Timely reunion panel hosted by Stanford president John Hennessy, moderated by Stanford alum Ted Koppel, and featuring Bill Perry and George Shultz.

The final decade of the 20th century was a time of great optimism. The fall of the Iron Curtain ushered in a new era of democracy and freedom for millions. The expansion of the European Union promised to open borders to trade and opportunity. The technology revolutions of the 1990s promised to bridge cultural gaps and unite diverse people.

Yet, in the first decade of the 21st century, this optimism has faded in the face of myriad threats: the menace of terrorism and nuclear proliferation, the danger of virulent pandemics, the global dependence on oil from volatile regions, and the far-reaching and often unsettling implications of an interconnected planet.

In such uneasy times, is it safe to feel safe? What is the way forward in the midst of these challenges? What will it take? What is Stanford doing to help address these issues?

Panelists

John L. Hennessy, Stanford President and Bing Presidential Professor

Jean-Pierre Garnier, MBA '74, CEO, GlaxoSmithKline

The Hon. Anthony M. Kennedy, '58, Supreme Court Justice

William J. Perry, '49, MS '50, former Secretary of Defense, Berberian Professor in the School of Engineering

Dr. Lucy Shapiro, Ludwig Professor of developmental biology and cancer researcher

George P. Shultz, former Secretary of State, Ford Distinguished Fellow, Hoover Institution

Jerry Yang, '90, MS '90, co-founder, Yahoo!

As a model of a democratizing and secular Muslim state that has been a stalwart ally for more than 50 years, Turkey is of enormous strategic importance to the United States and Europe, especially at a time when the widening chasm between the West and the Islamic world looms as the greatest foreign policy challenge. Yet Ankara's relations with Washington are strained - over Iraq, Cyprus, Syria, Iran and Hamas - and Turkey's prospects for joining the European Union remain uncertain.

As Washington prepares for a visit Wednesday by Turkey's foreign minister, Abdullah Gul, the United States and Turkey should explore three initiatives to repair and revitalize their relationship.

First, although the United States and Turkey share broad goals in Iraq, the situation there threatens a potential breach in relations. The Turks feel the war in Iraq has undermined their security by stirring Kurdish nationalism. It also coincided with renewed terrorist attacks mounted by the Kurdistan Worker's Party from inside Iraq. To address this challenge, the United States should initiate a trilateral dialogue on the future of Iraq with Turkey and representatives of the Iraqi government, including Kurdish leaders.

If the effort to build a functioning Iraqi government is successful, this trilateral consultative process will support the common goal of a unified and sovereign Iraq; should the Iraqi government fail, the dialogue will provide a mechanism for managing some of the worst potential consequences.

Second, Washington must make it a diplomatic priority to persuade skeptics in Europe to take a more positive approach toward Turkey. Peering into the future and considering the strategic implications of a Turkey unmoored - or, more darkly, a Turkey that turns against its traditional partners, aligning itself more closely with Damascus, Moscow or Tehran - should be instructive.

Washington needs to make the case to its European allies that delaying Turkey's accession to the EU could harm their security. The longer accession takes, the more likely it is that Turks will become disenchanted with the EU and look elsewhere for opportunities; it is also more likely that Turkey's impressive political reform process, which began in 2002, will stall.

Further, Washington should take a leadership role in working to resolve the Cyprus conflict, which threatens to create further obstacles to Turkish EU membership. Rather than waiting for a new UN or EU initiative on the future of the island, America should catalyze a renewed negotiation process. A special Cyprus coordinator would work with the UN and EU to develop a new plan for reuniting the island, encourage European leaders to use their collective clout to require more constructive behavior from the Cypriot government, and coordinate Washington's political, diplomatic and economic steps to break Turkish Cypriots from their international isolation.

Third, the United States and Turkey should establish a high-level commission that meets twice a year and provides a structured mechanism for interaction across agencies of government, nongovernmental organizations and the private sector. At the outset, three working groups should be launched, focusing on security, economic and commercial ties, and educational and cultural exchanges.

A U.S.-Turkey cooperation commission could facilitate the re-establishment of the sustained interaction that characterizes America's strongest partnerships, and provide a foundation for keeping Turkey aligned with the West should Ankara's bid for EU membership ultimately fail.

As tensions over the outcome in Iraq mount, the prospects for generating positive momentum in U.S.- Turkey relations are diminishing. The consequences of a disoriented Turkey would be even greater than a failure in Iraq. America and Europe must do everything they can to ensure that Turkey remains firmly anchored in the West.

Steven A. Cook and Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall are fellows at the Council on Foreign Relations.

It's been said that World War I was the chemists' war and World War II the physicists' war, but that World War III is destined to be the mathematicians' war.

With the gravest threat to U.S. security now posed by rogue terrorists who simultaneously hold a grudge and have access to weapons of mass destruction, some of this country's prime human calculators are on the case.

Combatting terrorism not with mortars and missiles but with mathematical models, they intend to prove this theorem: There literally is safety in numbers.

In their vanguard is an amiable Stanford University professor who, by devoting himself to the application of math principles to doomsday scenarios, is beginning to acquire the nickname "Dr. Doom." The attacks of Sept. 11 inspired mathematician Lawrence Wein to channel his expertise into some of the most compelling questions of our time.

He has ciphered the risks of our "woefully inadequate" inspection of container ships, assessed the effectiveness of border-control fingerprint checks to spot terrorists, and performed what may well be the first math analyses of hypothetical botulism, anthrax and smallpox contaminations.

Recall the agitation last year over warnings that the nation's milk supply was vulnerable, based on the calculation that one terrorist with a few grams of botulinum could contaminate a tanker and potentially poison 100,000 gallons of milk? That's just one of many tidings of comfort and joy brought to you by Wein.

Another such upper is that just about 6 percent of containers shipped into U.S. ports will be categorized as suspicious and subjected to tests for a nuclear device, based on a system that relies largely on reporting by the shipper. The rest, Wein noted, "just waltz right into the country without an inspector laying an eye on them."

At Stanford's Graduate School of Business, he teaches a core course in operations, and he says the parallels are strikingly similar: Just as McDonald's needs a well-designed distribution system to get its hamburgers out quickly, so the government needs a well-designed distribution system to get vaccines and antibiotics to citizens who might sicken or die from a bioterror attack. In math lingo, some of these computations rest on "queueing theory" -- the notion that a lot of needy people must line up behind a limited number of distributors.

And what do we do after crunching millions of numbers to arrive at specific prescriptions? Wein has taken on the role of necessary nag to a torpid federal bureaucracy and recalcitrant industries.

In fact, the feds scrambled to try to suppress publication of his damning milk study as a threat to national security -- an argument the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences rejected before publishing the work.

These days, Wein regularly testifies at congressional hearings, addresses scientific forums and pens op-ed pieces in national newspapers about precisely what the government should be doing -- and where it is falling short.

"I believe my work demonstrates that numbers really matter, and we need to pay attention to what they tell us," said Wein, a critic of the federal government's homeland security failures in key areas, particularly at the ports. "I really don't bring my own personal political views into this -- I would be just as critical of the federal bureaucracy if a Democrat were in the White House.

"Bureaucracy just isn't designed to respond nimbly."

On the other hand, politicians are eager to do something, anything, that might thwart a terror attack or save lives. But in an information vacuum, that makes them easy prey for entrepreneurs hawking all kinds of safety gadgets.

So, much of Wein's math analysis goes beyond documenting threats to assess the most effective, cost-efficient remedies.

Take the milk scare, for example. Wein urged the government to mandate that milk tanks and trucks be locked, that two people be present when it is transferred along each part of the supply chain, and that milk truck drivers use a 15 minute test to detect any toxins. The estimated cost of all this: 2 cents per gallon.

Some other experts disputed Wein's assumptions, and dairy industry groups insisted they already had taken extra steps such as raising pasteurization temperatures to secure the milk supply. They dismissed the scenarios Wein described as "highly unlikely or impossible."

To avoid being victimized by a radioactive device aboard a tanker -- otherwise known as a "poor man's missile" -- he and colleague Stephen Flynn of the Council on Foreign Relations advocate using techniques such as gamma-ray imaging to screen 100 percent of containers. They calculate the cost at $7 per container.

Some of Wein's calculations have translated into real reform.

In 2004, he presented to the White House his findings that the system of collecting only two fingerprints from incoming foreign visitors ran a high risk of missing terrorists because so many prints turned out to be of poor quality. His solution was simple: Take prints from all 10 digits. The government adopted it.

His 2003 research into the most effective response to an anthrax attack prompted pilot programs that are now testing his finding that the best way to widely distribute antibiotics would be by mail carriers, who already go door to door.

Albert Einstein once observed: "As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality."

And sure enough, one of the impediments to fighting terrorists with mathematics is the paucity of hard data.

An anthrax scenario illustrates the point. Estimates of fatalities per kilogram of poisonous agent released vary from a low of zero to a high of 660,000. That's because of variables: the dose required to cause infection, the percentage of people who survive infection, the degree of aerosol dispersion, the density of the population, the environmental stability of the agent and the effectiveness of a public health system response.

As Wein acknowledges, "It's not like we can do massive clinical trials on this."

The trail of what-ifs is so convoluted that in 2002 the National Academy of Sciences cited "an irreducible uncertainly of several orders of magnitude in the number of people who will be infected in an open-air release."

This makes some experts suspicious of anybody's calculations, even from a researcher with a pedigree like Wein's.

"With so much uncertainly surrounding the outcome of a bioweapons attack, it does not make sense to plan extensive biodefense programs when more-certain public threats, particularly those involving nuclear weapons, require attention," argued Allison Macfarlane, research associate in the Science, Technology and Global Security Working Group at MIT.

But Wein is undeterred, and is busy on new assessments. Yet he insists his work has not impaired his ability to sleep soundly.

"People really are much more likely to suffer from cancer than a terrorist attack, but that doesn't merit the same attention," he said. "We should do what makes sense to protect ourselves from both."

One day perhaps Marina Agaltsova will join the diplomatic corps at a foreign embassy, or help write policy positions for the Russian government. Coit Blacker hopes that the lessons from her Stanford-sponsored distance-learning course will stick.

Agaltsova was among a group of Russian students brought to the provincial city of Yaroslavl in late May for an academic conference that capped this year's five distance-learning courses offered at nine universities across Russia by the Initiative on Distance Learning at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

Through videotaped lectures, web readings and online chat sessions with senior research scholar Kathryn Stoner-Weiss and 14 other Stanford instructors, students in Democracy, Development and Rule of Law explored democratic ideals and practices, studying examples in Latin America, Asia and the former Soviet Union. "The course taught me that there is a black side to the reforms" that followed perestroika in Russia, Agaltsova says. "I learned more about Russian history [in the course] than I had learned in school."

That's the idea, says FSI director Blacker, who wants to re-establish the teaching of critical analysis, lost under decades of Communist rule, in Russian universities. "The social sciences were disemboweled," he says. He wants to develop future generations of diplomats and policy makers whose worldview is shaped "by how they think, not what they're told to think."

This year, to cap off the courses, 40 students came to Yaroslavl to participate in a mock United Nations Security Council session addressing Iran's nuclear program. They traveled from the farthest reaches of the Russian hinterlands, like Amur State University in Blagoveschensk, 4,800 miles from Moscow.

The arms control simulation is a teaching tool developed for the Stanford undergraduate class International Security in a Changing World, taught by Blacker and Scott Sagan, a political science professor and director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation within FSI. Sagan has exported the simulation to several universities in the United States where his former graduate students now teach--UC-Berkeley, Dartmouth, Columbia, Duke--but this was the first one he has conducted overseas.

This year's scenario was the International Atomic Energy Agency's referral of Iran to the U.N. Security Council for failure to fully disclose its nuclear activities. During the simulation, students submitted proposals to their heads of state, played by Blacker, Sagan and Russian faculty members. By the end of the two-day session, delegates had overcome seemingly intractable differences during four intensive sessions led by Stanford third-year law student Matthew Rojansky, acting as U.N. undersecretary-general for legal affairs. The council's resolution gave Iran three months to comply with the IAEA's requests and provided for Iran to obtain nuclear fuel from Russia, with the production and waste disposal to occur on Russian soil under IAEA controls.

After the session closed, students set aside their delegate roles to reflect on what they had learned. Narina Tadevosian, a student from Yakutsk State in far eastern Siberia, said she was surprised at "how strict Russia was" in taking a leading role in the session.

"If only it were so in real life," she added.