In 1920, the Irish Republican Army reportedly considered a terrifying new weapon: typhoid-contaminated milk. Reading from an IRA memo he claimed had been captured in a recent raid, Sir Hamar Greenwood described to Parliament the ease with which "fresh and virulent cultures" could be obtained and introduced into milk served to British soldiers. Although the plot would only target the military, the memo expressed concern that the disease might spread to the general population.

Although the IRA never used this weapon, the incident illustrates that poisoning a nation's milk supply with biological agents hardly ranks as a new concept. Yet just two weeks ago, the National Academy of Sciences' journal suspended publication of an article analyzing the vulnerability of the U.S. milk supply to botulinum toxin, because the Department of Health and Human Services warned that information in the article provided a "road map for terrorists."

That approach may sound reasonable, but the effort to suppress scientific information reflects a dangerously outdated attitude. Today, information relating to microbiology is widely and instantly available, from the Internet to high school textbooks to doctoral theses. Our best defense against those who would use it as a weapon is to ensure that our own scientists have better information. That means encouraging publication.

The article in question, written by Stanford University professor Lawrence Wein and graduate student Yifan Liu, describes a theoretical terrorist who obtains a few grams of botulinum toxin on the black market and pours it into an unlocked milk tank. Transferred to giant dairy silos, the toxin contaminates a much larger supply. Because even a millionth of a gram may be enough to kill an adult, hundreds of thousands of people die. (Wein summarized the article in an op-ed he wrote for the New York Times.) The scenario is frightening, and it is meant to be -- the authors want the dairy industry and its federal regulators to take defensive action.

The national academy's suspension of the article reflects an increasing concern that publication of sensitive data can provide terrorists with a how-to manual, but it also brings to the fore an increasing anxiety in the scientific community that curbing the dissemination of research may impair our ability to counter biological threats. This dilemma reached national prominence in fall 2001, when 9/11 and the anthrax mailings drew attention to another controversial article. This one came from a team of Australian scientists.

Approximately every four years, Australia suffers a mouse infestation. In 1998, scientists in Canberra began examining the feasibility of using a highly contagious disease, mousepox, to alter the rodents' ability to reproduce. Their experiments yielded surprising results. Researchers working with mice naturally resistant to the disease found that combining a gene from the rodent's immune system (interleukin-4) with the pox virus and inserting the pathogen into the animals killed them -- all of them. Plus 60 percent of the mice not naturally resistant who had been vaccinated against mousepox.

In February 2001 the American SocietyforMicrobiologists' (ASM) Journal of Virology reported the findings. Alarm ensued. The mousepox virus is closely related to smallpox -- one of the most dangerous pathogens known to humans. And the rudimentary nature of the experiment demonstrated how even basic, inexpensive microbiology can yield devastating results.

When the anthrax attacks burst into the news seven months later, the mousepox case became a lightning rod for deep-seated fears about biological weapons. The Economist reported rumors about the White House pressuring American microbiology journals to restrict publication of similar pieces. Samuel Kaplan, chair of the ASM publications board, convened a meeting of the editors in chief of the ASM's nine primary journals and two review journals. Hoping to head off government censorship, the organization -- while affirming its earlier decision -- ordered its peer reviewers to take national security and the society's code of ethics into account.

Not only publications came under pressure, but research itself. In spring 2002 the newly formed Department of Homeland Security developed an information-security policy to prevent certain foreign nationals from gaining access to a range of experimental data. New federal regulations required that particular universities and laboratories submit to unannounced inspections, register their supplies and obtain security clearances. Legislation required that all genetic engineering experiments be cleared by the government.

On the mousepox front, however, important developments were transpiring. Because the Australian research had entered the public domain, scientists around the world began working on the problem. In November 2003, St. Louis University announced an effective medical defense against a pathogen similar to -- but even more deadly than -- the one created in Australia. This result would undoubtedly not have been achieved, or at least not as quickly, without the attention drawn by the ASM article.

The dissemination of nuclear technology presents an obvious comparison. The 1946 Atomic Energy Act classifies nuclear information "from birth." Strong arguments can be made in favor of such restrictions: The science involved in the construction of the bomb was complex and its application primarily limited to weapons. A short-term monopoly was possible. Secrecy bought the United States time to establish an international nonproliferation regime. And little public good would have been achieved by making the information widely available.

Biological information and the issues surrounding it are different. It is not possible to establish even a limited monopoly over microbiology. The field is too fundamental to the improvement of global public health, and too central to the development of important industries such as pharmaceuticals and plastics, to be isolated. Moreover, the list of diseases that pose a threat ranges from high-end bugs, like smallpox, to common viruses, such as influenza. Where does one draw the line for national security?

Experience suggests that the government errs on the side of caution. In 1951, the Invention Secrecy Act gave the government the authority to suppress any design it deemed detrimental to national defense. Certain areas of research-- atomic energy and cryptography -- consistently fell within its purview. But the state also placed secrecy orders on aspects of cold fusion, space technology, radar missile systems, citizens band radio voice scramblers, optical engineering and vacuum technology. Such caution, in the microbiology realm, may yield devastating results. It is not in the national interest to stunt research into biological threats.

In fact, the more likely menace comes from naturally occurring diseases. In 1918 a natural outbreak of the flu infected one-fifth of the world's population and 25 percent of the United States'. Within two years it killed more than 650,000 Americans, resulting in a 10-year drop in average lifespan. Despite constant research into emerging strains, the American Lung Association estimates that the flu and related complications kill 36,000 Americans each year. Another 5,000 die annually from food-borne pathogens -- an extraordinarily large number of which have no known cure. The science involved in responding to these diseases is incremental, meaning that small steps taken by individual laboratories around the world need to be shared for larger progress to be made.

The idea that scientific freedom strengthens national security is not new. In the early 1980s, a joint Panel on Scientific Communication and National Security concluded security by secrecywasuntenable. Its report called instead for security by accomplishment -- ensuring strength through advancing research. Ironically, one of the three major institutions participating was the National Academy of Sciences -- the body that suspended publication of the milk article earlier this month.

The government has a vested interest in creating a public conversation about ways in which our society is vulnerable to attack. Citizens are entitled to know when their milk, their water, their bridges, their hospitals lack security precautions. If discussion of these issues is censored, the state and private industry come under less pressure to alter behavior; indeed, powerful private interests may actively lobby against having to install expensive protections. And failure to act may be deadly.

Terrorists will obtain knowledge. Our best option is to blunt their efforts to exploit it. That means developing, producing and stockpiling effective vaccines. It means funding research into biosensors -- devices that detect the presence of toxic substances in the environment -- and creating more effective reporting requirements for early identification of disease outbreaks. And it means strengthening our public health system.

For better or worse, the cat is out of the bag -- something brought home to me last weekend when I visited the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose. One hands-on exhibit allowed children to transfer genetic material from one species to another. I watched a 4-year-old girl take a red test tube whose contents included a gene that makes certain jellyfish glow green. Using a pipette, she transferred the material to a blue test tube containing bacteria. She cooled the solution, then heated it, allowing the gene to enter the bacteria. Following instructions on a touch-screen computer, she transferred the contents to a petri dish, wrote her name on the bottom, and placed the dish in an incubator. The next day, she could log on to a Web site to view her experiment, and see her bacteria glowing a genetically modified green.

In other words, the pre-kindergartener (with a great deal of help from the museum) had conducted an experiment that echoed the Australian mousepox study. Obviously, this is not something the child could do in her basement. But just as obviously, the state of public knowledge is long past anyone's ability to censor it.

Allowing potentially harmful information to enter the public domain flies in the face of our traditional way of thinking about national security threats. But we have entered a new world. Keeping scientists from sharing information damages our ability to respond to terrorism and to natural disease, which is more likely and just as devastating. Our best hope to head off both threats may well be to stay one step ahead.

When the 9.0-magnitude earthquake and resulting tsunami struck Asia and East Africa on December 26, Indonesia took a devastating hit. More than 100,000 people died and another 500,000 were left homeless, with some experts predicting that the final death toll may rise above 250,000. Aceh province on the northern tip of the island of Sumatra, where the Free Aceh Movement rebel forces have been fighting against the Indonesian Defense Forces for almost 30 years, was at the center of the destruction. Donald Emmerson, a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for International Studies and director of its Southeast Asia Forum, is an Indonesia specialist who has been traveling to Aceh since the late 1960s. He's finishing a book entitled What is Indonesia? Identity, Calamity, Democracy.

STANFORD: What do we need to know about Aceh province?

That it's a wonderful place, that the people have a tradition of hospitality, and that they share with you what they have. It's very sad that it has been subject to so much violence and conflict for so many years.

What's been happening in recent times?

Since May 2003, Aceh has been virtually off-limits to foreigners. The [military] reasoning is that it's for security reasons, but there's always been a suspicion that it's also because bad things -- horrible things, killings and so forth -- are done in the dark, and they don't want people to watch. Certainly the human rights community has had great difficulty getting access to Aceh.

What could happen as a result of some 1,000 representatives of aid organizations being on the ground there?

The opening of Aceh to foreign and domestic humanitarian aid workers has the potential to introduce elements that can serve as a check on human rights abuses. Obviously, the time for mourning is not over. But if we can insert a silver lining in this very dark cloud, it might be that the devastation of the tsunami opens up an opportunity to rebuild much of Aceh, and that it will require cooperation among all Acehnese. I am cautiously optimistic about the opening that this catastrophe represents for trying to lessen the man-made pain of the Acehnese people.

What might a rebuilt Aceh look like?

The plan is to take villages that were destroyed, and maybe even the town of Meulaboh on the west coast, which was the worst hit, and move them inland a certain number of kilometers. Then, construct mangrove swamps as barriers against a repetition of the tsunami, and also to protect the soil from erosion and generate the possibility of brackish-water fishing for the livelihoods of the people. This is a massive effort that is going to last for years and years. Authorities have estimated that the rebuilding costs in Aceh could run to $2.2 billion.

Fishing villages would no longer exist on the coast?

I spent nine months in fishing villages in East Java, and I found that the relationship of the populations on the coast to the ocean is not necessarily what one would expect. They are not happy bathers on the beach, fishing is an extremely dangerous operation, and the ocean is considered a wild place.

Many fishing communities are overfishing the source. I wrote a long report for the Ministry of Agriculture's fisheries office, arguing that what Indonesia ought to do was take the money the government was spending to supply nylon fishing nets and higher horsepower outboard motors, and spend it on wives who were involved in craft commodities. The women have commercial skills, and getting microcredit programs for women to set up shops and expand is the future.

How will religion figure in that future?

Aceh is known in Indonesia as "the front porch of Mecca." The Acehnese are almost entirely Muslim. While there's a tendency among Americans to presume that [a Muslim nation] must be fanatic, Indonesia remains an overwhelmingly moderate society. There is a poignant photo, which hasn't been circulated in the U.S. press, of a sign at a depot for humanitarian relief supplies. It reads, "If you try to steal this material, you will be responsible to Allah."

The following is supplemental material that did not appear in the print edition of STANFORD.

What was the overall impact of the tsunami in Indonesia?

I think it's important to keep in mind that each of the affected countries was affected in a somewhat different way. In Sri Lanka, an estimated 70 percent of the coastline of the entire island was affected, so the economic consequences there are going to be more severe than the damage that was done to Indonesia. If you go down the west coast of Sumatra, you will see damage, but the main damage was overwhelmingly concentrated in a single province, Aceh, which represents less than 2 percent of the total population of Indonesia. Aceh got a double-barrel assault -- from the earthquake and the tsunami. The death toll was horrid, with a huge loss of life, but it was concentrated on the coasts.

How does Aceh's history set it apart from the rest of Indonesia?

The first record we have of an Islamic sultanate in what is now Indonesia is a stone carving dated 1297, on the north coast of Aceh. Aceh was closest to the Middle East, and there were Muslim traders who would go short distances, pause, sell, buy and reload. Long-distance Arab-Malay trade finally got to Indonesia, and the logical landfall was Ache.

Then there were tremendous and unequal casualties in the war against the Dutch, who recruited Ambonese troops to fight a colonial war in Aceh in the 19th century. There's a photograph of Dutch troops standing on the dead bodies of Acehese rebels. The Acehnese war lasted a long time, and it was one of the last parts of the archipelago to be fully brought into the colonial orbit.

Aceh has been for some time under a state of military emergency, and an estimated 13,000 have died as a result of the [rebel] war since 1976. But the tsunami has changed all that. Looking at it from a political science point of view, if we don't begin trying to analyze the situation, I'm not sure we can make it better down the road.

What needs to happen?

In a time of crisis what you need is efficiency and effectiveness, and you need somebody to stand up and say, "This is the way things are going to be." But the governor of Aceh is, by all accounts, exceedingly corrupt. He is in Jakarta now, in detention, awaiting trial on corruption charges. So you don't even have an active, sitting provincial government leader to take charge.

The number of members of the provincial administration who died in the tsunami is quite high, and the central government has had to send up 300 replacements from Jakarta. The administration of Aceh has essentially been completely taken over by the central government. This is potentially unhelpful, depending on how sensitive and effective the central government is and how corrupt the atmosphere is within which masses of foreign aid are moving.

The somewhat optimistic scenario is that now Aceh is even more dependent on the central government than it was before, with the need to rebuild substantial portions of its coastline. So a leader of the [freedom] movement [might] look down the road and say, "It's unrealistic for us at this point, with this incredible body blow to our economy, to expect that we can now somehow take over Aceh. We are more dependent than we were before on the central government."

And, conversely, in Jakarta there might be the thinking that since Aceh now so obviously needs support within the republic, "We are in a stronger position, and therefore we can afford to be generous, and to extend concessions, short of independence, that will take advantage of this." The bottom line is that two enemies who were at each other's throats now face a third enemy -- nature.

Are there other voices that should be heard in Aceh?

One of the difficulties of having negotiations between the Acehnese Freedom Movement and the central government is that it tends to exclude other Acehnese views, which is one reason why negotiations that took place previously were not successful. Acehnese society is pretty diverse, and the Acehnese Freedom Movement does not represent all Acehnese, not to mention the Javanese and Indonesians who have migrated into the province, who are university students and [members of] religious communities.

The conflict has lasted for 30 years in its present form, and it has created such enmities that there is no particular mood to compromise. The government has no incentive to reach out, and the Acehnese Freedom Movement remains intransigent. In the long run, those who disagree with a so-called freedom movement are in the shadows and their views tend not to be reported. My hope is that as these voices are allowed to take part in determining the future of Aceh and its political leadership, the polarization will decrease and there will emerge a kind of more moderate center, in favor of autonomy and full rights.

In the 1990s, the United States cut military assistance programs to Indonesia. Is the relationship between the two countries improving?

SBY -- Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono -- is a former military man, but he's identified as relatively clean, and associated with a somewhat more reform-minded element within the military. More than any previous president of Indonesia, he has had exposure to the United States. Certainly this is an opportunity for an improved relationship between Indonesia and the U.S.

PALO ALTO, Calif. -- The European Union is increasingly showing a new independent stance on foreign-policy issues as the logic of its industrial and economic integration plays out in the international arena.

Already the EU has taken a distinct and independent approach to both the Israel-Palestinian conflict and the nuclear crisis in Iran. Now it has broken ranks over the Korean Peninsula, fed up and concerned with the failure to resolve the ongoing crisis over North Korea's development of nuclear arms.

Reflecting this new stance, the European Parliament this week passed a comprehensive resolution on the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and nuclear arms in North Korea and Iran:

• It urges the resumption of the supply of heavy fuel oil (HFO) to North Korea in exchange for a verified freeze of the Yongbyong heavy-water reactor, which is capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium, to avoid a further deterioration in the situation. At the same time it is calling for the European Council and Commission to offer to pay for these HFO supplies.
• It urges the Council of Ministers to reconsider paying 4 million Euros of the suspension costs for KEDO (the Korea Energy Development Organization) to South Korea to ensure the continued existence of an organization that could play a key role in delivering energy supplies during a settlement process.
• It demands that the Commission and Council request EU participation in future six-party talks, making it clear that the EU will in the future adopt a "no say, no pay" principle in respect to the Korean Peninsula. Having already placed more than $650 million worth of humanitarian and development aid into the North, it is no longer willing to be seen merely as a cash cow. This view was backed in the debate by the Luxembourg presidency and follows a line initially enunciated by Javier Solana's representatives last month in the Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee.
• It urges North Korea to rejoin the NPT, return to the six-party talks and allow the resumption of negotiations.

The EP cannot substantiate U.S. allegations that North Korea has an HEU (highly enriched uranium) program or that North Korea provided HEU to Libya. It has called for its Foreign Affairs Committee to hold a public hearing to evaluate the evidence. "Once bitten, twice shy" is the consequence of U.S. claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

The world order is changing; the EU -- like China -- is emerging as a significant global power economically with the euro challenging the dollar as the global currency (even prior to the latest enlargement from 15 to 25 member states, the EU's economy was bigger than that of the United States). Speaking at Stanford University earlier this month, former U.S. foreign policy adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski pointed out that the EU, U.S., China, Japan and India will be the major powers in the new emerging global order. Since the new Asia will have three out of the five major players, he stressed the importance of engaging with it.

How will those already in play respond? Some may claim that statements by North Korea welcoming the EU's involvement and participation are merely polite, inoffensive small talk that cannot be taken seriously. Yet there have been a spate of pro-EU articles appearing in Rodong Sinmun, the daily newspaper of the Central Committee of the Korean Workers Party, since 2001.

Of 128 EU-related articles between 2001 and 2004, a majority praised Europe's independent counter-U.S. stance, emphasized its increasing economic power and influence, and heralded its autonomous regional integration. Rodong Sinmun portrays the EU as the only superpower that can check and balance U.S. hegemony and America's unilateral exercise of military power.

North Korea's perception of the EU is well reflected in articles such as: "EU becomes new challenge to U.S. unilateralism"; "Escalating frictions (disagreements) between Europe and U.S."; "European economy (euro) dominating that of the U.S."; "Europe strongly opposing unilateral power play of U.S.," and so forth.

Concurrently, North Korea has pursued active engagement with the EU by establishing diplomatic relations with 24 of the 25 EU member states (the exception being France). It is not necessary to read between the lines to recognize North Korea's genuine commitment to engagement with the EU based on its perception of the EU's emerging role on the world stage.

The Republic of Korea has publicly welcomed the prospect of EU involvement, while China wishes to go further and engage in bilateral discussions with the EU on its new policy toward the North. Russia will follow the majority. The problem is with Japan and the U.S.

In Japan, opinion is split by hardliners in the Liberal Democratic Party who view problems with North Korea as a convenient excuse to justify the abandonment of the Peace Constitution. They don't want a quick solution until crisis has catalyzed the transformation of Japan into what advocates call a "normal" country.

The U.S. expects an EU financial commitment, but not EU participation. The neocons believe that EU participation would change the balance of forces within the talks inexorably toward critical engagement rather than confrontation.

The question is whether the EU's offer will point the U.S. into a corner or trigger a breakthrough. Will U.S. fundamentalists outmaneuver the realists who favor a diplomatic rather than military solution? Only time will tell.

Glyn Ford, a Labour Party member of the European Parliament (representing South West England), belongs to the EP's Korean Peninsula Delegation. Soyoung Kwon is a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University's Asia-Pacific Research Center.