Stanford University

Consequences of Counterterrorism, The

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The 9/11 terrorist attacks opened America's eyes to a frightening world of enemies surrounding us. But have our eyes opened wide enough to see how our experiences compare with other nations' efforts to confront and prevent terrorism? Other democracies have long histories of confronting both international and domestic terrorism. Some have undertaken progressively more stringent counterterrorist measures in the name of national security and the safety of citizens. But who wins and who loses? In The Consequences of Counterterrorism, editor Martha Crenshaw makes the compelling observation that "citizens of democracies may be paying a high price for policies that do not protect them from danger." The book examines the political costs and challenges democratic governments face in confronting terrorism.

Using historical and comparative perspectives, The Consequences of Counterterrorism presents thematic analyses as well as case studies of Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Japan, and Israel. Contributor John Finn compares post-9/11 antiterrorism legislation in the United States, Europe, Canada, and India to demonstrate the effects of hastily drawn policies on civil liberties and constitutional norms. Chantal de Jonge Oudraat and Jean-Luc Marret assert that terrorist designation lists are more widespread internationally than ever before. The authors examine why governments and international organizations use such lists, how they work, and why they are ineffective tools. Gallya Lahav shows how immigration policy has become inextricably linked to security in the EU and compares the European fear of internal threats to the American fear of external ones.

A chapter by Dirk Haubrich explains variation in the British government's willingness to compromise democratic principles according to different threats. In his look at Spain and Northern Ireland, Rogelio Alonso asserts that restricting the rights of those who perpetrate ethnonationalist violence may be acceptable in order to protect the rights of citizens who are victims of such violence. Jeremy Shapiro considers how the French response to terrorist threats has become more coercive during the last fifty years. Israel's "war model" of counterterrorism has failed, Ami Pedahzur and Arie Perliger argue, and is largely the result of the military elite's influence on state institutions. Giovanni Cappocia explains how Germany has protected basic norms and institutions. In contrast, David Leheny stresses the significance of change in Japan's policies.

Preventing and countering terrorism is now a key policy priority for many liberal democratic states. As The Consequences of Counterterrorism makes clear, counterterrorist policies have the potential to undermine the democratic principles, institutions, and processes they seek to preserve.

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Martha Crenshaw
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Quadrennial Defense Review Report

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The Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) is a legislatively-mandated review of Department of Defense (DoD) strategy and priorities. The QDR will set a long-term course for DoD as it assesses the threats and challenges that the nation faces and re-balances its strategies, capabilities and forces to address today's conflicts and tomorrow's threats.

Executive summary (excerpt):

The mission of the Department of Defense is to protect the American people and advance our nation’s interests.

In executing these responsibilities, we must recognize that first and foremost, the United States is a nation at war. In Afghanistan, our forces fight alongside allies and partners in renewed efforts to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat Al Qaeda and the Taliban. In Iraq, U.S. military personnel advise, train, and support Iraqi forces as part of a responsible transition and drawdown. Above all, the United States and its allies and partners remain engaged in a broader war—a multifaceted political, military and moral struggle—against Al Qaeda and its allies around the world.

Furthermore, as a global power, the strength and influence of the United States are deeply intertwined with the fate of the broader international system—a system of alliances, partnerships, and multinational institutions that our country has helped build and sustain for more than sixty years. The U.S. military must therefore be prepared to support broad national goals of promoting stability in key regions, providing assistance to nations in need, and promoting the common good.

With these realities in mind, the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review advances two clear objectives. First, to further rebalance the capabilities of America’s Armed Forces to prevail in today’s wars, while building the capabilities needed to deal with future threats. Second, to further reform the Department’s institutions and processes to better support the urgent needs of the warfighter; buy weapons that are usable, affordable, and truly needed; and ensure that taxpayer dollars are spent wisely and responsibly.

The strategy and initiatives described in the QDR will continue to evolve in response to the security environment. Using the QDR as its foundation, the Department will continually examine its approach—from objectives to capabilities and activities to resources—to ensure its best alignment for the nation, its allies and partners, and our men and women in uniform.

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Fear Factor: Understanding the Origins and Consequences of Beliefs about National Security and the Threats We Face

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The routine employment of torture on the popular television series 24 has given rise to the charge that the program lends verisimilitude to  the questionable premise that torture is a legitimate and effective means of interrogation. A growing body of evidence suggests the critics' charge is correct. Indeed, the Dean of the US Military Academy at West Point grew sufficiently concerned about the pernicious effects 24 was having on his cadets that he traveled to California to meet with the show's creators to ask them to tone down the use of torture on the program. The Intelligence Science Board has echoed the critics' concerns, arguing that similar reality-distorting attitudes towards torture can be seen in the public at large. But how and why can a wholly fictional program like 24 actually influence political reality? Is this case something of an exception, or more akin to the rule?  Unfortunately, evidence suggests that fiction and other socially constructed portrayals of political reality-including propaganda, false flag operations and conspiracy theories-have long exercised demonstrable effects on political reality, often in unforeseen and unintentional ways.

Through the lens of the invasion panic that gripped Great Britain in the late nineteenth century, Greenhill will explore how and why national security-related "social facts"-i.e., things that are deemed to be "true" simply because they are widely believed to be true-can become broadly adopted and disseminated and, by extension, thereby influence the development and conduct of national security policy. Greenhill will further explore what this historical case can tell us about the theoretical and policy implications such "social facts" may hold for the threats we face today, including terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

Kelly M. Greenhill is Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Tufts University and Research Fellow at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. She holds a Ph.D. and an S.M. from M.I.T., a C.S.S. from Harvard University, and a B.A. from UC Berkeley. Greenhill previously held pre- or post-doctoral fellowships at Harvard University's Olin Institute for Strategic Studies and Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and at CISAC.

Her work has appeared in a variety of venues, including the journals International Security, Security Studies, and International Migration as well as in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and in briefs prepared for the U.S. Supreme Court. Greenhill has two books shortly forthcoming with Cornell University Press: the first, Weapons of Mass Migration: Forced Displacement, Coercion and Foreign Policy, focuses on the use of large-scale population movements as instruments of state-level coercion; and the second, Sex, Drugs and Body Counts: The Politics of Numbers in Global Crime and Conflict (co-edited with Peter Andreas), examines the politicization and manipulation of crime and conflict-related statistics. She is currently at work on a new book, a cross-national study that explores why, when, and under what conditions, fiction, so-called "social facts" and other non-factual sources of information-such as rumors, conspiracy theories and propaganda-materially influence the development and conduct of national security policies.

Lynn Eden is Associate Director for Research at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University. Eden received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Michigan, held several pre- and post-doctoral fellowships, and taught in the history department at Carnegie Mellon before coming to Stanford. In the area of international security, Eden has focused on U.S. foreign and military policy, arms control, the social construction of science and technology, and organizational issues regarding nuclear policy and homeland security. She co-edited, with Steven E. Miller, Nuclear Arguments: Understanding the Strategic Nuclear Arms and Arms Control Debates (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989). She was an editor of The Oxford Companion to American Military History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), which takes a social and cultural perspective on war and peace in U.S. history. That volume was chosen as a Main Selection of the History Book Club.

Eden's book Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, and Nuclear Weapons Devastation(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004; New Delhi: Manas Publications, 2004) explores how and why the U.S. government--from World War II to the present--has greatly underestimated the damage caused by nuclear weapons by failing to predict damage from firestorms. It shows how well-funded and highly professional organizations, by focusing on what they do well and systematically excluding what they don't, may build a poor representation of the world--a self-reinforcing fallacy that can have serious consequences, from the sinking of the Titanic to not predicting the vulnerability of the World Trade Center to burning jet fuel. Whole World on Fire won the American Sociological Association's 2004 Robert K. Merton Award for best book in science, knowledge, and technology.

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Kelly M. Greenhill CISAC Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science, Tufts University Speaker

Lynn Eden

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Lynn Eden is a Senior Research Scholar Emeritus. She was a Senior Research Scholar at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation until January 2016, as well as was Associate Director for Research. Eden received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Michigan, held several pre- and post-doctoral fellowships, and taught in the history department at Carnegie Mellon before coming to Stanford.

In the area of international security, Eden has focused on U.S. foreign and military policy, arms control, the social construction of science and technology, and organizational issues regarding nuclear policy and homeland security. She co-edited, with Steven E. Miller, Nuclear Arguments: Understanding the Strategic Nuclear Arms and Arms Control Debates (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989). She was an editor of The Oxford Companion to American Military History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), which takes a social and cultural perspective on war and peace in U.S. history. That volume was chosen as a Main Selection of the History Book Club.

Eden's book Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, and Nuclear Weapons Devastation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004; New Delhi: Manas Publications, 2004) explores how and why the U.S. government--from World War II to the present--has greatly underestimated the damage caused by nuclear weapons by failing to predict damage from firestorms. It shows how well-funded and highly professional organizations, by focusing on what they do well and systematically excluding what they don't, may build a poor representation of the world--a self-reinforcing fallacy that can have serious consequences, from the sinking of the Titanic to not predicting the vulnerability of the World Trade Center to burning jet fuel. Whole World on Fire won the American Sociological Association's 2004 Robert K. Merton Award for best book in science, knowledge, and technology.

Eden has also written on life in small-town America. Her first book, Crisis in Watertown (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), was her college senior thesis; it was a finalist for a National Book Award in 1973. Her second book, Witness in Philadelphia, with Florence Mars (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), about the murders of civil rights workers Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman in the summer of 1964, was a Book of the Month Club Alternate Selection.

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Lynn Eden Senior Research Scholar and Associate Director for Research, CISAC Commentator
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How to protect our nuclear deterrent

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William J. Perry
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In their latest op-ed in "The Wall Street Journal," William Perry, George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, and Sam Nunn argue that maintaining confidence in the U.S. nuclear arsenal is necessary as the number of weapons decreases.

The four of us have come together, now joined by many others, to support a global effort to reduce reliance on nuclear weapons, to prevent their spread into potentially dangerous hands, and ultimately to end them as a threat to the world. We do so in recognition of a clear and threatening development.

The accelerating spread of nuclear weapons, nuclear know-how, and nuclear material has brought us to a tipping point. We face a very real possibility that the deadliest weapons ever invented could fall into dangerous hands.

But as we work to reduce nuclear weaponry and to realize the vision of a world without nuclear weapons, we recognize the necessity to maintain the safety, security and reliability of our own weapons. They need to be safe so they do not detonate unintentionally; secure so they cannot be used by an unauthorized party; and reliable so they can continue to provide the deterrent we need so long as other countries have these weapons. This is a solemn responsibility, given the extreme consequences of potential failure on any one of these counts.

For the past 15 years these tasks have been successfully performed by the engineers and scientists at the nation's nuclear-weapons production plants and at the three national laboratories (Lawrence Livermore in California, Los Alamos in New Mexico, and Sandia in New Mexico and California). Teams of gifted people, using increasingly powerful and sophisticated equipment, have produced methods of certifying that the stockpile meets the required high standards. The work of these scientists has enabled the secretary of defense and the secretary of energy to certify the safety, security and the reliability of the U.S. nuclear stockpile every year since the certification program was initiated in 1995.

The three labs in particular should be applauded for the success they have achieved in extending the life of existing weapons. Their work has led to important advances in the scientific understanding of nuclear explosions and obviated the need for underground nuclear explosive tests.

Yet there are potential problems ahead, as identified by the Strategic Posture Commission led by former Defense Secretaries Perry and James R. Schlesinger. This commission, which submitted its report to Congress last year, calls for significant investments in a repaired and modernized nuclear weapons infrastructure and added resources for the three national laboratories.

These investments are urgently needed to undo the adverse consequences of deep reductions over the past five years in the laboratories' budgets for the science, technology and engineering programs that support and underwrite the nation's nuclear deterrent. The United States must continue to attract, develop and retain the outstanding scientists, engineers, designers and technicians we will need to maintain our nuclear arsenal, whatever its size, for as long as the nation's security requires it.

This scientific capability is equally important to the long-term goal of achieving and maintaining a world free of nuclear weapons—with all the attendant expertise on verification, detection, prevention and enforcement that is required.

Our recommendations for maintaining a safe, secure and reliable nuclear arsenal are consistent with the findings of a recently completed technical study commissioned by the National Nuclear Security Administration in the Department of Energy. This study was performed by JASON, an independent defense advisory group of senior scientists who had full access to the pertinent classified information.

The JASON study found that the "[l]ifetimes of today's nuclear warheads could be extended for decades, with no anticipated loss in confidence, by using approaches similar to those employed in Life Extension Programs to date." But the JASON scientists also expressed concern that "[a]ll options for extending the life of the nuclear weapons stockpile rely on the continuing maintenance and renewal of expertise and capabilities in science, technology, engineering, and production unique to the nuclear weapons program." The study team said it was "concerned that this expertise is threatened by lack of program stability, perceived lack of mission importance, and degradation of the work environment."

These concerns can and must be addressed by providing adequate and stable funding for the program. Maintaining high confidence in our nuclear arsenal is critical as the number of these weapons goes down. It is also consistent with and necessary for U.S. leadership in nonproliferation, risk reduction, and arms reduction goals.

By providing for the long-term investments required, we also strengthen trust and confidence in our technical capabilities to take the essential steps needed to reduce nuclear dangers throughout the globe. These steps include preventing proliferation and preventing nuclear weapons or weapons-usable material from getting into dangerous hands.

If we are to succeed in avoiding these dangers, increased international cooperation is vital. As we work to build this cooperation, our friends and allies, as well as our adversaries, will take note of our own actions in the nuclear arena. Providing for this nation's defense will always take precedence over all other priorities.

Departures from our existing stewardship strategies should be taken when they are essential to maintain a safe, secure and effective deterrent. But as our colleague Bill Perry noted in his preface to America's Strategic Posture report, we must "move in two parallel paths—one path which reduces nuclear dangers by maintaining our deterrence, and the other which reduces nuclear dangers through arms control and international programs to prevent proliferation." Given today's threats of nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism, these are not mutually exclusive imperatives. To protect our nation's security, we must succeed in both.

Beyond our concern about our own stockpile, we have a deep security interest in ensuring that all nuclear weapons everywhere are resistant to accidental detonation and to detonation by terrorists or other unauthorized users. We should seek a dialogue with other states that possess nuclear weapons and share our safety and security concepts and technologies consistent with our own national security.

Mr. Shultz was secretary of state from 1982 to 1989. Mr. Perry was secretary of defense from 1994 to 1997. Mr. Kissinger was secretary of state from 1973 to 1977. Mr. Nunn is former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

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Second volume of Daedalus on 'The Global Nuclear Future' published

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The second part of a special issue of Daedalus, the quarterly journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has been released. Titled, "The Global Nuclear Future, it contains articles by CISAC Co-Director Siegfried S. Hecker and Consulting Professor Thomas Isaacs. CISAC Co-Drector Scott D. Sagan coauthored the concluding essay.
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2010 Payne Lecture Series: Globalization of Terror

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Steve Coll is president of New America Foundation, and a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine. Previously he spent 20 years as a foreign correspondent and senior editor at The Washington Post, serving as the paper's managing editor from 1998 to 2004. He is the author of six books, including The Deal of the Century: The Break Up of AT&T (1986); The Taking of Getty Oil (1987); Eagle on the Street, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the SEC's battle with Wall Street (with David A. Vise, 1991); On the Grand Trunk Road: A Journey into South Asia (1994), Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (2004); and The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century (2008).

Mr. Coll's professional awards include two Pulitzer Prizes. He won the first of these, for explanatory journalism, in 1990, for his series, with David A. Vise, about the SEC. His second was awarded in 2005, for his book, Ghost Wars, which also won the Council on Foreign Relations' Arthur Ross award; the Overseas Press Club award and the Lionel Gelber Prize for the best book published on international affairs during 2004. Other awards include the 1992 Livingston Award for outstanding foreign reporting; the 2000 Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Award for his coverage of the civil war in Sierra Leone; and a second Overseas Press Club Award for international magazine writing. Mr. Coll graduated Phi Beta Kappa, Cum Laude, from Occidental College in 1980 with a degree in English and history. He lives in Washington, D.C.

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Steve Coll President, New America Foundation Speaker
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Microbial Forensics for Attribution of Biological Attacks: How well will it work?

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Since the 2001 anthrax attacks, members of the biosecurity community and US government officials have expressed a growing sense of alarm at the threat of a biological attack.  The Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism recently predicted that a terrorist attack involving WMD is likely to take place by 2013 and identified biological terrorism as the most likely contingency.  To counter this threat, increasing emphasis has been placed on the role of microbial forensics in deterring an attack. New infrastructure has been established by the US government to develop capabilities to identify the source of a pathogen used in an attack and identify the perpetrators. However, many open questions remain about the potential efficacy of this approach both from a technological capabilities standpoint and from a deterrence perspective.

Existing technologies can be borrowed from molecular biology to identify elements in a pathogen's DNA, which could help investigators trace it back to a specific source strain. However, these tools are limited, and new methods should be developed to increase confidence in microbial forensics analyses. Moreover, a comprehensive genome database of pathogen strains is necessary for an effective investigation in the event of an attack. Who will cover the costs of sequencing pathogen genome strains to generate such a database? Will there be obstacles to gaining cooperation from academic and government facilities within the United States and internationally?  In the best-case scenario, advances in microbial forensics could enable us to identify the source of a biological attack; would these capabilities effectively deter non-state actors? These questions must be addressed to determine the extent to which microbial forensics programs can meet their stated goals.

Jaime Yassif is a doctoral candidate in the Biophysics Group at UC Berkeley. She is conducting her thesis research in the Liphardt lab, where she studies the dynamics of RNA-binding proteins using a single-molecule technique called plasmon rulers.

Prior to her graduate work, Ms. Yassif worked for several years in science and security policy and arms control.  She began as a research assistant at the Federation of American Scientists, where she contributed to the writing of Senate Foreign Relations Committee testimony on radiological weapons and authored a piece on radiological decontamination in Defense News. She then worked as a program officer at the Nuclear Threat Initiative, where she provided support for the organization's four key program areas-Russia/New Independent States, Biological, Regional and Communications-and managed the organization of an international workshop on Global Best Practices in Nuclear Materials Management. This was followed by a fellowship to study the Chinese nuclear posture at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

Ms. Yassif holds an MA in Science and Security from the War Studies Department at King's College London, where she wrote her thesis on verification of the Biological Weapons Convention.  She received her bachelor's degree in Biology from Swarthmore College. Ms. Yassif is former president of the student-run Science, Technology and Engineering Policy group at UC Berkeley and a member of Women in International Security.

Martha Crenshaw is a senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation and the Freeman Spogli Institute, and professor of political science (by courtesy). Her current research focuses on why the United States is the target of terrorism, the effectiveness of counter terrorism policies, and mapping terrorist organizations. Professor Crenshaw served on the Executive Board of Women in International Security and chaired the American Political Science Association (APSA) Task Force on Political Violence and Terrorism. She was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2005-2006. Her edited book, The Consequences of Counterterrorism in Democracies, is being published by the Russell Sage Foundation.

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Jaime Yassif PhD candidate, UC Berkeley Biophysics Graduate Group Speaker

Martha Crenshaw

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Martha Crenshaw is a senior fellow emerita at CISAC and FSI. She taught at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, from 1974 to 2007.  She has published extensively on the subject of terrorism.  In 2011 Routledge published Explaining Terrorism, a collection of her previously published work.  A book co-authored with Gary LaFree titled Countering Terrorism was published by the Brookings Institution Press in 2017. She recently authored a report for the U.S. Institute of Peace, “Rethinking Transnational Terrorism:  An Integrated Approach”.

 

 She served on the Executive Board of Women in International Security and is a former President and Councilor of the International Society of Political Psychology (ISPP). In 2005-2006 she was a Guggenheim Fellow. She was a lead investigator with the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and the Response to Terrorism (START) at the University of Maryland from 2005 to 2017.  She is currently affiliated with the National Counterterrorism, Innovation, Technology, and Education (NCITE) Center, also a Center of Excellence for the Department of Homeland Security.  In 2009 the National Science Foundation/Department of Defense Minerva Initiative awarded her a grant for a research project on "mapping terrorist organizations," which is ongoing.  She has served on several committees of the National Academy of Sciences.  In 2015 she was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.  She is the recipient of the International Studies Association International Security Studies Section Distinguished Scholar Award for 2016. Also in 2016 Ghent University awarded her an honorary doctorate.  She serves on the editorial boards of the journals International Security, Security Studies, Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict, Orbis, and Terrorism and Political Violence.

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Negotiation and Strategy: Understanding Sanctions Effectiveness

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Despite extensive and ongoing debate about economic sanctions, policy makers disagree about their effectiveness. This is to some extent surprising given the frequency and ceremony with which states sanction each other to achieve their policy goals. Analytically, this confusion is understandable; the multitude of factors that influence the outcome of a conflict involving sanctions confounds the task of evaluating the impact of sanctions.

Ongoing efforts by the United States and the United Nations to influence proliferators and human rights violators, such as Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Burma with sanctions suggest that they will remain a preferred policy tool for the major powers. In that light, it is essential to continue honing our understanding of the conditions under which they can be expected to achieve established policy goals.

This paper advances the debate about sanctions efficacy by assessing their role in a broader conflict management strategy. It argues that sanctions are more likely to succeed when they yield conditions conducive to bargaining between the parties to a dispute. The centrality of bargaining means that if sanctioners are unwilling to compromise over major policy goals, sanctions alone are unlikely to succeed. Therefore, countries aiming to achieve policy goals through sanctions must be prepared to engage, negotiate and compromise with their adversaries.

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Reframing Nuclear De-Alert: Decreasing the Operational Readiness of U.S. and Russian Arsenals

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Executive Summary of Report

Nearly twenty years after the end of the Cold War, Russia and the United States continue to maintain hundreds of nuclear weapons capable of striking the other side, and to have at least some of these nuclear forces at Cold War levels of alert, that is, ready to fire within a few minutes of receiving an order to do so.

Even during the Cold War, alert levels were not static and moved up or down in step with changes in the strategic and tactical environments. While the operational readiness of some weapon systems has been reduced, there has been no major change in the readiness levels of most of the nuclear weapon systems in the post-Cold War era. This is in considerable part because Russia and the United States believe that despite fundamental changes in their overall relationship, vital interest requires maintaining a high level of nuclear deterrence.

The post-Cold War experience also demonstrates that alert levels can be reduced and measures can be taken to reduce the risk of accidents or unauthorized takeover of nuclear weapons. Further measures could be taken to reduce operational readiness of nuclear arsenals. U.S. and Russian experts alike stressed survivability as a key element in the acceptance of these measures because of its importance to maintaining deterrence.

Cold War legacy postures under which thousands of weapons are kept on high readiness can be altered through top-down policy initiatives, as was the case in the early 1990s with one class of nuclear weapons.

Technical issues related to the peculiar "ready" character of land-based ICBMs can be resolved by bringing designers into discussions on decreasing operational readiness of nuclear weapons. There was a sense that technical solutions to the problems of nuclear risk reduction are available and can be multilateralized. Information sharing can help implementation of these solutions.

Concerns over "re-alerting" races and vulnerability of "de-alerted" forces to conventional or nuclear strikes during "reversal" can be addressed through survivable forces, dialogue, and confidence building.

Other nuclear weapon states apparently have alert practices that differ from those of Russia and the United States. It was debated whether this state of affairs can be ascribed to an absence of nuclear war fighting capabilities or to a different assessment of the post-Cold War nuclear security environment. There was a sense that nuclear doctrines and alert practices of different nuclear weapon states cannot be analyzed in a vacuum and must be evaluated as parts of a larger political and security framework.

Non-nuclear weapon states' experts forcefully asserted the legitimate interest their states have in the issue and underlined the practical and constructive approach of the U.N. General Assembly resolution on reducing operational readiness of nuclear forces.

Non-nuclear weapon states say that lowering of the operational status of nuclear weapons would both reduce the risk of accidental or unintended nuclear war and provide a much-needed practical boost for disarmament and nonproliferation. Decreasing the operational readiness of nuclear weapons would be a highly desirable confidence-building measure between nuclear weapon states and non-nuclear weapon states. It would also be a welcome step in the lead-up to the 2010 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference.

The principal objection to decreasing operational readiness of nuclear weapons as commonly understood has been that it seeks to address a problem that does not exist. Even if it does exist in some instances, it can be addressed by technical and organizational means updated to cover current threats such as nuclear terrorism. Furthermore, the remedy itself could end up undermining nuclear deterrence and strategic or crisis stability.

The insight that emerged during the meeting was that the above objection flows from a narrow view of de-alerting as meaning measures that make it physically impossible to promptly launch an attack on order. Such a view also leads to a somewhat excessive focus on verification of technical measures, which ends up giving an easy argument to the opponents of de-alerting-that it is not verifiable and therefore should not be attempted.

There are no fundamental obstacles to many useful measures of decreasing operational readiness of nuclear weapons, provided the issue is not framed narrowly. De-alert has to be seen not only as a technical fix but also as a strategic step in deemphasizing the military role of nuclear weapons, in other words, moving to retaliatory strike postures and doctrines instead of legacy preemptive or "launch on warning" postures. The ongoing U.S. Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) offers an opportunity for such a perceptual shift.

If decreasing operational readiness of nuclear weapons is reframed in this manner, several concrete steps become possible:

As part of the START follow-on negotiations, Russia and the United States could examine how measures to reduce operational readiness can accompany the bilateral arms control process.

Both Russia and the United States could further strengthen controls against unauthorized action, takeover, and tampering; further increase the capability of warning systems to discriminate real from imagined attacks; and enhance the survivability of their forces and their command and control systems.

Arrangements related to data exchange and ensuring a capability to destroy a "rogue" missile in flight could be multilateralized, at least in terms of sharing data, to bring other declared nuclear weapon states into the process.

Multilateralization of institutions such as the Joint Data Exchange Center may also have collateral benefits in the area of space security.

The premise of maintaining nuclear deterrence between Russia and the United States should not be considered immutable. A dialogue on legacy nuclear postures and doctrines in the Russia-U.S. context may trigger a broader dialogue among relevant states on reducing the salience of nuclear weapons, thus facilitating progress on disarmament and nonproliferation.

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