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.

A growing number of scholars argue that the new administration should overturn a key decision by President George W. Bush administration’s decision in 2002 to create a Homeland Security Council (HSC). Until the September 11 attacks, the National Security Council (NSC) coordinated the handful of institutions, (including the Department of Defense) that protected the United States from its adversaries. Bush responded to al Qaeda’s attacks by organizing a sprawling parallel system of institutions to protect the United States from terrorism. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is only part of that system. The Bush administration also assigned terrorism prevention functions to the Departments of Agriculture (USDA), Health and Human Services, Interior, and other federal institutions which had never before played such significant roles in securing the United States from attack. Bush capped this parallel security system with the HSC to help guide and coordinate its activities.

A spate of recent studies argue that creating the HSC was a mistake and that the new administration should subsume the Council within the NSC. Such a merger, however, would impede the reforms that are most vital for securing the United States against future terrorist attacks and hurricanes or other natural hazards.

Accidental harm to civilians in warfare often becomes an occasion for public outrage, from citizens of both the victimized and the victimizing nation. In this vitally important book on a topic of acute concern for anyone interested in military strategy, international security, or human rights, Alexander B. Downes reminds readers that democratic and authoritarian governments alike will sometimes deliberately kill large numbers of civilians as a matter of military strategy. What leads governments to make such a choice?

Downes examines several historical cases: British counterinsurgency tactics during the Boer War, the starvation blockade used by the Allies against Germany in World War I, Axis and Allied bombing campaigns in World War II, and ethnic cleansing in the Palestine War. He concludes that governments decide to target civilian populations for two main reasons?desperation to reduce their own military casualties or avert defeat, or a desire to seize and annex enemy territory. When a state's military fortunes take a turn for the worse, he finds, civilians are more likely to be declared legitimate targets to coerce the enemy state to give up. When territorial conquest and annexation are the aims of warfare, the population of the disputed land is viewed as a threat and the aggressor state may target those civilians to remove them. Democracies historically have proven especially likely to target civilians in desperate circumstances.

In Targeting Civilians in War, Downes explores several major recent conflicts, including the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Civilian casualties occurred in each campaign, but they were not the aim of military action. In these cases, Downes maintains, the achievement of quick and decisive victories against overmatched foes allowed democracies to win without abandoning their normative beliefs by intentionally targeting civilians. Whether such ?restraint? can be guaranteed in future conflicts against more powerful adversaries is, however, uncertain.

During times of war, democratic societies suffer tension between norms of humane conduct and pressures to win at the lowest possible costs. The painful lesson of Targeting Civilians in War is that when these two concerns clash, the latter usually prevails.

Technology has always had a profound influence on the character of war. In the past century alone the industrial revolution, culminating in the development of modern aircraft, tanks, artillery, and naval vessels increased the lethality of war manifold. However, the advent of nuclear weapons in 1945 represented a quantum jump in the lethality of war. Looking ahead, one wonders how emerging information technologies and bio-technologies might revolutionize warfare in the future.

The history of the Cold War can be attributed to the confluence of two factors: the development of nuclear weapons and the rise of the former Soviet Union and the United States as the two dominant military powers after World War II. It may seem paradoxical that the development of the most destructive form of warfare, nuclear warfare, led to a period of relative peace, the Cold War. In fact, nuclear weapons have been used only twice in war-the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 and Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. This is not to say that wars on the periphery of U.S. and Soviet interests did not occur, but simply that war between the major powers was absent. This article discusses the development of nuclear weapons, their effects, and the impact they have had on the character of war and military strategy. The ascendance of deterrence as the central strategic concept for nuclear warfare helps explain the apparent paradox mentioned above.