The turmoil caused by weak and failing states gravely threatens U.S. security, yet Washington is doing little to respond. The United States needs a new, comprehensive development strategy combining crisis prevention, rapid response, centralized decision-making, and international cooperation.

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan created the High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change in September 2003 with SIIS and CISAC senior fellow Stephen J. Stedman as its research director to identify the major global threats and generate new ideas about policies and institutions to enable the U.N. to be effective in the 21st century.

The panel issued a four-part report, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility, in December 2004.

PART ONE: The panel identifies six types of threats of greatest global concern: war between states; violence within states; poverty, infectious disease, and environmental degradation; nuclear, chemical, biological, and radiological weapons; terrorism; and transnational crime. A collective security system must take all member states' threats seriously and deal with them equitably.

PART TWO: In prescribing policies to prevent threats from spreading or worsening, the report emphasizes development as the first line of defense. Combating poverty and infectious disease, the panel argues, will save millions of lives and strengthen states' capacity to deter terrorism, crime, and proliferation of nuclear and biological weapons. The report also urges the U.N. to improve its capacity for preventive diplomacy and mediation and to forge a counterterrorism strategy.

PART THREE: The report reiterates the U.N.'s recognition of states' right to self-defense, but also suggests that the Security Council should consider stepping in more often to exercise its preventive authority. Peacekeeping, peace enforcement, and peace building are vital to global security, and developed nations should do more to transform their armies into units suitable for peace operations. Post-conflict peace building should be a core function of the U.N.

PART FOUR: The report prescribes revitalization of the Security Council and the General Assembly, and creation of a new Peacebuilding Commission. On the Security Council, the report provides two options for achieving reforms: one would appoint new permanent members, and the other would establish new long-term, renewable seats. Neither option creates any new vetoes.

In the late winter of 2003, a number of livestock animals in the Midwest were poisoned due to accidental contamination of a popular commercial feed with a lethal additive. Although all the evidence indicates this incident had no malicious or terrorist intent, it is informative as a case study highlighting potential security implications with respect to a terrorist event directed at U.S. agriculture.

In all the discussions of agricultural terrorism, the threat of deliberate and malicious introduction of a contaminant to animal feed has barely warranted a sentence in policy papers and legislation. Yet the historical record shows that individuals from New Zealand to Kenya to the U.S. have seen contamination as an easy method to kill animals.

In the November 2004 issue of the Journal of Animal Science (the leading peer-reviewed, technical animal science journal), this article discusses the poisoning of livestock alpacas (a smaller cousin of the llama) in early 2003. The animals were killed by accidental contamination of a popular commercial feed with a lethal additive parts per million (ppm) level. Although the absolute number of animals affected was small, if a similar percentage of beef livestock were poisoned, it would correspond to a loss of over 400,000 cattle in the U.S.

The article provides a brief history of incidents of chemical contamination and the political (failure of re-election bid by the Belgian Premier in 2000) and human effects (documented cases of lymphoma, breast and digestive cancers in Michigan among those who ate fire retardant-tainted meat in 1973.) Also addressed are the relative risks to agriculture by biological agent versus chemical agent and concludes with specific recommendations for bringing feed security into the agricultural terrorism dialogue.

The dominant (though contested) wisdom among international relations scholars is that military officers tend to be more cautious than their civilian counterparts about initiating the use of force. Sobered by the experience of combat, the theory holds, soldiers are hesitant to recommend military action except under the most favorable of circumstances. It might be the case, however, that military conservatism is simply a product of strong civilian oversight. Indeed, scholars have suggested that military officers actually have powerful incentives to promote the use of force, but these predilections may be muted when civilian leaders can punish officers for botched military adventures. In this article, the author details a quantitative, competitive test of these propositions, showing that states with strong civilian control are on average less prone to initiate military action than states without it. The results suggest that civilian control should play a central role in future models of conflict initiation.

This article uses the case of the Cuban Missile Crisis to illustrate the criteria by which victory and defeat are assessed in international crises. The evidence suggests that few objective criteria are actually used in such evaluations. Indeed, examination of the specific terms of crisis settlements can prove to be less important than a range of factors that do not conform to traditional rational actor assumptions. These include: i) prior biases in perception, ii) the experience of the crisis itself and the subsequent way in which it becomes framed, and iii) public opinion management during and after the crisis. This analysis has significant implications for policymakers who have to deal with the aftermath of a crisis, and also for the wider public and media, if governments are to be held accountable for their foreign policy.

Whole World on Fire focuses on a technical riddle wrapped in an organizational mystery: How and why, for more than half a century, did the U.S. government fail to predict nuclear fire damage as it drew up plans to fight strategic nuclear war?

US bombing in World War II caused massive fire damage to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but later war plans took account only of damage from the blast; they completely ignored damage from atomic firestorms. Recently a small group of researchers has shown that for modern nuclear weapons the destructiveness and lethality of mass fire often--and predictably--greatly exceeds that of blast effects. This has major implications for defense policy: the US government has underestimated the damage caused by nuclear weapons, Lynn Eden finds, and built far more warheads, and far more destructive warheads, than it needed for the Pentagon's war-planning purposes.

How could this have happened? The answer lies in how organizations frame the problems they try to solve. In a narrative grounded in organization theory, science and technology studies, and primary historical sources (including declassified documents and interviews), Eden explains how the US Air Force's doctrine of precision bombing led to the development of very good predictions of nuclear blast--a significant achievement--but did not advance organizational knowledge about nuclear fire. Expert communities outside the military reinforced this disparity in organizational capability to predict blast damage but not fire damage. Yet some innovation occurred, and predictions of fire damage were nearly incorporated into nuclear war planning in the early 1990's. The author explains how such a dramatic change almost happened, and why it did not.

Whole World on Fire shows how well-funded and highly professional organizations, by focusing on what they do well and systematically excluding what they don't do well, may build a poor representation of the world--a self-reinforcing fallacy that can have serious consequences. In a sweeping conclusion, Eden shows the implications of this analysis for understanding such things as the sinking of the Titanic, the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, and the poor fireproofing in the World Trade Center.

This book won the American Sociological Association's 2004 Robert K. Merton Award for best book in science, knowledge, and technology. It was published in 2005 by Manas Publications in New Delhi, India.

After the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, many scholars, journalists, and public officials expressed fear about the security of nuclear facilities in the United States.

The reaction to this new terrorist threat has been strong and predictable. Emergency efforts began immediately to deploy more security forces to protect U.S. nuclear facilities after the September 11 attacks. Experts testifying to Congress have strongly advocated adding more security guards and patrols at nuclear facilities to prevent nuclear terrorism. The increased threat of nuclear terrorism, it is argued, must be met with a countervailing increase in nuclear security personnel.

There are understandable incentives for organizational leaders to want to devote more resources and more personnel to address dangerous problems when they are seen to develop. From a political perspective, action must be taken after a major disaster, at a minimum, to let insiders and outsiders see that top officials are doing something to prevent a reoccurrence. If the causes of the problem are uncertain, however, the appropriate reaction is unclear. This article analyzes how we should think about nuclear security and the emerging terrorist threats. It presents a warning about the most simple, and most tempting, solution to our new nuclear terrorism problem: to add more security forces to protect power plants, weapons facilities, and nuclear storage sites. The article uncovers the dark side of redundancy by focusing on how efforts to improve nuclear security can inadvertently backfire, increasing the risks they are designed to reduce.