Does the conflict in Iraq amount to a civil war? In many ways, the public debate over this question is largely political. Calling Iraq a "civil war" implies yet another failure for the Bush administration and adds force to the question of whether U.S. troops still have a constructive role to play.

Politics aside, however, the definition of civil war is not arbitrary. For some -- and perhaps especially Americans -- the term brings to mind all-out historical conflicts along the lines of the U.S. or Spanish civil wars. According to this notion, there will not be civil war in Iraq until we see mass mobilization of sectarian communities behind more or less conventional armies.

But a more standard definition is common today:

1) Civil war refers to a violent conflict between organized groups within a country that are fighting over control of the government, one side's separatist goals, or some divisive government policy.

By this measure, the war in Iraq has been a civil war not simply since the escalation of internecine killings following the bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra in February, but at least since the United States handed over formal control to an interim Iraqi government in June 2004.

Here's why: Although the insurgents target the U.S. military, they are also fighting the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government and killing large numbers of Iraqis. There is little reason to believe that if the United States were suddenly to withdraw its forces, they would not continue their battle to control or shape the government.

Political scientists who study civil war have proposed various refinements to this rough definition to deal with borderline cases. One issue concerns how much killing has to occur -- and at what rate.

2) For a conflict to qualify as a civil war, most academics use the threshold of 1,000 dead, which leads to the inclusion of a good number of low-intensity rural insurgencies.

Current estimates suggest that more than 25,000 Iraqis have been killed in fighting since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003 -- a level and rate of killing that is comparable to numerous other conflicts that are commonly described as civil wars, such as those in Lebanon (1975-1990) and Sri Lanka (beginning in 1983).

The organization -- or rather, disorganization -- of the warring communities in Iraq means that a large-scale conventional conflict along the lines of the U.S. Civil War is unlikely to develop. More probable is a gradual escalation of the current "dirty war" between neighborhood militias that have loose ties to national political factions and are fighting almost as much within sectarian lines as across them.

This is roughly what happened in Lebanon and at a lower level in Turkish cities in the late 1970s. Ethnic cleansing will occur not as a systematic, centrally directed campaign (as in Bosnia), but as a result of people moving to escape danger.

And there's another twist to the terminology:

3) If the conflict in Iraq becomes purely a matter of violence between Sunni and Shiite communities driven by revenge and hatred rather than by political goals, many political scientists would say that it is something other than civil war.

Almost no one, for example, calls the Hindu-Muslim violence in India a civil war.

A civil war has to involve attempts to grab power at the center of government or in a given region, or to use violence to change some major government policy.

In Iraq's case, however, the vacuum of power at the center means that communal violence will inevitably be tied to struggles for political power and control.

A final complication concerns the nature of international involvement. Some argue, for example, that the war in Bosnia should be seen as an interstate war rather than a civil war, since the Bosnian Serb forces were armed and directed largely by Belgrade. Post-Mobutu violence in Congo is often termed a civil war, even though fighters have been closely tied to armies from neighboring states.

4) A conflict may be both a civil and an interstate war at the same time.

The Vietnam War, for instance, clearly comprised both a civil war in the South and an interstate war involving the North, the South and the United States.

Iraq may be moving in this direction. The United States and Britain are already openly involved, and such neighboring countries as Iran and Syria are more covertly involved. Not that it matters to the people dying there, but the next debate here may turn on whether what is already a civil war in Iraq should be viewed as an interstate war as well.

Before attacking Iraq in March 2003, the United States told the world that Saddam Hussein had reconstituted his nuclear weapons program in defiance of the United Nations. That claim, used to justify the war, was based on assessments provided by the United States intelligence community. But as everyone now knows, those assessments were wrong. So Jeffrey T. Richelson's history of American nuclear intelligence, including our attempts to learn about Iraq's nuclear program, could hardly be more timely.

In "Spying on the Bomb," Richelson, the author of several books on American intelligence, has brought together a huge amount of information about Washington's efforts to track the nuclear weapons projects of other countries. He examines the nuclear projects of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, China, France, Israel, India, South Africa, Taiwan, Libya, Pakistan, Iran and North Korea, as well as Iraq. Through interviews and declassified documents as well as secondary works, he sets out briefly what we currently know about those projects and compares that with assessments of the time.

This may sound like heavy going, but Richelson writes with admirable clarity. And along the way he has fascinating stories to tell: about plans to assassinate the German physicist Werner Heisenberg during World War II; about discussions in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations on the possibility of attacking Chinese nuclear installations; about Indian measures to evade the gaze of American reconnaissance satellites; and about the bureaucratic infighting over the estimates on Iraq.

The United States has put an enormous effort into gathering information about the nuclear projects of other countries. After World War II it equipped aircraft with special filters to pick up radioactive debris from nuclear tests for isotopic analysis. It created a network of stations around the world to register the seismic effects of nuclear explosions. Most important, in 1960 it began to launch reconnaissance satellites that could take detailed photographs of nuclear sites in the Soviet Union and China. Richelson occasionally speculates about the role of communications intercepts and of spies, but these appear from his account to have been much less important than the other methods of collecting information.

Through these means the United States has gathered a vast quantity of data, sometimes to surprising effect. Intelligence played a crucial role in the cold war, for instance, by reducing uncertainty about Soviet nuclear forces. Alongside such successes, however, there have been failures. One notable example concerned the first Soviet test, which took place in August 1949, much sooner than the C.I.A. had predicted. Another was the failure to detect Indian preparations for tests in May 1998, even though at an earlier time the United States, with the help of satellite intelligence, had managed to learn about preparations the Indians were making and to head off their tests.

But the most serious failure of all was in Iraq in 2003, because in no other case did the intelligence assessments serve as justification for the use of military force. The information needed for avoiding political surprise is one thing. That needed for preventive war is quite another, if only because of the consequences of making a mistake.

Beyond making the uncontroversial recommendation that "aggressive and inventive intelligence collection and analysis" should continue, Richelson draws no general conclusions. That is a pity, because his rich material points to issues that cry out for further analysis. He suggests in one or two cases that failures sprang from the mind-set of the intelligence community, but he does not elaborate on this point. He has little to say about relations between policy makers and the intelligence community, even though the quality of intelligence and the use made of it depend heavily on that relationship.

His focus is no less narrow in his discussion of foreign nuclear projects. He concentrates on the programs themselves, paying very little attention to their political context. Does that reflect a technological bias in nuclear intelligence? Would, for example, the prewar assessment of Iraqi nuclear capabilities have been more accurate if it had paid more attention to the broader political and economic circumstances of Hussein's regime?

The task of intelligence has become more complex than it was during the cold war. A single dominant nuclear opponent has now been replaced by a number of nuclear states, along with states and stateless terrorists that are aiming to get their hands on nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, the technology needed for producing nuclear weapons has become easier to acquire.

Many critics believe the recent performance of the intelligence community shows it has not responded adequately to this new situation. Richelson does not have much to say on this question; nor does he discuss the likely impact of the current reforms, initiated in response to the Iraq war, on the quality of intelligence. His reticence may imply that he does not think reform is necessary. Still, it is disappointing that he does not draw on his historical survey to discuss whether new approaches are needed for dealing with nuclear threats, and, if so, what those new approaches might be.

While the improving U.S. economy remains the engine of growth for the world economy, an underlying trend involving "huge imbalances and risks" should be cause for serious alarm, Paul Volcker warned Feb. 11 during a speech on campus. Americans have virtually no savings, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve said, and the nation is consuming more than it is producing. Furthermore, Social Security and Medicare are threatened by the retirement of millions of baby boomers and skyrocketing health care costs. More broadly, he continued, the world economy is lopsided.

"Altogether, the circumstances seem as dangerous and intractable as I can remember," Volcker said during a keynote address at the second annual summit of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. "But no one is willing to understand [this] and do anything about it."

Volcker spoke at the end of a daylong conference that attracted about 450 corporate leaders, entrepreneurs, policymakers and academics. The event included discussions on the stability of the global economy, the U.S. economic outlook and the role of the Internet in helping to level the competitive playing field worldwide. The conference also featured sessions on outsourcing, Medicaid and Medicare, technology policy and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which was implemented in 2002 to restore investor confidence in corporate America following a series of bankruptcies and far-reaching accounting scandals.

During a morning session, William J. Perry, a former secretary of defense and a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for International Studies, gave a chillingly stark assessment of the crisis of terrorism that was reinforced by George Shultz, a former secretary of state.

"I fear that we're headed toward an unprecedented catastrophe where a nuclear bomb is detonated in an American city," Perry said. "The bomb will not come in a missile at the hands of a hostile nation. It will come in a truck or a freighter at the hands of a terror group."

Perry, who holds the Michael and Barbara Berberian Professorship, said the "awesome military capability" of the United States has had unintended consequences in that it has increased the incentive for a hostile power, unable to compete in conventional warfare, to acquire weapons of mass destruction and launch terror attacks against America. U.S. military superiority is not particularly effective against such tactics, he said. "There exist terror groups, of which al Qaeda is the most prominent, that have the mission, the intent to kill Americans," Perry said. "They have the capability to do so; they have the resources to do so." A truly nightmare scenario would involve a terror group using nuclear weapons acquired clandestinely, he said: "After 9/11 that threat seems all too real."

Such a catastrophe is preventable, but the United States is not taking the necessary measures to avert it, Perry warned. Important steps should include a major expansion of the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program with the support the G-8 group of industrialized nations. The program was created in 1991 to reduce the threat posed by the legacy of the Soviet nuclear arsenal and succeeded in dismantling and destroying weapons in Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Belarus. Furthermore, Perry said, a clear strategy of "coercive diplomacy" should be used against North Korea and Iran, followed by a major diplomatic initiative to convince other nuclear powers that the threats posed by terrorists are real and not just directed at Americans. "While America must show real leadership in dealing with this problem, [it] cannot deal with it alone," he said.

Shultz, the Thomas W. and Susan B. Ford Distinguished Fellow at the Hoover Institution, said the United States faces a huge problem in combating Islamic radicals intent on using terror to achieve their goals. "Eventually, what they want is to change the way the world works by creating a unified Islamic theocratic state," he said. "It's a worldwide agenda."

Shultz argued that the United States must help supporters of mainstream Islam understand the fundamental nature of the problem so they will take action against the radicals themselves.

"That's why Iraq is of such overwhelming importance," he said. "Here we have a country in the heart of the Middle East where there is a chance. If Iraq can emerge as a sensibly governed country--that's a gigantic event in the Middle East and in this war on terror. Our enemies recognize that just as well as we do, and that's why we're having so many problems."

Other measures that Shultz said should receive greater support include efforts to set up independent media in countries such as Iraq, as well as a revival and expansion of the U.S. diplomatic service, which he said was allowed to atrophy after the end of the Cold War. "We have developed an awesome military capability," he said. "We need a diplomatic capability that is as every bit as good." Shultz also stressed the need to reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil. "We are out of our cotton-picking minds not to be doing much, much more to figure out how to use much, much less oil," he said to applause from the audience.

In the afternoon, Thomas Friedman, a columnist at the New York Times, also called for greater efforts to develop alternative energy supplies. This should be the "moon shot of our generation," he said.

Friedman discussed how the convergence of personal computers, cheap telecommunication and workflow software has changed the way the world works. In his upcoming book, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century, Friedman explained that the world has shrunk to the point where individuals, not countries or companies, are increasingly able to think and act globally. "And it's not just a bunch of white Westerners," he said. "It's going to be driven by individuals of every color of the rainbow."

Friedman told the audience that these technological advances quietly unfolded just as the 9/11 terror attacks, the Enron collapse and the dot-com bust grabbed America's attention. "People thought globalization was over but actually it turbo-charged globalization; it drove it overseas," he said. "9/11 completely distracted our administration, and then there was Enron. We have hit a fundamentally transformative moment and no one is talking."

In this new scenario, people anywhere in the world will be able to "innovate and not emigrate" if they have the required skills, Friedman said. This means that engineers in India and China will be able to compete on a level playing field with people in this country. "When the world goes flat, everything changes," he said.

To address this challenge, Friedman said the United States must radically improve science, mathematics and engineering education and encourage young people to enter these fields. "We're not doing that," he said. "In the next two years, five years, it won't matter. In 15 years, which is the time it takes to build an engineer, it will matter. We will not be able to sustain our standard of living."

The United Nations High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change completed its comprehensive review of collective security, recommending historic changes to the U.N. in its report, "A more secure world: Our shared responsibility." Among the panel's 101 recommendations for the U.N. and member states are expansion of the U.N. Security Council and creation of a Peacebuilding Commission to advance proactive, preventive global security measures.

The report culminates a year-long project for which SIIS Senior Fellow Stephen J. Stedman served as research director. The 16-member panel, commissioned by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and chaired by former Thailand Prime Minister Anand Panyarachun, represents the U.N.'s most comprehensive effort to analyze collective security, since the founding of the international body in 1947. The select panel sought international input in an effort to honor the perspectives of all member states, as it analyzed current threats and identified specific security measures.

Nations are the "front line in today's combat," Annan said, introducing the report. He added, "The task of helping states improve their own capacities to deal with contemporary threats is vital and urgent. The United Nations must be able to do this better. The panel tells us how."

The report identifies six major threats to global security: war between states; violence within states, including civil wars, large-scale human rights abuses and genocide; poverty, infectious disease and environmental degradation; nuclear, chemical, biological and radiological weapons; terrorism; and transnational organized crime.

The panel proposed expanding the U.N. Security Council--for which it put forth two options--as well as creating a Peacebuilding Commission to help the Security Council pursue the recommended preventive security strategies. One proposal for Security Council expansion would appoint new permanent members, and the other would establish new long-term, renewable seats. Neither option creates any new vetoes.

In a cover letter to the secretary-general, Panyarachun thanked CISAC and Stedman for supporting the panel's work. CISAC Co-Director Christopher F. Chyba served on the panel's 30-member resource group, providing expertise on nuclear nonproliferation and bioterrorism. CISAC hosted a nuclear nonproliferation workshop at Stanford for the panel last March, and Panyarachun discussed security issues with representatives from China, India, Pakistan, Russia and the United States at CISAC's Five-Nation Project meeting in Bangkok last summer. Stedman's research staff included Bruce Jones, a former CISAC Hamburg Fellow, and Tarun Chhabra, a graduate of CISAC's undergraduate honors program.

Annan has asked Stedman to stay at the United Nations another year to help gain worldwide support in implementing the panel's recommendations.

The panel's report received prominent news coverage, including a front-page New York Times article ("Report urges big changes for the U.N.," by Warren Hoge, Dec. 4), and in the Economist an invited article by Annan ("Courage to fulfill our responsibilities," Dec. 4) as well as several other pieces in the Nov. 24 and Dec. 4 issues.

Lisa Sickorez, financial manager for the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), will receive the annual Marsh O'Neill staff award on Tuesday, Nov. 16, at the Faculty Club for her outstanding support and dedication to the center's directors and scholars.

Sickorez, a Stanford employee since 1993, was enthusiastically nominated by the center's co-directors and professors. CISAC, part of the Stanford Institute for International Studies, conducts research and training pertaining to international security.

As financial manager, Sickorez performs essential behind-the-scenes duties, such as moving grant proposals through the university process, ensuring funds are properly spent once they are received and participating in general strategic planning.

The award, presented by the Office of the Dean of Research and Graduate Policy, honors staff who have made exceptional and enduring contributions to Stanford's research enterprise. Those who nominated Sickorez described several ways in which she applies a rare combination of quickness, accuracy and creativity to her job.

When a senior scholar last summer reported that he hoped to research the effects of arms buildup in India and Pakistan, Sickorez suggested applying for a grant from the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a foundation she had recently read about. The foundation has a similar focus, and Sickorez knew that CISAC had not tapped the organization for several years.

Another time, center co-director Scott Sagan met with a potential donor in New York who unexpectedly proposed phasing in funding over 10 years--necessitating some quick number crunching to reassess immediate financial needs.

Before the lunch meeting ended, Sickorez had faxed from her office in Encina Hall the adjusted amounts, clearly outlined in a chart for Sagan and his host to read.

"This is a dedicated staff member who can work miracles very promptly and efficiently," Sagan said. "The breadth of her interest and skills are quite stunning, and she combines them in a way that are, in my experience, highly unusual."

Sickorez came to the university as a research administrator in the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Economics, a program in the Department of Economics. She has held her current position at CISAC since 1998.

Part of her job, she says, is keeping abreast of potential funding sources, which she does through her "voracious" reading and online searches using keywords gleaned from research proposals. But her position also meshes well with her personal interest in current events and politics.

"I am very interested in the research that goes on at the center," she said. "It's intellectually stimulating; it's current events."

Indeed. The center's scholars include former Secretary of Defense William Perry, also a professor of management science and engineering, and Stephen Stedman, a senior fellow at the center who is currently on leave to direct research for United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan.

Sickorez may see the center's heavy hitters only occasionally, but she says she feels like she plays an essential role at the center. She collaborates often with the various directors and says they are generous in their expressions of gratitude.

"It's a wonderful place to work," Sickorez said. "The center doesn't have much of a strict hierarchy."

Sickorez was chosen from among 21 nominees who work in the university's various academic units, central administration and Medical School. She will receive a $3,000 certificate and a plaque. Each nominee will receive a congratulatory letter from the Office of the Dean of Research and Graduate Policy.

The award is named after Marshall O'Neill, former associate director of the W. W. Hansen Laboratories, who became the first recipient upon retirement in 1990. The Nov. 16 reception for the award winner begins at 4 p.m.; friends and colleagues are invited.