacks attributed to these groups between 1970 and 2004. We found that just 3% of attacks by these designated anti-U.S. groups were actually directed at the United States. Moreover, 99% of attacks targeting the United States did not occur on U.S. soil but were aimed at U.S. targets in other countries (e.g., embassies or multilateral corporations). We also found that more than 90% of the non-U.S. attacks were domestic (i.e., nationals from one country attacking targets of the same nationality in the same country). We used group-based trajectory analysis to examine the different developmental trajectories of U.S. target and non-U.S. target terrorist strikes and concluded that four trajectories best capture attack patterns for both. These trajectories outline three terrorist waves-which occurred in the 1970s, 1980s, and the early 21st century-as well as a trajectory that does not exhibit wave-like characteristics but instead is characterized by irregular and infrequent attacks.

Policy Implications
Our results underscore the importance of proximity for terrorist targeting. Terrorists, like ordinary criminals, are likely to choose targets close to their operational base. However, when attacks occur further from the terrorists' home bases, they are more deadly. Approximately half of the terrorist organizations studied here exhibited wave-like boom and bust attack trajectories. Given that most attacks by groups identified as threats by the U.S. government are in fact aimed at non-U.S. domestic targets, the United States should pursue efforts to strengthen the capacity of local governments to combat terrorism and to communicate to them our understanding that groups that are anti-United States are also a threat to local governments. In framing counterterrorism policies, the United States should put threats into perspective by acknowledging that we are the exception and local governments are the rule. Terrorism is not just about us.

This article seeks to explain why two states faced with a similar terrorist threat, perceiving it in a similar way, and drawing the same broad implications for their counterterrorist investigations, have nevertheless put in place significantly different types of organizational
reforms in response to that threat. The study shows that although France and Britain have embraced a common preventive logic in the face of Islamist terrorism, the changes that they have made to the coordination of intelligence, law enforcement, and prosecution in that context have differed because of contrasting organizational routines and interinstitutional conventions in the two states. An analysis of the British and French cases shows that law enforcement can be preventive but that western states are likely to pursue different ways of bringing security agencies and the law together to prevent and prosecute terrorism. The organizational and institutional factors that give rise to such divergent practices have important consequences for the ability of a state to develop a coordinated operational response to terrorism and convict terrorist suspects of crimes in a court of law.

The forthcoming U.S. Nuclear Posture Review should broaden the traditional focus of such policy reviews on deterrence requirements and include a thorough analysis of how U.S. nuclear declaratory policy influences the likelihood of nuclear proliferation, the consequences of proliferation, and perceptions of the illegitimacy of nuclear terrorism. Such a broader frame of analysis leads to the conclusion that it would be in the U.S. national interest to adopt a no-first-use declaratory policy, stating clearly that 'the role of U.S. nuclear weapons is to deter nuclear weapons use by other nuclear weapons states against the United States, our allies, and our armed forces, and to be able respond, with an appropriate range of second-strike nuclear retaliation options, if necessary, in the event that deterrence fails.'

How does democracy influence terrorism? Some scholars argue that lack of representation in autocracy motivates terrorism; others claim that individual liberty in democracy permits it. This thesis explores the debate by using Chile as a case study to examine how democracy influences terrorist organizational processes. It traces how variations in levels of representation and individual liberty in Chile between 1965 and 1995 influenced terrorist strategic capacity, or the ability of groups to think and act towards long-term survival and success. Analyzing the five observable features of strategic capacity - mission, hierarchy, membership, tactics, and violence level - reveals that democratic characteristics positively influence some dimensions and constrain others. High-functioning democracy and highly repressive autocracy are unlikely to experience violence, due to the high constraints that each places on different features of strategic capacity. However, democracies with weak representation and autocracies with some individual liberty allow strategic capacity to strengthen, making violence more likely.