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57631. The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty: Next Steps

Author:
Thomas Jr. Graham and Christopher Chyba
Publication Date:
07-2000
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), Stanford University
Abstract:
Dr. Sid Drell: With the end of the Cold War there's been a major change in the U.S. nuclear weapons program, because the continuous cycle of developing and testing and deploying new warheads has ended. President George Bush announced in 1992 that we have no need for new nuclear weapons designs for deployment. It was this decision that, of course, opened the possibility of a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which is why we now have a Stockpile Stewardship Program with the three requirements: we must maintain an enduring stockpile that's reliable, effective and safe for the indefinite future without nuclear explosive testing; we must maintain competence in nuclear weapons; and we must retain a technical capability and a manufacturing infrastructure in order to respond if required to any change in strategic circumstances. This will be one of the factors in our net assessment of whether to enter a CTBT.
Topic:
Arms Control and Proliferation, International Cooperation, International Law, and Nuclear Weapons
Political Geography:
United States

57632. How Much Is Enough? A Risk-Management Approach to Computer Security

Author:
Kevin J. Soo Hoo
Publication Date:
06-2000
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), Stanford University
Abstract:
How much security is enough? No one today can satisfactorily answer this question for computer—related risks. The first generation of computer security risk modelers struggled with issues arising out of their binary view of security, ensnaring them in an endless web of assessment, disagreement, and gridlock. Even as professional risk managers wrest responsibility away from the first—generation technologists, they are still unable to answer the question with sufficient quantitative rigor. Their efforts are handicapped by a reliance on non—quantitative methodologies originally developed to address the deployment and organizational acceptance issues that plagued first—generation tools.
Topic:
Security and Science and Technology

57633. Impact On Global Warming Of Development And Structural Changes In The Electricity Sector Of Guangdong Province, China

Author:
Michael M. May, Chi Zhang, and Thomas C. Heller
Publication Date:
03-2000
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), Stanford University
Abstract:
This paper examines the impact on global warming of development and structural changes in the electricity sector of Guangdong Province, China, together with the possible effect of international instruments such as are generated by the Kyoto Protocol on that impact. The purpose of the paper is three–fold: to examine and analyze the data available, to put that data into an explanatory economic and institutional framework, and to analyze the possible application of international instruments such as CDMs in that locality. Our plans are to supplement this work with similar work elsewhere in China.
Topic:
Development, Economics, Energy Policy, and Environment
Political Geography:
China and Asia

57634. The U.S. Enlargement Strategy and Nuclear Weapons

Author:
Michael M. May
Publication Date:
03-2000
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), Stanford University
Abstract:
The United States is often accused of lacking a global security strategy. The United States, so the accusation goes, makes foreign policy and security decisions on an ad-hoc basis, prompted by the demands of politics and pressure groups, and in alternating bursts of idealism and realpolitik. Since none of these factors can safely be dismissed, there has to be something to the accusation. In an unpredictable world, a certain respect for the ad hoc may even be a good thing: a global strategy, carried out without regard to circumstances, would confine the United States to a conceptual straitjacket, depriving it of needed flexibility.
Topic:
Security, Foreign Policy, Defense Policy, Arms Control and Proliferation, and Nuclear Weapons
Political Geography:
United States

57635. A Verification Regime for Warhead Control

Author:
Liu Suping
Publication Date:
01-2000
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), Stanford University
Abstract:
After a brief period of progress, the U.S.-Russian nuclear reduction process has reached a stalemate. This situation causes us to rethink the following issues: What is the motivation for the two nuclear superpowers to conduct nuclear reductions? How can the focus of the nuclear arms reduction process be changed from verification of reduction of delivery vehicles to verification of reduction of warheads and nuclear materials? What is the objective for future nuclear reductions? What kind of verification regime will be required for future nuclear reductions?
Topic:
Arms Control and Proliferation and Nuclear Weapons
Political Geography:
Russia, United States, Europe, and Asia

57636. An Alternative Framework for the Control of Nuclear Materials

Author:
Robert L Rinne
Publication Date:
07-2000
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), Stanford University
Abstract:
The decade of the 1990s has seen renewed concerns over nuclear proliferation, both horizontal and vertical. While many in the arms control community focus on numbers, it is control that is the most important factor—the detonation of just one nuclear weapon would be an international catastrophe. Rather than concentrating on numbers, the regime defined herein centers on enhancing the safety and security being provided nuclear weapons and weapons-usable fissile materials. The proposal in the paper is called the Nuclear Weapons Control Treaty (NWCT) and referred to as New Court. The emphasis is on control rather than disarmament, protection from unintended or unauthorized use rather than elimination. New Court, once in place, would provide an environment in which the necessary audits and accountability for undertaking dramatic reductions in the numbers of weapons and the quantities of weapons-usable materials could be made with much greater confidence than exists today. However, it will be decades (if ever) before the number of nuclear weapons goes to zero. In the meantime, it is paramount that comprehensive safety and security be established and maintained.
Topic:
Security, Arms Control and Proliferation, and Nuclear Weapons

57637. Women's Rights are Human Rites: Women's human rights activists as cross-cultural theorists

Author:
Brooke A. Ackerly
Publication Date:
10-2000
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for International Studies, University of Southern California
Abstract:
The familiar human rights paradigm, manifested in the Universal Declaration on Human Rights and subsequent related international documents, is problematic. It cannot deal with 1) rights violations associated with a country's cultural norms that define what it means to be “human” and 2) rights violations that do not take the paradigmatic form of discrimination. Further, the framework for human rights set out by the Universal Declaration on Human Rights is insufficient for 3) adjudicating between seemingly competing liberal rights or between liberal and other rights, 4) attributing responsibility for human rights violations by state and non-state actors, attributing responsibility for structural causes of human rights violations, or imputing political import to private actions, and 5) reconciling the concept of universal human rights with cultural norms that violate certain universal human rights. These five problems are interrelated. Cross- cultural human rights theorizing is promising, but in its current articulations, it tends to focus on the last of these five problems. Moreover, it relies either on models of discourse that are exclusionary or on models of culture articulated by elites. Drawing on the theory implicit in their actions, I argue that women's human rights activists give us a way of theorizing that addresses the problems with the existing paradigm without being exclusive or elitist.
Topic:
International Relations, Gender Issues, and Human Rights

57638. 'So how do you do culture?': A workshop to discuss methodological approaches to studying culture in International Relations

Author:
Patricia M. Goff and Jacinta O'Hagan
Publication Date:
04-2000
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for International Studies, University of Southern California
Abstract:
Increasingly, scholars of International Relations are acknowledging that attention to the various dimensions of culture can expand our understanding of world politics. This workshop was premised on the assumption that culture is a significant factor in international relations. Its objective was not to ask whether culture matters in IR; it assumes that it does. Instead, it asked “how do we study the influence of culture? What methodological approaches are available to us?” Part of the difficulty in addressing these questions lies in the epistemological and methodological divide that animates many IR debates. While discussions inevitably touched on these issues, the emphasis was on productive discussions of method. Rather than reprising debates over the relative merits of quantitative versus qualitative methods, or rationalist versus social construction approaches, the workshop sought to draw on all of these traditions, in an effort to assemble a problem-driven methodological toolkit that could make confident assertions and arguments about an increasingly important area of inquiry.
Topic:
International Relations

57639. Syria and Weapons of Mass Destruction

Author:
Anthony H. Cordesman
Publication Date:
10-2000
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)
Abstract:
The Middle East is the scene of an ongoing process of proliferation. Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Libya, and Syria all have significant capabilities to deliver weapons of mass destruction Israel, and Syria has made considerable progress in acquiring weapons of mass destruction since the mid-1970s. Syria has never shown a serious interest in nuclear weapons, although it did seek to buy two small research reactors from the PRC in 1992, including a 24-megawatt reactor, and purchased a small 30-kilowatt research reactor from the PRC in 1991. It allowed inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency for the first time in February 1992. Syria does, however, deploy sheltered missiles, armed with chemical warheads, as a means of both countering Israel's nuclear forces and maintaining its rivalry with Iraq. As the attached article Syrian Defense Minister Gen. Mustafa Tlas shows, Syria has a major interest in biological warfare, and the fact his article first appeared in public in an Iranian journal may not entirely be a coincidence.
Topic:
Security, Nuclear Weapons, Terrorism, and Weapons of Mass Destruction
Political Geography:
Iraq, Iran, Middle East, Israel, Libya, Syria, and Egypt

57640. Defending America: Redefining the Conceptual Borders of Homeland Defense

Author:
Anthony H. Cordesman
Publication Date:
09-2000
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)
Abstract:
There is a wide spectrum of potential threats to the American homeland that do not involve the threat of overt attacks by states using long-range missiles or conventional military forces. Such threats include covert attacks by state actors, state use of proxies, independent terrorist and extremist attacks by foreign groups or individuals, and independent terrorist and extremist attacks by residents of the US. These threats are currently limited in scope and frequency. No pattern of actual attacks on US territory has yet emerged that provides a clear basis for predicting how serious any given form of attack will be in the future, what means of attack will be used, or how lethal new forms of attack will be if they are successful.
Topic:
Security, Defense Policy, Nuclear Weapons, Terrorism, and Weapons of Mass Destruction
Political Geography:
United States and America