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That approach may sound reasonable, but the effort to suppress scientific information reflects a dangerously outdated attitude.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.

While the anthrax scare at Washington Post offices this year proved to be a false alarm, it was a reminder of how vulnerable Americans are to biological terrorism. In general, two threats are viewed as the most dangerous: anthrax, which is as durable as it is deadly, and smallpox, which is transmitted very easily and kills 30 percent of its victims.

But there is a third possibility that, while it seems far more mundane, could be just as deadly: terrorists spreading a toxin that causes botulism throughout the nation's milk supply.

Why milk? In addition to its symbolic value as a target--a glass of milk is an icon of purity and healthfulness--Americans drink more than 6 billion gallons of it a year. And because it is stored in large quantities at centralized processing plants and then shipped across country for rapid consumption, it is a uniquely valuable medium for a bioterrorist.

For the last year, a graduate student, Yifan Liu, and I have been studying how such an attack might play out, and here is the situation we consider most likely: a terrorist, using a 28-page manual called "Preparation of Botulism Toxin" that has been published on several jihadist Web sites and buying toxin from an overseas black-market laboratory, fills a one-gallon jug with a sludgy substance containing a few grams of botulin. He then sneaks onto a dairy farm and pours its contents into an unlocked milk tank, or he dumps it into the tank on a milk truck while the driver is eating breakfast at a truck stop.

This tainted milk is eventually piped into a raw-milk silo at a dairy-processing factory, where it is thoroughly mixed with other milk. Because milk continually flows in and out of silos, approximately 100,000 gallons of contaminated milk go through the silo before it is emptied and cleaned (the factories are required to do this only every 72 hours). While the majority of the toxin is rendered harmless by heat pasteurization, some will survive. These 100,000 gallons of milk are put in cartons and trucked to distributors and retailers, and they eventually wind up in refrigerators across the country, where they are consumed by hundreds of thousands of unsuspecting people.

It might seem hard to believe that just a few grams of toxin, much of it inactivated by pasteurization, could harm so many people. But that, in the eye of the terrorists, is the beauty of botulism: just one one-millionth of a gram may be enough to poison and eventually kill an adult. It is likely that more than half the people who drink the contaminated milk would succumb.

The other worrisome factor is that it takes a while for botulism to take effect: usually there are no symptoms for 48 hours. So, based on studies of consumption, even if such an attack were promptly detected and the government warned us to stop drinking milk within 24 hours of the first reports of poisonings, it is likely that a third of the tainted milk would have been consumed. Worse, children would be hit hardest: they drink significantly more milk on average than adults, less of the toxin would be needed to poison them and they drink milk sooner after its release from dairy processors because it is shipped directly to schools.

And what will happen to the victims? First they will experience gastrointestinal pain, which is followed by neurological symptoms. They will have difficulty seeing, speaking and walking as paralysis sets in. Most of those who reach a hospital and get antitoxins and ventilators to aid breathing would recover, albeit after months of intensive and expensive treatment. But our hospitals simply don't have enough antitoxins and ventilators to deal with such a widespread attack, and it seems likely that up to half of those poisoned would die.

As scary as this possibility is, we have actually been conservative in some of our assumptions. The concentration of toxin in the terrorists' initial gallon is based on 1980's technology and it's possible they could mix up a more potent brew; there are silos up to four times as large as the one we based our model on, and some feed into several different processing lines that would contaminate more milk; and the assumption that the nationwide alarm could go out within 24 hours of the first reported symptoms is very optimistic (two major salmonella outbreaks in the dairy industry, in 1985 and 1994, went undetected for weeks and sickened 200,000 people).

What can we do to avoid such a horror? First, we must invest in prevention. The Food and Drug Administration has some guidelines - tanks and trucks holding milk are supposed to have locks, two people are supposed to be present when milk is transferred - but they are voluntary. Let's face it: in the hands of a terrorist, a dairy is just as dangerous as a chemical factory or nuclear plant, and voluntary guidelines are not commensurate with the severity of the threat. We need strict laws - or at least more stringent rules similar to those set by the International Organization for Standardization in Geneva and used in many countries - to ensure that our milk supply is vigilantly guarded, from cow to consumer.

Second, the dairy industry should improve pasteurization so that it is far more potent at eliminating toxins. Finally, and most important, tanks should be tested for toxins as milk trucks line up to unload into the silo. The trucks have to stop to be tested for antibiotic residue at this point anyway, and there is a test that can detect all four types of toxin associated with human botulism that takes less than 15 minutes. Yes, to perform the test four times, once for each toxin, on each truck would cost several cents per gallon. But in the end it comes down to a simple question: isn't the elimination of this terrifying threat worth a 1 percent increase in the cost of a carton of milk?

One other concern: although milk may be the obvious target, it is by no means the only food product capable of generating tens of thousands of deaths. The government needs to persuade other food-processing industries - soft drinks, fruit juices, vegetable juices, processed-tomato products - to study the potential impact of a deliberate botulin release in their supply chains and take steps to prevent and mitigate such an event.

Americans are blessed with perhaps the most efficient food distribution network in history, but we must ensure that the system that makes it so easy to cook a good dinner doesn't also make it easy for terrorists to kill us in our homes.

May 2005 opened with a bleak couple of weeks for the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Delegates from 189 countries struggled to settle on an agenda for the seventh 5-year review of the Treaty, North Korea announced a new extraction of plutonium from its reactor to make nuclear weapons, and Iran stood firm against European attempts to dissuade it from pursuing a nuclear energy program that could be diverted for weapons-making. Yet CISAC's George Bunn, in an interview with BBC's "The World," cautioned against despair.

As the first general counsel to the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Bunn has watched the NPT weather many diplomatic storms since it entered into force in 1970. Far from a failure, the treaty prevented nuclear weapons from becoming a commonplace in nations' defense programs, he said.

"I think that if there were no NPT, there would be something like 35 to 40 countries with nuclear weapons," Bunn explained. "When you think that at the time of our negotiations in the 60s, Sweden and Switzerland both had programs to explore the possibility of making nuclear weapons"--ambitions that the NPT helped dissuade--the treaty has provided incalculable benefits to world security. "If Sweden and Switzerland had nuclear weapons, think how many other countries would have them," he added.

Today the treaty's main weakness is its focus on states' possession of nuclear weapons, at a time when terrorists' ambitions to acquire the weapons is a major concern. At the treaty's outset, "terrorism wasn't perceived by us as a threat. The treaty hardly deals with the threat of terrorism," Bunn said.

The radio interview with George Bunn and his son Matthew Bunn, also a nuclear arms expert, is available at the link below. (Windows Media Player is required.)

Hans Blix, chairman of the International Commission on Weapons of Mass Destruction and former chief weapons inspector in Iraq, said at the Stanford Institute for International Studies' International Day, "Challenges in a New Era," on May 6 that he does not think the world faces a new nuclear arms race. Nuclear risks posed by terrorists and nations like Iran and North Korea could trigger a new nuclear arms race, warned CISAC Co-Director and Stanford professor Scott D. Sagan.

Blix said that there need not be a new arms race if the world diligently pursues diplomacy. Blix's speech attracted a strong response from Sagan, who participated in the same plenary panel titled "Looking Ahead: A New Nuclear Arms Race?" "I think there already is a new and very different kind of nuclear arms race going on," Sagan said. "It is a race between terrorists trying to develop a nuclear weapon and national and international efforts to stop that." As North Korea "race[s] ahead with its own persistent and provocative nuclear program," Sagan said the likelihood that the impoverished country will want to test its weapons or sell them to the highest bidder will increase. "I think Dr. Blix's paper greatly underestimates the threat of nuclear terrorism today," he said.

The exchange was one of many during the one day International Day that attracted hundreds of diplomats, policymakers, faculty and students. Other speakers included Oxford professor Paul Collier, the State Department counselor, Philip Zelikow, and Stonebridge International chairman, Samuel Berger. Zelikow and Berger both spoke on U.S. foreign policy.

The SIIS International Day also included discussion session on topics such as Russia's future, U.S. policy on the Korean peninsula, climate change, our energy future, United Nations reform, responses to infectious diseases, U.S.-European relations, and international criminal justice and security. Participants included both Stanford faculty and invited scholars, policymakers, and journalists.

Coit D. Blacker, director of SIIS, said the International Day, an annual event, will become part of the university's newly launched International Initiative that promotes interdisciplinary research and teaching. He also said the Stanford Institute for International Studies will be renamed the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, effective September 1, in recognition of alumni Bradford Freeman, a member of the university's Board of Trustees, and Ronald Spogli, a member of the SIIS board of visitors, who together donated a lead gift of $50 million to help launch the initiative last month.

Of the Pentagon's $419.3 billion budget request for next year, only about $10.5 billion - 2 percent - will go toward basic research, applied research and advanced technology development. This represents a 20 percent reduction from last year, a drastic cutback that threatens the long-term security of the nation. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld should reconsider this request, and if he does not, Congress should restore the cut.

These research and development activities, known as the "technology base" program, are a vital part of the United States defense program. For good reason: the tech base is America's investment in the future. Over the years, tech base activities have yielded advances in scientific and engineering knowledge that have given United States forces the technological superiority that is responsible in large measure for their current dominance in conventional military power.

Research into basic understanding of methods for reducing radar signatures in the 1970's, for example, gave rise to "stealth" technology. Advances in electronic sensor technology enable the vast collection of information from satellites, and past work on computer systems permits distribution of this information in near real-time to military commanders. The combination of near-real-time intelligence and precision munitions are the heart of the so-called "revolution in military affairs" that avoids large and costly systems and approaches.

These advances require years of sustained effort by university, industry and government researchers. If the Pentagon does not make the required investments today, America will not have dominant military technology tomorrow.

The technology base program has also had a major effect on American industry. Indeed, it is the primary reason that the United States leads the world today in information technology. American companies not only draw heavily on the Pentagon's work, but they have also come to depend on it. The research and development programs of many of America's major information technology companies are almost exclusively devoted to product development.

It was the investment of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in a network known as ARPA-net in the 1960's and 70's, for example, that gave rise to the Internet. The JPEG file format for digital images is based on software and standards developed by the Pentagon. The global positioning satellite system, first developed for precision-guided munitions, is now used in many cellphones and has the potential to revolutionize our air traffic control system. America's ability to translate the Pentagon's technology base into commercial achievement is the envy of the world.

Of course, the administration and Congress need to make tough budget choices. But to shift money away from the technology base to pay for Iraq, other current military operations or research on large, expensive initiatives, is to give priority to the near term at the expense of the future. This is doubtful judgment, especially at a time when the nature of the threat confronting America is changing. New threats, like catastrophic terrorism and the spread of weapons of mass destruction, urgently call for new technology.

There should be no doubt that basic research will continue to make a contribution. Robotics, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, brain and cognitive sciences, nanotechnology, large-scale modeling and simulation: all these fields can have a huge impact. If properly supported, basic technology work is likely to lead to unprecedented results.

Mr. Rumsfeld has long championed the need to transform the military and exploit new technology. He has supported the technology base in the past and has urged the adoption of a more long-term view of security needs. He should, then, be willing to review and reverse the Pentagon's request for reducing its technology base. He should understand that short-term budget requirements for the armed services always tend to push out the technology base program - unless the Pentagon leadership supports it.

Perhaps the reason for this year's reduction is the mistaken belief that a one-year gap in financing does not matter, because innovation takes so long. But tech base advances occur because of stable financing. Fluctuating budgets cause wasted effort.

It is possible that Congress will restore the cuts in technology base programs and correspondingly reduce some other part of the defense budget. But Mr. Rumsfeld should not depend on Congress. It would be vastly better if the Pentagon understood the importance of the tech base effort, and acted on that understanding.

The Department of Defense's technology base programs have been an important factor in giving America the dominant military force in the world. They have also helped many American information technology companies become successful. The Pentagon should maintain its dedication to these programs, and that will require leadership from the secretary of defense - as well as support from Congress.

John Deutch, a professor of chemistry at M.I.T., was deputy secretary of defense from 1994 to 1995. William J. Perry was secretary of defense from 1994 to 1997.