Chaim Braun comments on the essay "Light Water Reactors at the Six Party Talks," which appeared as Policy Forum Online 05-78: 21 September 2005, published by the Nautilus Institue. Braun agrees that it is unlikely the U.S. will approve sending any nuclear-sensitive technology to the DPRK before a complete and verifiable de-nuclearization process takes place and produces results in the field. He surveys other possible sources of nuclear power for North Korea, including building a Russian reactor as suggested in the initial essay.

David Hafemeister is a physics professor at California Polytechnic State University, but this academic year he's at Stanford University studying ways to keep the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty viable for the U.S. Senate to consider ratifying. Jonathan Farley, a professor in the mathematics and computer science deparment at the University of the West Indies, is here this year as well, conducting a mathematical analysis of counterterrorism operations. They are among seven science fellows now visiting the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), part of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford.

With fellowships in the sciences and social sciences, CISAC, directed by political science Professor Scott Sagan, brings top scholars to campus to find solutions to complex international problems.

This year's fellows "are a select and exciting set of scholars doing innovative work on important issues of international security--which now includes homeland security," said Lynn Eden, CISAC's associate director for research. "All of us at CISAC are very much looking forward to having our new crew on board."

The other CISAC science fellows are:

• Manas Baveja and Yifan Liu, both doctoral candidates at the Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering at Stanford, who use mathematical models to study homeland security;
• Chaim Braun of Altos Management Partners, who is working on a United Nations nuclear energy project;
• Belkis Cabrera-Palmer, a physics doctoral candidate from Syracuse University, who is studying nuclear energy issues in Latin America; and
• Sonja Schmid, a lecturer in Stanford's Science, Technology and Society Program, who is working on a book aimed at understanding the decisions that produced and sustained the civilian nuclear energy program in the Soviet Union from the 1950s through the 1980s.

Charles Perrow, professor emeritus of sociology from Yale University, is among seven pre- and postdoctoral fellows in social science disciplines who are also visiting CISAC. Perrow is working on a project to reduce homeland security vulnerabilities. CISAC's other postdoctoral social science fellows are:

• Tarak Barkawi, a lecturer at the Centre for International Studies at the University of Cambridge in England, who is examining why small wars have big consequences, and
• Alex Montgomery, a doctoral candidate in political science at Stanford, whose project deals with U.S. post-Cold War nuclear counterproliferation strategies.

CISAC's predoctoral fellows in social science are:

• Dara Cohen, a doctoral candidate in political science at Stanford, who will examine the efficacy of post-9/11 domestic security legislation;
• Matthew Rojansky, a law student at Stanford, whose project explores the legitimacy of international institutions and legal instruments in the war on terror;
• Jacob Shapiro, a doctoral candidate in political science at Stanford, whose project looks at the organizational consequences of terrorist motivation; and
• Jessica Stanton, a doctoral candidate in political science at Columbia University, who is examining compliance with international laws of war during civil war.

CISAC also is hosting Robert Carlin of the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization, a visiting scholar whose project addresses U.S.-North Korea relations, and Laura Donohue, who is writing a book, Counterterrorism and the Death of Liberalism, while completing a law degree at Stanford Law School. Patrick Roberts, who comes to Stanford from the University of Virginia, where he earned a doctorate in politics, will examine bureaucratic autonomy and homeland security reorganization.

Amid uncertainty over the outcome of the six-party negotiations on North Korea's nuclear weapons development, public concern is likely to focus on whether Pyongyang will live up to commitments it made to dismantle its nuclear weapons programme (already questionable) and whether it will pursue long-range nuclear missiles that could destroy an American city or, more immediately, Seoul and Tokyo. But the latter concern is not the most effective nuclear threat North Korea or other potential adversaries could pose.

A nuclear threat to American cities, if implemented, would certainly provoke massive US retaliation. There are better options for opponents: credible, cheaper and more suited to the US capabilities that adversaries would face. Since the cold war, the top US military priority, as stated in congressional testimonies, has been to deploy the world's most effective power projection forces. These forces have been used in the Balkans, the Persian Gulf and central Asia. A power projection force operates in or near hostile territory. It must rely on superior training, tactics and equipment. Joint force training, mobile communication and control, soldiers capable of individual initiative and precision-guided munitions have been key to US success.

Any power projection force needs air bases and ports of debarkation and logistics centres for sustained operations. These facilities must be rented or conquered. Their number is limited - a handful in Iraq, and not many more in east Asia, seven or so in Japan, some bases in South Korea, and a few others. These facilities are highly vulnerable even to inaccurate nuclear missile attacks. They are "soft targets", not "hardened" against nuclear weapons.

North Korea, with a couple of dozen warheads mounted on its intermediate-range No Dong missiles, or its longer-range Taepo Dong missiles, could threaten all the US assets mentioned above and have weapons left to threaten Tokyo and Seoul.

The US could destroy those North Korean military and nuclear assets it could locate. North Korean forces could retreat into the mountains and position for a protracted ground war. But would the US then launch a massive attack against North Korea with the threat still hanging over Japanese and South Korean cities?

The Pentagon's Quadrennial Defense Review envisages a force structure better suited to counter-terrorism and control of the seas and the sky, rather than focused on fighting two land wars simultaneously. The nuclear threat to essential US force-projection assets largely counterbalances the advantage provided by US conventional forces, without necessarily consigning whole cities and industrial bases to destruction. That latter threat can still be held in reserve by our adversaries.

Should this threat mature, it would undercut the credibility of US security guarantees in east Asia that have been the hallmark of US strategy in the region for more than half a century. Japan, South Korea and Taiwan all depend heavily on these guarantees for their security. This credibility has dissuaded each government from acquiring its own nuclear force. Such restraint, in turn, has permitted China to proceed at a more measured pace in its own nuclear weapons development programmes.

If key political and defence officials in Tokyo, Seoul and Taipei no longer believed in US guarantees because of the vulnerability of US military assets in the region to a North Korean nuclear missile attack, the consequences for their own security and for US national strategy could be profound. Although circumstances are quite different in the Middle East-Persian Gulf region, similar consequences could materialise if Iran or another hostile country developed a comparable nuclear missile capability.

A great deal is at stake in constraining the missile and nuclear weapons capabilities of North Korea and other rogue states. The US thus must utilise all the resources at its disposal, working constructively with its allies and other interested parties, to deny these states the capabilities they almost surely seek to acquire. A more resilient forward defence and deterrent posture is essential to an effective American global strategy.