The wars of the 1990s confirm a basic finding from the study of civil war termination: "peacemaking is a risky business." The greatest source of risk comes from spoilers - leaders and parties who believe that peace emerging from negotiations threatens their power, worldview, and interests, and use violence to undermine attempts to achieve it. When spoilers succeed, the results are catastrophic. But not all spoilers do succeed.

The crucial difference between the success and failure of spoilers is the role played by international actors as custodians of peace. This study begins to develop a typological theory of spoiler management, providing a first step toward understanding the spoiler problem in peace processes and evaluating the appropriateness and effectiveness of different strategies of spoiler mangement.

The July Workshop on Protecting and Assuring Critical National Infrastructure focused on three specific areas: international and legal issues relating to the control of network misuse and government roles for securing the infrastructure; economic factors, including market responses to the threat and to protection measures; and directions for future tools research in forensics, modeling, and simulation that will enhance understanding of system robustness, vulnerabilities, and security.

In addition to this agenda, the Workshop addressed the nature of public-private partnerships that could serve to coordinate the separate infrastructure protection efforts of each.

Whether China can achieve its economic and political goals depends very much upon whether PRC's domestic stability can be maintained and large-scale devastating military conflict, either internally with Taiwan or externally with major foreign powers, can be avoided. This article will speculate on China's security role in the region and in the world ten to fifteen years hence, and assess China's likely intentions, capabilities, and strategies in domestic and foreign affairs, in light of the changes in China's geopolitical environment.

Future regional conflicts will almost certainly involve politically less stable nations or other regional actors using theater ballistic missiles armed with either nuclear, biological, or chemical warheads. The United States Air Force is attempting to deal with this threat by developing the Airborne Laser (ABL) with the goal of shooting down missiles while they are still under power and before they can release submunitions possibly containing highly toxic biological agents. This paper presents the results of an analysis of this system. It is based solely on information found in the open literature and using the basic physics and engineering involved in transmitting intense laser beams through the atmosphere. The ABL's potential capabilities and possible theaters of operation are discussed at a non-technical level.

Since Brazil and West Germany surprised the world by announcing that they had reached the nuclear "deal of the century" in 1975, many national and international observers have feared that Brazil sought to develop atomic weapons. Brazilian rejection of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Tlatelolco treaties, insistence on its legal right to develop so-called peaceful nuclear explosives (PNEs), aspirations to great power status, authoritarian military government, and tacit nuclear rivalry with Argentina aroused concern that this ambitious program of reactor construction and technology transfer would mask an effort to reach the bomb.

Although difficult financial circumstances derailed this program in the late 1970s, by the early 1980s press reports began to emerge indicating that a secretive "parallel" nuclear program under military direction was underway. Transition to democratic rule in 1985 failed to clarify the nature and objectives of this second effort, and provocative statements by senior military officers intensified concerns. This second effort persevered in the face of the severe economic conditions that made the 1980s a "lost decade" for Latin American countries, increasing international stress on nonproliferation, and protests from domestic anti-nuclear and environmental groups, as well as a 1990 investigation by the national congress.

By 1991, however, Brazil had formally renounced PNEs, agreed to establish bilateral safeguards with Argentina and to accept International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspection of formerly secret nuclear facilities, and committed to ratifying the Treaty of Tlatelolco. This marked the apparent reversal of a long trajectory toward the proliferation threshold, and thus assuaged apprehension within and outside the country. Yet military involvement in nuclear technological development continued essentially unaltered, and Brazil now enjoys the distinction of being one of the few states with the indigenous capacity to produce fissile material necessary to construct atomic weapons.

This paper seeks to answer two questions: Given limited resources and domestic and foreign opposition, how did the Brazilian military succeed in developing this capacity? Given their determined effort and enduring role in nuclear development, why did the armed forces stop short of the bomb?

This study answers these two questions through investigation of domestic political processes, which involve the formation and maintenance of programmatic coalitions that marshal human, material, and political resources for technological development. Such coalitions encounter constraints which include competition for scarce human and financial capital, international technological denial, and domestic and international opposition. Such programs must be either effectively insulated from domestic challenges, or politically defended and normatively legitimated in spite of them.

In July 1996, President Clinton established the Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection, with a charter to designate critical infrastructures and assess their vulnerabilities, to recommend a comprehensive national policy and implementation strategy for protecting those infrastructures from physical and cyber threats, and to propose statutory or regulatory actions to effect the recommended remedies. The charter gives examples of critical infrastructures (telecommunications, electrical power systems, gas and oil storage and transportation, banking and finance, transportation, water supply systems, emergency services, and continuity of government), and also notes the types of cyber threats of concern (electronic, radio-frequency, or computer-based attacks on the information or communications components that control critical infrastructures).

Some of the critical infrastructures are owned or controlled by the government, and hence the government can, in principle, harden and restructure these systems and control access to achieve a greater degree of robustness. However, the President's executive order recognizes that many of the critical infrastructures are developed, owned, operated, or used by the private sector and that government and private sector cooperation will be required to define acceptable measures for the adequate protection and assurance of continued operation of these infrastructures.

The Stanford Center for International Security and Arms Control (CISAC), as part of its ongoing Program on Information Technology and National Security, and the Center for Global Security Research (CGSR) of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) are conducting workshops to examine many of the issues connected with the work of the Commission. In addition to the questions of vulnerabilities, threats, and possible remedies, we discuss the impact on the marketplace of possible protective actions, cost in terms of capital and functionality, legal constraints, and the probable need for international cooperation.

The first of these jointly sponsored workshops was held March 10-11, 1997, and included participation by members and staff of the Presidential Commission; the Stanford community; the information technology industry; and by security specialists at infrastructure organizations, research companies, and the national laboratories. The results of this two-day meeting are summarized in the following report.

This paper focuses on the impact of a comprehensive test ban on China's nuclear program and security policy. After a general review of China's nuclear doctrine and development, the study analyzes the relationship between China's nuclear strategy and its desire for testing, and explores the reasons China decided to join the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. By comparing the maturity of the nuclear programs of the nuclear states and the degree of their preparations for a cessation of nuclear tests, this paper concludes that a comprehensive test ban would place greater constraints on China's nuclear program than on those of the others. Efforts such as a deeper reduction of the nuclear arsenals of the principal nuclear powers, a no-first-use commitment by all nuclear states, and the adherence to the ABM treaty by its signatories would be critical to reducing China's concerns. The progress of international arms control negotiations in the above directions would further encourage China to make even greater contributions in the field of global arms control in the post-comprehensive test ban era.

"Claim-Making and Large-Scale Historical Processes in the Late Twentieth Century," held March 7-9, 1997, at Stanford University, was an experimental workshop to preview the dimensions on the eve of the twenty-first century that the MacArthur Foundation Consortiumon Challenges to the Study of International Peace and Cooperation, will explore over the next three years: war and institutions of violence; globalization; society and the ecosphere; and identity and social power. The idea was to examine these dimensions as large structural macro-historical processes and also to look at how these processes are immanent in the political and cultural claims made by contending actors. All of the workshop panels brought out issues of several dimensions. The first panel, on Globalization and Social Claims, looked at processes of globalization and also at society and the ecosphere. The second panel, State Formation and Claim-Making, focused on the dimensions of war and institutions of violence and also identity and social power. The third panel, Identities and Social Power, was on that dimension, largely in the context of globalization. The fourth panel, a roundtable on Claims to Sovereignty in the Former Soviet Union, was most related to the dimension of war and institutions of violence.

By the end of 1995, China had built the world's ten largest telecommunications networks and the industry was growing at a faster rate than any other sector of the booming Chinese economy. For example, the country's 40 million telephone subscribers with 50 million telephone numbers represented an average annual growth rate of nearly 100 percent over a ten-year period. Internet users served by ChinaNet jumped from 6,000 in 1995 to 53,739 in March 1997. Progress was qualitative as well, as China procured state-of-the-art fiber-optic and satellite technologies and narrowed the gap between itself and the United States and between its own urban and rural areas. The achievement can be attributed to the government's commitment to telecommunications as the key to further development--a commitment backed by preferential policies; to foreign financial and technical support; and to changing attitudes of the Chinese people themselves.

However, China faces some major problems. The gap in living standards between coastal and interior provinces is widening, as people migrate from poor villages to increasingly affluent cities. The government must focus more on developing isolated regions. Rapid development of telecommunications cannot be sustained under a government monopoly, which aids the government's economic and security interests but discourages foreign companies from investing and transferring technology. At the same time, there has been little headway in developing domestic telecommunications products. Management of the industry is chaotic in the absence of clear regulations, and a multilayered bureaucracy encourages wasted resources, duplication, red tape, and corruption. Political problems are likely to emerge as telecommunications continues to help open Chinese society and young Chinese come to embrace Western industrial culture.

Nevertheless, China is destined to become and remain the world's "super market" as long as it remains politically stable in its transition from a plannned to a market economy. Telecommunications will continue to play a key role during this transition.