This report is a product of the Catastrophic Terrorism Study Group, a nine-month long collaboration of faculty from Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, and the University of Virginia. The Group involves experts on national security, terrorism, intelligence, law enforcement, constitutional law, technologies of catastrophic terrorism and defenses against them, and government organization and management.

The Group is co-chaired by Ashton B. Carter and John M. Deutch, and the project director is Philip D. Zelikow. Organized by the Stanford-Harvard Preventive Defense Project, the work of the Study Group is part of the Kennedy School of Government's "Visions of Governance for the Twenty-First Century" project, directed by Dean Joseph S. Nye, Jr. and Elaine Kamarck.

While the danger of catastrophic terrorism is new and grave, there is much that the United States can do to prevent it and to mitigate its consequences if it occurs. The objective of the Catastrophic Terrorism Study Group is to suggest program and policy changes that can be taken by the U.S. government in the near term, including the reallocation of agency responsibilities, to prepare the nation better for the emerging threat of catastrophic terrorism.

This paper develops a probabilistic model that can be used to determine the number of ballistic missile defense interceptors required to meet a specific defense objective, given the technical performance of the defense. The defense objective is stated as some probability that no warheads leak through the defense. The defense technical performance is captured by the interceptor single-shot probability of kill and the warhead detection, tracking, and classification probability. Attacks are characterized by the number of warheads and decoys that cannot be discriminated by the defense. Barrage and shoot-look-shoot firing modes are examined, with the optimal interceptor allocation derived for the shoot-look-shoot mode. Applications of this model to national and theater missile ballistic missile defense are discussed.

Gail Lapidus of Stanford University assesses the factors leading to Moscow's decision in December 1994 to use military force to crush Chechnya's resistance to the authority of the Russian leadership. Exhaustively researched and documented, Lapidus's study traces the evolution of the secessionist struggle through six stages. At the heart of the conflict, she says, was the Chechens' growing desire for sovereignty and territorial integrity sparked by Mikhail Gorbachev's political liberalization initiatives and further fueled by the establishment of a number of new states after the breakup of the Soviet Union. Lapidus also considers the role of Western governments and international institutions first in preventing the outbreak of hostilities and then in mitigating and, finally, terminating the conflict. She concludes that when the behavior of a major power is at issue, the potential for outside intervention is limited, which in turn raises a host of troubling questions about the prospects for future internal conflict resolution.

The majority of Russia's current strategic nuclear force will become obsolete shortly after the turn of the century. Hence, Russian strategic force modernization is essential if Russia is to remain a nuclear power on a par with the United States. Numerous uncertainties, especially financial uncertainties, prevent accurate estimates of Russia's future strategic force structure. Nevertheless, under the START I Treaty, Russia can probably maintain a force with slightly more than 4,000 strategic nuclear warheads over the next two decades-about half the number of the United States. Under START II, Russia is likely to maintain a strategic force of between 1,800 and 2,500 warheads, compared to 3,500 warheads for the United States. Therefore, Russia's main interest in ratifying the START II Treaty would be to pursue a START III Treaty that limits both sides to between 2,000 and 2,500 strategic nuclear warheads. This is the least expensive way to retain rough parity with the United States. Several reasons have been educed for why Russia should not ratify the START II Treaty, namely, because the Treaty allows a U.S. advantage in reconstitution capability and prompt hard-target-kill capability. However, these advantages are neither so great nor so consequential that Russia should reject the START II Treaty for these reasons alone. If Russia ratifies the START II Treaty, and presumably a follow-on START III Treaty, Russia's future strategic nuclear force will appear a lot different than its Soviet predecessor due to the reduced emphasis on land-based ICBMs. Nevertheless, the Russian force should remain a highly survivable, stable force-assuming Russian leaders allocate sufficient resources to ensure that their ballistic missile submarines, mobile ICBMs, and bombers can survive all plausible counterforce threats.

The MacArthur Consortium workshop "Slaughter of the Innocents: Understanding Political Killing" focused on mobilization for large-scale killing and genocide. How does such violence become possible? Rather than concentrating on effect and prescription, participants devoted their attention to diagnosis and causal understanding. The workshop had three main areas of investigation:

1. the historical sociology of mobilization for large-scale killing,
   
2. the phenomenology of genocide, and
   
3. the role of memory in such mobilization.
   

In exploring a topic that has become highly problematic and pressing in the context of civil wars, the workshop addressed changing institutions of violence and issues of identity. The workshop aimed to raise as many questions as it answered, as well as to set an agenda for future interdisciplinary understanding.

The third Stanford-Livermore workshop in the series examining the protection of critical national infrastructures against cyber attack was held at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on February 26-27, 1998. The first two workshops were intended to provide informed inputs to the work of the President's Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection, and the third, which came soon after the publication of the Commission's report to the President (entitled Critical Foundations), was directed toward a critical review of that report and to developing suggestions for steps to implement its findings in four areas that are considered particularly important: criteria and priorities to guide near-term actions; creation of a public-private partnership; legal issues, with some emphasis on understanding impediments to cooperation; and facilitation of research and development planning, with a subtheme on the robustness of complex systems.

If high-performance computing (HPC) export control policy is to be effective, three basic premises must hold:

This study applies and extends the methodology established in Building on the Basics [1]. Its objective has been to study trends in HPC technologies and their application to problems of national security importance to answer two principal questions:

· Do the basic premises continue to be satisfied as the 20th century draws to a close?

· In what range of performance levels might an export-licensing threshold be set so that the basic premises are satisfied?

The study concludes that export controls on HPC hardware are still viable, although much weaker than in the past. In particular, while applications of national security interest abound, it is increasingly difficult to identify applications that strongly satisfy all three basic premises, i.e. are of extreme national security importance and would likely be effectively pursued by countries of national security concern and would be severely retarded without levels of computing performance that could be effectively controlled.

From the preface:

"Events in recent years have caused heightened concern about the security of weapons-usable nuclear material. The possibility of illicit trafficking in, or seizure of, such material, leading to nuclear terrorism, is a worry for all states and their citizens. And given the relatively small quantities required, material obtained in one part of the world could be made into a weapon in another and threaten lives in a third. It is truly a global problem.

Since the beginning of the nuclear era, the physical protection of fissile material has been a responsibility of the individual states possessing the material. These states have different organizational approaches for providing physical protection; and while cognizant of recommended general standards, they tend to follow their own practices, shaped by custom, costs, and threat perception. Moreover, the existence of military as well as civil programs in some states adds another dimension
to the physical protection issue.

Because physical protection is a sovereign matter and not part of an international regime (except for transit of civil material across borders), there has been less attention in much of the world community to the issues of physical protection than to the other elements of nuclear safeguards and controls. (An important exception to this situation is the effort being made to assist the states of the former Soviet Union in the disposition of their weapons-usable nuclear materials.) The lack of a general dialog about a problem of growing concern motivated us to hold a three-day workshop at Stanford University to develop a better understanding of some of the important underlying questions and issues, and to undertake a comparative examination of states' approaches to physical protection. We were pleased to have knowledgeable participants from a number of the countries and regions where physical protection of fissile materials is, or will become, a day-to-day matter.

The results of the workshop are reported in these Proceedings. It is our hope that this work will stimulate further analysis and discussion, and lead to greater interest in international standards, cooperation, and supporting programs.

James E. Goodby
1996-1997 Payne Distinguished Lecturer
Stanford University

Ronald F. Lehman II
Director of the Center for Global Security Research
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

William C. Potter
Director, Center for Nonproliferation Studies
Monterey Institute of International Studies"

Proceedings of a conference, "Preventing Deadly Conflict: Strategies and Institutions," held in Moscow Aug. 14-16, 1996," that was a joint undertaking of the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, the Institute of Universal History of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Center for International Security and Arms Control at Stanford University.

Dr. Lapidus, who co-edited the report, wrote the conclusion, "Lessons from the Russian Experience."