STANFORD, Calif.— More than 100 hostages are dead after Russian authorities used an unidentified gas to incapacitate terrorists holding 750 people in a Moscow theater. Nearly all of the deaths were due to the gas, which Russian authorities have so far refused to identify.

Press coverage has rightly emphasized grief and the question of why antidotes were not immediately available. It has then focused on whether the Russians' use of gas was a violation of the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention. But this focus, while important, risks overlooking the big picture when it comes to Russian chemical weapons.

The Chemical Weapons Convention is a global treaty with more than 170 signatory nations. It bans the production, acquisition, stockpiling, transfer and use of chemical weapons -- the first arms-control treaty to outlaw an entire class of so-called weapons of mass destruction. It also requires its signatories to declare and destroy, by certain deadlines, the chemical weapons they possess.

Since the 1925 Geneva Protocol prohibiting the use of chemical and biological weapons in war -- a reaction to gas attacks in World War I -- the world has struggled to ban these weapons. In part, this is because of their indiscriminate nature.

After Sept. 11, 2001, it seems all the more important to eliminate stocks of such weapons because access to them could confer such power to terrorists. In a world with 70,000 metric tons of chemical weapons agents, some of which may be vulnerable to terrorist theft, the verified elimination of these weapons will be a step toward greater security for all. This is true despite the disturbing fact that Iraq, North Korea and certain other nations are not parties to the convention.

The weapons convention permits the production and use of riot-control agents for law enforcement purposes. Until the Russians inform us of the agent used, whether they were in violation of the convention will remain uncertain. But renewed attention to Russian chemical agents should focus on a more important issue. Russia retains some 40,000 tons of chemical warfare blister agents and nerve gas. It is required by the convention to destroy them, and the United States and European nations have agreed to help. But American efforts under the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program are stalled in Congress.

The Cooperative Threat Reduction program began in 1992. It provides expertise and funding to help the former Soviet Union secure and destroy nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and materials. Progress with chemical and biological weapons has been especially slow, and the Russians have too often been less than forthcoming.

Of particular concern has been the Russian stockpile at Shchuch'ye, a town near the southern border with Kazakhstan. The Shchuch'ye stockpile contains nearly two million artillery shells -- and hundreds of missile warheads -- filled with nerve gas or other chemical weapons. Although stockpile security has been upgraded with help from American financing, the threat of insider theft remains real. Many of the shells are in working condition, and they are small and easily transportable.

Cooperative Threat Reduction funds have paid to design a plant for construction at Shchuch'ye to destroy these weapons securely and safely. The Pentagon wants $130 million for construction in the new fiscal year. Russia, its economy still weak, won't do this without American assistance. But the program is currently stalled in a Congressional conference committee due to a disagreement over granting the president authority to proceed with the project.

The Bush administration's new national security strategy has emphasized the destruction of weapons of mass destruction by pre-emptive strikes if necessary. But at Shchuch'ye alone, the United States could destroy more than 5,000 tons of ready-to-use weapons of mass destruction through a different kind of pre-emptive strike -- action by a Congressional committee.  

For most of the 1990s, U.S. foreign-policy makers, analysts of Russia in the United States, and leaders of U.S. nongovernmental organizations have pointed to generational change as the beacon of hope for Russia. Because it was believed that the transition from communism to capitalism and democracy would require a "short term" decline in the well-being of Russian society - and that the older generations would suffer the most during the transitional period - all hope was placed on the younger generation. Unlike their grandparents and parents, the young people would enjoy the benefits of reform and therefore embrace the reforms advocated by these U.S. policymakers and analysts.

After the collapse of the former Soviet Union in 1991, illicit trafficking of nuclear and other radioactive material emerged as a serious international concern. The economic and social conditions that followed the collapse left nuclear and radioactive material often poorly guarded and vulnerable to theft. In the early 1990s, Europe observed a sharp increase in nuclear smuggling incidents, as stolen nuclear and other radioactive material was brought from the former Soviet republics to Western Europe in the hope of finding a market. Since 1994, however, reported illicit trafficking incidents in Europe have declined. By contrast, since 1999 there has been an increase in such incidents in the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Turkey. Analysts have long speculated that nuclear smugglers would exploit this region--known as the southern tier--as a transit corridor.

This report looks at the illicit trafficking situation in the southern tier and Turkey in an attempt to establish whether these regions have become new routes for smuggling nuclear and other radioactive material. It discusses reported incidents of illicit trafficking in these countries, assesses their responses to the threat of trafficking, and evaluates foreign assistance provided to the region to combat this smuggling. The report concludes with recommendations for improving international anti-nuclear smuggling efforts.

"Why the major reversal in Bush's thinking on Russia? Most have attributed this amazing transformation to September 11. . . . But September 11 is only part of the story."

To make his case, [Bush] has a powerful historical experience to draw upon: the end of the Cold War. Regime change in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union fundamentally enhanced American national security. If Iraq possessed Russia's nuclear arsenal today, the United States would be in grave danger. Two decades ago we feared this same arsenal in the hands of the Kremlin. Today we do not. The reason we do not is that the regime in Russia has become more democratic and market-oriented and therefore also more Western- oriented.

Second, democratization on the periphery of Europe has stalled. A dictator who praises Stalin and Hitler runs Belarus. President Vladimir Putin has weakened democratic institutions and grossly violated the human rights of his own citizens in Chechnya in his attempt to build "managed democracy" in Russia. In Ukraine, President Leonid Kuchma aspires to create the same level of state control over the democratic process as Putin has achieved in Russia to ensure a smooth -- that is, Kuchma-friendly -- transition of power when his term ends in 2004. In contrast to Russia, Ukraine has a vibrant democratic opposition, whose leader, Viktor Yushchenko, is likely to win a free and fair presidential election. This vote in 2004 will be free and fair, however, only if the West is watching. Only in Moldova has authoritarian creep been avoided, but that's because of the weakness of the state, hardly a condition conducive to long-term democratic consolidation.

PALO ALTO, CALIF.
A year ago, a group of terrorists from Saudi Arabia and Egypt attacked the United States using box cutters as their weapons and citing extremist versions of Islamic fundamentalism as their cause.

Today, the Bush administration and Congress are focused almost solely on Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction, with almost no reference whatsoever to his ideology.

This narrow focus has only a loose relationship to the grander vision of "securing freedom's triumph" that President Bush has outlined as the mission of American foreign policy in the new millennium.

As currently framed, the debate about Iraq has produced three dangerous distortions. First, the discussion has confused the means-ends relationship between weapons of mass destruction and regime change. Suddenly, both hawkish Republicans and antiwar Democrats now have asserted that the destruction of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction is the new paramount objective in the war on terrorism.

For the hawks, regime change is the means to achieving this objective. Those less eager to go to war assert that this same goal can be achieved by other means, such as sending in the weapons inspectors or even by a surgical strike against weapons facilities.

Both sides of this debate are focused on the wrong objective. Regime change – democratic regime change – must be the objective. If over the next years and decades, a democratic regime consolidates in Iraq, then it will not matter to the United States if Iraq has weapons of mass destruction or not.

Does anyone in the United States know how many weapons of mass destruction the British or French have? Does anyone even lose much sleep over the fact that Russia still has thousands of nuclear weapons and launch vehicles capable of reaching the US in a matter of minutes?

Specialists are rightly worried about the safety and security of Russian weapons, but most Americans no longer make plans for what to do in the event of a Soviet nuclear attack. It was not a robust nonproliferation regime, coercive weapons inspections, or a preemptive war against the Soviet Union that produced this shift in our attitudes about Russia's weapons of mass destruction. Rather, it was regime change in the Soviet Union and then Russia.

Someday, the same will be true in Iraq. Israel already destroyed Iraq's nuclear weapons program once in 1981, delaying but not eliminating the threat. The real objective of any strategy toward Iraq, therefore, must be the creation of a democratic, market-oriented, pro-Western regime.

The singular focus on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction – not unlike the misplaced focus on arms control during the cold war – prevents the US from pursuing a grander strategy that could secure the more important objective of democratic regime change. Moreover, many of the means for achieving this objective are nonmilitary by nature, an aspect forgotten in the discussion.

A second distorting consequence of the current debate is that we have become obsessed with one leader, one country, and one category of weapons, none of which were involved directly in the Sept. 11 attacks.

The Iraqi dictatorship (and not simply President Hussein) is certainly part of the problem, but Iraq cannot be the only front of the war on terrorism. In fact, victories on other fronts could create momentum for the Iraqi regime's demise. Ronald Reagan's strategy for defeating communism did not begin with a military invasion of the Soviet Union, but rather aimed first to roll back communism in peripheral places like Poland, Afghanistan, and Nicaragua. Imagine how isolated Hussein would be if democratic regimes took hold in Iran, Palestine, and Afghanistan.

A third distortion of the debate is the near silence about the kind of regime the Bush administration plans to help build in Iraq after the war. The Bush administration is busy making the case against Hussein, but has devoted much less attention to outlining the plan for a new regime in Iraq. Will it be one state or three, a federal or unitary state, governed by the US or the United Nations? How many decades will occupation last?

We need to have the same "frenzied" debate about Iraq's reconstruction that is now being devoted to Iraq's deconstruction. A serious discussion of the postwar regime in Iraq will help inspire support in Congress, the international community, and within Iraq. Now is the time to be concrete about future blueprints.

To be credible, the message of change must also be directed at other dictators in the region. The probabilities of fanatics coming to power in Pakistan and using weapons against American allies are greater than the probabilities of Hussein doing the same.

Without reform, revolution in Saudi Arabia is just as likely as an Iranian attack on American allies. Failure to define a grand strategy of transformation in the region will condemn American soldiers to fighting new dictators like Hussein over and over again.

A new narrative about Post-Soviet Russia is taking hold in policy, media, and academic

circles and shows signs of entrenching as a new conventional wisdom. By this reading, Russia's experiment with democracy has flat-out failed. So misconceived and mismanaged were the political and economic reforms of the 1990s that they have fueled mass disenchantment with democratic norms and brought authoritarianism back into repute. Russians, in short, are said to be giving up on democracy.

For those concerned with democratization in the communist world, the final years of the Soviet Union were a truly exhilarating time. At the end of the Gorbachev era, the Soviet Union experienced an explosion of grassroots nongovernmental activity. For the first time in nearly a century, civic groups, trade unions, political parties, and newspapers organized and operated independent of the state. 1 In the final year preceding the collapse of the USSR, these newly formed organizations also cooperated with each other, forming horizontal links in their shared quest to challenge the Soviet system. Most impressive were the miner's strikes in 1989 and again in 1991, as well as the mass demonstrations on Manezh Square in downtown Moscow that occurred repeatedly throughout fall 1990 and spring 1991. At times, hundreds of thousands filled the expansive square. Russian society was politicized, organized, and mobilized. The Soviet state had to respond. Occurring in the shadow of decades of totalitarian rule in the Soviet Union, this kind of social activity was remarkable. The proliferation of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and exponential rise in citizen participation in these groups fueled hope that a proto-civil society was taking root--one capable of strengthening Russia's young and tenuous democracy.