The Cox Commission of the U.S. Congress was established in June 1998 to investigate concerns over Chinese acquisition of sensitive U.S. missile and space technology in connection with the launching of U.S. civilian satellites using Chinese launchers on Chinese territory. The investigations were broadened in October 1998 to include alleged security problems and possible espionage at the U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories. Some conclusions were released in January 1999 by the White House together with the administration's response. The full declassified (redacted) version of the report of the Cox Commission was released on May 25, 1999.

The U.S. Senate's rejection of the CTBT in October 1999 does not free the United States from the Treaty's norm against nuclear-weapon test explosions. Nor does it mean that the Senate will never approve the Treaty. But it does mean that the final U.S. position on the Treaty almost certainly will not be known until after the next U.S. presidential election in November 2000. Moreover, a debate to build domestic and international support for U.S. adherence to the Treaty's norm could help to produce eventual Senate approval.

This article sets out the constraints of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 (the “Act”), which generally prohibits active enforcement of civilian laws by the military, and describes the discretion of the military commander to assist civilian law enforcement in protecting America’s information infrastructure against computer-assisted attack. A primary purpose of this article is to help legal advisors to commanders and DoD civilian officials better understand the boundaries of command discretion so that commanders and officials can feel free to exercise proper command discretion to assist law enforcement according to military interests and their professional and personal ethics and ideals. Another primary purpose of the article is to appraise Congress of the Act, its prohibitions, and its application to assist in framing the policy debate about how to constrain or expand the discretion of commanders and other officials to most productively serve the American public.

The nuclear nonproliferation regime was challenged in 1998 by nuclear-weapon tests in India and Pakistan, by medium-range missile tests in those countries and in Iran and North Korea, by Iraq's defiance of UN Security Council resolutions requiring it to complete its disclosure of efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction, and by the combination of "loose nukes" and economic collapse in Russia. Additional threats to the regime's vitality came in 1999 from the erosion of American relations with both China and Russia that resulted from NATO's 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia--with additional harm to relations with China resulting from U.S. accusations of Chinese nuclear espionage and Taiwan's announcement that it was a state separate from China despite its earlier acceptance of a U.S.-Chinese "one China" agreement. Major threats to the regime also came from the continued stalemate on arms-control treaties in the Russian Duma and the U.S. Senate, from a change in U.S. policy to favor building a national defense against missile attack, and from a Russian decision to develop a new generation of small tactical nuclear weapons for defense against conventional attack.

This paper will discuss the effect some of these developments had on the 1999 Preparatory Committee (PrepCom) meeting of Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) parties to prepare for review of the NPT in 2000, and speculate about their likely future effect on the regime.

The Soviet Union placed a high priority on science and technology and built a huge assembly of research institutes, educational programs, design bureaus, and production enterprises embodying some measure of science and/or technology. This assembly concentrated overwhelmingly on military applications. Approximately three-quarters of this complex was located in Russia, but essential elements of many programs were located in other republics.

Starting in the Gorbachev regime there was a recognition that the economy was deteriorating and that it was necessary to reduce military expenditures and increase the civilian economy. A major element of this has been the attempt to direct a much greater effort toward the development of commercial products and services based upon technologies and skills developed in the military-industrial complex (MIC). This commercialization of Soviet and Russian military technology has been attempted by the Russians both independently, through conversion programs, and in cooperation with foreign partners. The conversion programs have had very limited success. The success of attempts at cooperative commercialization by U.S. companies and Russian enterprises have also been modest, but they illustrate workable models that could be utilized by other cooperative ventures. These cooperative commercialization ventures are the primary subject of this report.

This research is based primarily on the study of several cases of cooperative attempts by U.S. companies and Russian enterprises to commercialize Russian technology. Additional information has been gathered through participation in workshops and conferences including sessions or presentations on technology commercialization. There is no attempt to determine the total amount of such activity, but foreign investment of all types in Russia has been very small. These cases may not be representative of what is going on at many defense enterprises, especially those that do not have foreign partners. They do, however, show models of what can be achieved, as well as some of the problems encountered in technology commercialization.

This report and the conference it is based on are motivated by the sharp debate stemming from NATO's decision at Madrid to invite three new members to join its ranks. This debate is not partisan: it cleaves parties. It is profound because it has kindled the first truly geostrategic inquiry among Americans in the post-Cold War era. This inquiry has led Americans to advance from celebrating the end of the Cold War to confronting the design of Eurasia's future security system and America's role in it.

The Cross-Industry Working Team (XIWT), with the support of Stanford University Consortium for Research on Information Security and Policy (CRISP), sponsored a symposium on cross-industry activities aimed at improving the reliability, dependability, and robustness of the information infrastructure. The purpose of this meeting was to identify the steps required to get to a reliable and dependable information infrastructure serving the needs of society. The emphasis in the meeting was on cross-industry and potentially cross-sector (government, industry, and academia) activities to accomplish that goal. The symposium dealt with the following generic topics: organizational activities to identify and pursue critical issues, issues in data transport and communications, issues in applications and services, and potential research and development activities.

The presentations and discussions of the meeting identified several potential cross-industry activities that could further the effort toward a more reliable and trustworthy information infrastructure. These activities fell into four general categories:

• Information Exchange Activities
  
• Consensus Activities
  
• Collaborative Operational Activities
  
• Collaborative R&D Activities
  

Two specific activities were discussed in some detail.

Government Sharing of Best Practices

It was observed that many of the government agencies have undertaken extensive efforts to improve the trustworthiness of their information systems, enabling them to withstand both failures and attacks. There is an opportunity for these agencies to be exemplars for the community— sharing what they have learned in the process of trying to make their systems more robust. This was felt to be an example of how the government and industry could work together to improve the trustworthiness of the overall information infrastructure.

Collaborative Experimental Environments

A potentially very productive collaborative R&D activity was discussed, involving industry, academia, and government. Universities and university consortia are investigating new techniques for building reliable systems of unreliable components, and for dealing with large complex systems. There is a need to evaluate, validate, and assimilate such research results into the industry environment. To that end, a collaborative, multi-industry experimental environment was discussed. This environment, distributed across multiple organizations, could provide such an evaluation, validation, and assimilation opportunity.

A number of other potential cross-industry activities were also mentioned throughout the meeting, and are discussed briefly in the proceedings.

Attendees agreed (based on a follow-up survey and informal comments) that the symposium was well worthwhile, and that continued dialogue is important to achieving the shared goal of a trustworthy information infrastructure. XIWT plans on helping foster such dialogue as well as collaborative activities toward that goal.

Can the current global moratorium on nuclear weapon testing survive the May 1998 tests by India and Pakistan and the refusal of US Senate leaders to permit consideration of the Comprehensive Test Ban treaty (CTBT) by the Senate? If nuclear testing resumes by India or Pakistan - or by Britain, China, France, Russia, or the United States - will it be condemned by most of the world as if an international norm against testing was already in effect? What will be the likely consequences for nonproliferation if tests resume? This article seeks to show that there are norms operating against nuclear testing even though the CTBT has not been ratified, and that renewal of testing would have widespread consequences.

This report is the result of a workshop held in April 1998, when fifty policy experts, government officials and scholars met in Washington, DC. to discuss an issue of great import: the future of the relationship between Ukraine and NATO, This event, the Workshop on Ukraine-NATO Relations, was sponsored by the Harvard University Project on Ukrainian Security and the Stanford-Harvard Preventive Defense Project. The express goal of the workshop was to bring together representatives of Ukraine, NATO, and the United States so that they could collaborate on developing concrete recommendations for short and long-term next steps to broaden and deepen Ukraine-NATO relations.

The conveners of this workshop believed that the relationship developing [at that time] between Ukraine and NATO had the capacity to evolve into an important force for stability and security in Europe and the world, and to serve as a model for other countries in the region. While the NATO-Ukraine Charter and Ukraine's participation in the Partnership for Peace and the NATO peacekeeping mission in Bosnia provided a strong foundation, the longer-term direction of this very important relationship continued to be largely undefined. Further, they strongly believed that the Charter on a Distinctive Partnership signed by Ukraine and NATO in the summer of 1997 was only the first step towards institutionalizing the growing Ukraine-NATO relationship. Ensuring that the Charter was meaningful depended on concrete implementation of the cooperation anticipated in that document. Thus they decided that a concerted effort needed to be made to develop a gameplan for the future.

Background: In the 1980s, many medical organizations identified the prevention of nuclear war as one of the medical profession's most important goals. An assessment of the current danger is warranted given the radically changed context of the post–Cold War era.

Methods: We reviewed the recent literature on the status of nuclear arsenals and the risk of nuclear war. We then estimated the likely medical effects of a scenario identified by leading experts as posing a serious danger: an accidental launch of nuclear weapons. We assessed possible measures to reduce the risk of such an event.

Results: U.S. and Russian nuclear-weapons systems remain on high alert. This fact, combined with the aging of Russian technical systems, has recently increased the risk of an accidental nuclear attack. As a conservative estimate, an accidental intermediate-sized launch of weapons from a single Russian submarine would result in the deaths of 6,838,000 persons from firestorms in eight U.S. cities. Millions of other people would probably be exposed to potentially lethal radiation from fallout. An agreement to remove all nuclear missiles from high-level alert status and eliminate the capability of a rapid launch would put an end to this threat.

Conclusions: The risk of an accidental nuclear attack has increased in recent years, threatening a public health disaster of unprecedented scale. Physicians and medical organizations should work actively to help build support for the policy changes that would prevent such a disaster.