The tasks of preventive diplomacy and conflict prevention are neither self-evident nor value-neutral, as some of their proponents seem to believe. Diplomacy that aims to resolve long-standing conflicts may have to take sides and coerce powerful parties into concessions. Diplomacy that aims to manage conflict so that it does not become violent may have to sacrifice a quest for justice in deference to the powerful. Prevention might conflict with important national and even global interests. If, as President Clinton has suggested many times, the primary American interest in Bosnia is thwarting the spread of the war, then the arms embargo has been an unqualified success. If, however, the primary American and global interest has been denying Serbian aggression and upholding the principle of Bosnian sovereignty, then the embargo has failed.

A focus on prevention ignores the role that conflict plays in driving political change in societies. For grievances to be redressed, they must be vocalized. If they are vocalized, those with a stake in the status quo will attempt to suppress them. Often the balance of change depends on the ability of the grieved to amplify the conflict to increase their support. If we have learned anything from the disparate cases of conflict resolution in recent decades -- the civil rights movement in the United States, the fight for human rights in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the fight for national self-determination in the Middle East, the fight against apartheid in South Africa -- it is that some conflicts must be intensified before they are resolved.

Preventive diplomacy and conflict prevention do not lessen the difficulty of choices for leaders, nor do they really lessen costs. For either to succeed, policymakers must still spell out their interests, set priorities among cases, and balance goals with resources. The president will still need to educate the American people about the rationale behind a policy and convince them of the need for action. Absent well-defined interests, clear goals, and prudent judgment about acceptable costs and risks, policies of preventive diplomacy and conflict prevention simply mean that one founders early in a crisis instead of later.

This report is an expanded version of the executive summary of a much larger report, "Defense Industry Restructuring in Russia: Case Studies and Analysis." Many people contributed to that report, and to the underlying research. In writing that report, we did not attempt to reach consensus among the authors on the interpretations to be drawn from the data.

In this study we have looked at some of the most important elements of restructuring involved in the attempt to generate a viable civilian industrial sector from the assets of the military-industrial complex. Many other reform activities must be implemented at the national level to create the environment and infrastructure necessary for the functioning of a restructured industrial sector. Although not addressed here, they are important and difficult to implement. Another issue that we have not addressed is the pandemic presence of organized crime, which is a huge financial "tax" on economic activity as well as a disincentive to entrepreneurship and investment. I join those who believe that this is the largest single problem threatening the economic stability of Russia today.

This report comprises a description, summary, and analysis of an entrepreneurial training workshop for Russian nuclear scientists held at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), May 9-20, 1994. This is the third in a series of such workshops. The first workshop was held in Boston, July, 1992. The second was held in Moscow, June, 1993. The workshop was cosponsored by the U.s. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA), the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), and the Ministry of the Russian Federation for Atomic Energy (Minatom).

The goals of the workshop were to provide the Russian scientists with academic and practical background in several basic business areas, and then to assist them, in conjunction with American industry representatives, in the preparation of business plans for possible cooperative projects.

In this book, distinguished U.S. and Russian scholars analyze the great challenges confronting post-Communist Russia and examine the Yeltsin government's attempts to deal with them. Focusing on problems of state- and nation-building, economic reform, demilitarization, and the definition of Russia's national interests in its relations with the outside world, the authors trace the complex interplay between the communist legacy and efforts to chart new directions in both domestic and foreign policy in the years ahead.

Chapter 3 in The New Russia: Troubled Transformation, edited by Gail W. Lapidus.

In this book, edited by Gail W. Lapidus, distinguished U.S. and Russian scholars analyze the great challenges confronting post-Communist Russia and examine the Yeltsin government's attempts to deal with them. Focusing on problems of state- and nation-building, economic reform, demilitarization, and the definition of Russia's national interests in its relations with the outside world, the authors trace the complex interplay between the communist legacy and efforts to chart new directions in both domestic and foreign policy in the years ahead.

Based on interviews with participants and research in newly opened archives, the book reveals how the American atomic monopoly affected Stalin's foreign policy, the role of espionage in the evolution of the Soviet bomb, and the relationship between Soviet nuclear scientists and the country's political leaders.

The Soviet Union's economy was overindustrialized and highly militarized, with a disproportionate share of the military industry located in the Russian Republic. It is therefore not surprising that industrial production, including military production, has dropped sharply in the economic environment of the last few years. Many enterprises are shrinking, but few are failing completely or going into bankruptcy, and there is little disaggregation of large enterprises into smaller legal entities. Thus, with the exception of privatization, the general profile of Russian industry has not changed greatly.

The creation of new entrants (new business entities), to the extent that it is occurring, is one of the more promising aspects of the economic transition. However, the managers of many of the large enterprises resist divesting themselves of segments of their business. They fear that subsequent capitalization will result in a major reduction of value of the parent because the parent's contribution to the capitalized spin-off will not command much equity. Directors recognize the need for decentralization of management and financial responsibility, but many of them prefer to create divisions rather than subsidiaries. They also try to bring outside investment into the entire large enterprise rather than into a subsidiary. It is difficult for small groups of employees to simply leave and form a new (start-up) corporation because of the lack of commercial and social services infrastructure, especially capital markets, and the lack of rights to use state facilities.

With the ending of the Cold War, regional conflicts have come increasingly to the fore.  U.S. foreign policy goals in such areas continue to involve a mix of U.S. self-interest (as perceived by governing elites, Congress, and sometimes the electorate directly) and a desire to see conflicts in the world resolved more peacefully.  Both of these factors have led and will probably continue to lead to U.S. military interventions in some of these conflicts.

This paper addresses the issue of what role--if any--U.S. nuclear weapons should play in these interventions.  We focus on the following questions: given a military regional confrontation between the United States and a regional power, under what circumstances if any should nuclear weapons be used?  What arguments militate for and against their use? Can one come to an overall policy recommendation in this regard?

We are well aware that the best way to deal with military confrontations is to prevent them. To some degree, military confrontations represent a failure of policy.  Nevertheless, these confrontations do occur, and on occasion, the use of nuclear weapons has been and may again be contemplated.  The paper reviews some such possible occasions.

A remarkable tripartite collaboration. . . . A new and highly revealing account of how the Korean War began, based on a careful comparison of Chinese, Soviet, and even North Korean sources. The authors' achievement, from a historian's perspective, is roughly the equivalent of making a first flight around the hidden side of the moon. . . . An exemplary standard for the "new" Cold War history. -Atlantic Monthly

A fascinating and exciting book. Every expert on Soviet and Chinese foreign policy and every student of international relations and the Cold War will have to read it. I am awed by the materials that have been put together in this book; it is international collaboration at its very best. 

-Melvyn P. Leffler, University of Virginia

This title, the first using newly available resources from China and Russia, represents the opening of a new era in the study of Sino-Soviet relations and their effect on international politics. The credentials of the authors are the highest.
-Library Journal

This magisterial work provides the missing dimension of the Korean war - how policy was made on the communist side. Making use of previously unavailable Chinese and Soviet sources . . . this is likely to become the standard work on the subject.
-John Merrill, George Washington University.