WASHINGTON - Despite its threat of severe consequences, the Bush administration has little leverage to use on North Korea to keep it from testing a long-range missile and few ways to punish the nuclear-armed nation if it proceeds.

The United States has no diplomatic or economic ties with North Korea, the rudimentary U.S. missile-defense system is untested in real-world conditions and Pyongyang is regarded as having a right to test missiles, making any American attack to forestall a launch an act of war with potentially explosive consequences.

"The United States could try to shoot down the rocket, but good luck,'' said Wonhyuk Lim of the Brookings Institution, a policy-research organization in Washington.

The dearth of options illustrates the limits of the administration's pre-emption strategy and its need to rely on the cooperation of others -- especially given the strains on the U.S. military from Iraq and Afghanistan -- to contain threats.

Washington hopes that the world's only Stalinist regime will heed demands by the United States, South Korea, Japan, Russia and China to uphold a self-imposed 1999 moratorium on missile tests and rejoin talks on curbing its nuclear program in return for security guarantees and economic and political benefits.

At the same time, the administration is reviewing its options should the Kim Jong Il regime test-fire what U.S. officials describe as a multi-stage Taepodong-2 missile, thought to be capable of reaching Alaska.

"The launch of a missile would be a provocation,'' Assistant Secretary of Defense Peter Rodman said Thursday during a House Armed Services Committee hearing. "If such a launch took place, we would seek to impose some cost on North Korea.''

Rodman declined to say what Washington would do. Experts said that even the imposition of sanctions by the United States would be largely symbolic.

They think that North Korea would not have readied the missile for flight unless it had decided it could live with the consequences.

"It probably means they are not worried about the American reaction,'' said Daniel C. Sneider of Stanford University's Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. "There is nothing that the United States can do to them.''

The United States has no diplomatic relations or financial assistance it can threaten to cut, and it suspended contributions to international food aid for North Korea last year.

The administration has moved against Pyongyang by trying to halt its missile sales to other countries, its alleged international narcotics trafficking, and its alleged counterfeiting of U.S. currency, cigarettes and over-the-counter drugs.

Under American pressure, banking regulators in February froze North Korean accounts at the Banco Delta Asia, a Macao bank that the U.S. Treasury Department accused of laundering North Korea's ill-gotten gains.

Other banks, anxious to avoid American scrutiny, reportedly have curtailed business with North Korea.

David L. Asher, a former Treasury Department official who oversaw the crackdown on North Korea's alleged illicit dealings, said the United States could respond to a test with an intensified campaign against Pyongyang's alleged international criminal activities that would hurt the ruling elite.

"Do not underestimate the impact of the financial pressure we could put on them,'' said Asher, a scholar with the Institute for Defense Analyses, a policy-research organization.

Washington is counting on Japan, which also is threatened by Pyongyang's nuclear arms and missile programs, to react to a launch by closing ports to North Korean ships and shutting off remittances by ethnic Koreans to relatives in North Korea. But those measures are expected to have limited impact.

A North Korean missile test in 1998 prompted Japan to boost missile-defense cooperation with the United States, and experts said a new launch probably would prompt Washington and Tokyo to forge even closer military ties.

The only nations that could tighten the screws significantly are China and South Korea, North Korea's main foreign trading partners and aid donors.

But while Seoul and Beijing would be outraged, because a missile test would effectively kill hopes of restarting talks on containing North Korea's nuclear arms program, they are unlikely to take any step that could rock Pyongyang.

Both are anxious to avoid destabilizing their neighbor of 26 million people. China doesn't want to be overwhelmed by North Korean refugees, and South Korea would be unable to bear the economic and social costs of sudden reunification.

They also fear that Kim's government could lash out with its million-member army against the South, igniting a conflict that would drag in the United States and devastate the Asian-Pacific economy.

"China and South Korea fear instability more than they fear a nuclear North Korea,'' said Marcus Noland, an expert at the Economic Policy Institute.

Moreover, Beijing probably would be unwilling to jeopardize the budding commercial ties it has been pursuing with North Korea.

"China opposes sanctions on North Korea because it believes they would lead to instability, would not dislodge the regime but would damage the nascent process of market reforms and harm the most vulnerable,'' said a February report by the International Crisis Group, a conflict-prevention organization.

South Korea has been pursuing a policy of economic engagement and political exchanges with North Korea.

The United States has been consulting with members of the U.N. Security Council on a response to a North Korean test. But North Korea has the right under international law to test-fire missiles, making it tough for the United States to win more than words of chastisement of North Korea from the council.

The anticipated title from Cambridge University Press has been released in hard-cover and is available for purchase. Edited by PESD director, David Victor, Rice professor Amy Jaffe, and PESD fellow Mark Hayes, the book sheds light on the political challenges which may accompany a shift to a natural gas-fed world.

Energy is on the front burner and will stay there, so this book has special value. Read it and learn about the topic of today and tomorrow and tomorrow.

- George P. Shultz, United States Secretary of State, 1982-1989

The coming phase of energy industry development is bringing with it the rapid globalisation of the gas business. Long term take-or-pay contracts, which align supply and demand and which formed the foundation of all successful projects in the past, are coming under pressure from liberalisation. But security of supply still depends on security of demand: this timely and authoritative study demonstrates that, if gas is to

fulfil its enormous promise as an energy source, new ways must be found to establish the confidence of both sides that secure supply will be matched by reliable demand

- Frank Chapman, CEO, BG Group plc

This is a very valuable addition to the global literature on energy issues and energy policy ... Natural Gas and Geopolitics goes deep into the global gas policy issues that affect critical US energy policy, not only looking backward but helping understand what may happen as the global natural gas market develops.

- Bill Richardson, Governor of New Mexico, United States Secretary of Energy, 1998 2001

Steven Levy looked at Liu's company Augmentum, a rapidly expanding three-year-old software start-up whose programmers are working on projects that go beyond the traditionally "low- and medium-level programming" tasks that have usually been outsourced to China.

The article, which originally appeared in Newsweek's June 12, 2006 issue, examined the challenges that face Chinese software companies as they attempt to tap into their workers' creativity and innovation to tackle the most advanced programming projects at--as Liu puts it--"a third of the price it would cost our customers to do [it] in-house."

On May 20-21, 2006, the Stanford Project on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SPRIE) and the China Institute for Science and Technology Policy (CISTP) of Tsinghua University co-sponsored an international workshop in Beijing on "Greater China's Innovative Capacity: Progress and Challenges."

The workshop, held in collaboration with the Zhongguancun Science Park and the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), was hosted on the campus of Tsinghua University. Participation by more than 70 academics, industry leaders and government policy makers reflected many of the ongoing partnerships SPRIE holds with institutions, individuals and organizations around the world.

The nine workshop sessions and more than twenty paper presentations provided rich opportunities for engaging discussion and knowledge sharing. The output of this workshop will lead to the publishing of selected proceedings in the near future.

Theme and Topics

The workshop addressed how the innovative capacities in Greater China are evolving. What are the most significant areas of progress and challenge? Scholars and business leaders from the U.S., Europe and Asia were brought together to discuss new research and current practice of key aspects of Greater China's innovative capacity: inputs, processes, outputs, institution, government policies, business models and management strategies.

More specifically, the workshop focused on:

• information and communications technologies
• innovation across the value chain from R&D to business processes and models
• development within and linkages among key regions and players in mainland China, Taiwan, Singapore and Silicon Valley

In 1979, anthrax was accidentally released in the city of Sverdlovsk (pop. 1,200,000) in the former Soviet Union, infecting about 80 to 100 people and killing at least 70. Russian officials claimed at the time that tainted meat sold on the black market was responsible; American officials argued that a nearby biological weapons facility released the killer spores. In the early 1990s, Harvard researchers visited the city to piece together the epidemiology of the outbreak. Their investigation, published in Science magazine in 1994, concluded that the Soviet cover story was false.

Now, physicist Dean A. Wilkening, director of the science program at Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), has revisited this Cold War tragedy and used its real-world data to improve our ability to model the medical effects of inhalational anthrax. This, in turn, allows him to model more accurately hypothetical scenarios such as the release of a kilogram of aerosolized anthrax in Washington, D.C., today.

The models researchers have used in such thought experiments "predict very different outcomes," says Wilkening, whose work to better understand the human effects of inhalational anthrax was supported by grants from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation. Using real-world data from the Sverdlovsk outbreak and from limited nonhuman primate experiments, he was able to eliminate two of four theoretical models currently used in "what if?" scenarios that inform bioterrorism policies ranging from how much medicine we should have on hand in the Strategic National Stockpile to how rigorous post-attack decontamination efforts need to be. He reports his findings in the May 1 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"To date, researchers haven't paid enough attention to which model they use," Wilkening says. "Different models can give predictions that vary by a factor of 10 or more, so it matters which model one uses for predicting the human effects of inhalational anthrax." Wilkening aims to anchor models on the best available data and provide realistic models that the bioterrorism community can employ in policy studies.

The Sverdlovsk outbreak is "a sort of natural experiment," he says. "It's a tragic incident, but it also is a very valuable source of scientific data that one can use to distinguish between the four models currently in use." The upshot of his analysis is that two of the models currently in use are not accurate for predicting the human response to inhalational anthrax.

Insufficient data is available to resolve which of the remaining two models he examined is most accurate. That answer will have to await further data from costly nonhuman primate experiments, should they ever be performed (none are planned). "We have to use both [models] right now, or use them as bounding cases," he advises.

Wilkening explored four policy issues that illustrate the consequences of choosing different models: 1) calculating how many anthrax-exposed people would become infected and how many would die; 2) assessing if decontamination would be needed; 3) determining how soon exposed people would show symptoms and how soon doctors would recognize those symptoms as anthrax; and 4) calculating how soon exposed people need to receive antibiotics to avoid contracting the disease.

"To figure out what happens in a bioterrorist event, you need to know two basic properties about the pathogen you're dealing with," Wilkening says. One is the dose-response curve, which determines the likelihood of becoming infected at different exposure levels--the higher the dose of anthrax you get, the higher the probability that you will become infected. The dose at which 50 percent of an exposed population becomes infected, called the ID50, is around 10,000 spores. The other basic property is the incubation-period distribution, or the time the pathogen takes to grow in the body before symptoms first appear.

Wilkening's study brought dose-dependence to a debate over how long the incubation period is for inhalational anthrax. Published data from vaccine efficacy tests in which nonhuman primates were challenged with high doses of anthrax--up to a million spores--indicate an incubation period of one to five days. Data from Sverdlovsk, which exposed people to low doses probably on the order of 1 to 10 spores, indicate a longer incubation period, about 10 days. Whereas previous authors have debated whether nonhuman primate experiments or the Sverdlovsk data should be used to determine the incubation period for inhalational anthrax in humans, Wilkening demonstrates that both estimates are correct, with the difference between them being due to the dose dependence of the incubation period and the very different doses received in each case.

"If you are exposed to a higher dose, there is a much higher chance that an anthrax spore will germinate quickly, thus leading to a shorter incubation period," he says. "Sverdlovsk was a low-dose exposure event and, consequently, one would expect anthrax spore germination to take a longer time, thus leading to a longer incubation period."

Truth and consequences

Russian officials confiscated the medical records of the Sverdlovsk victims and have so far refused to release details of what happened on April 2, 1979. "It would be nice to know exactly what happened, because that would allow us to model the event more accurately," Wilkening says.

Nevertheless, based on weather and other data from the day of the event, scientists think that around 2 p.m. spores, or dormant cells that revive under the right conditions, were released from a military facility, and the Bacillus anthracis spores spread up to 5 kilometers downwind. People breathed in the spores, which geminated and incubated in the body for between four to 40 days before people began to feel ill or show signs of illness such as sore throat, coughing, pains, aches and runny nose--the same symptoms as flu--that indicated they had entered what doctors call the prodromal phase. Within four days, people passed the point of no return, called the fulminant phase, in which toxins from the bacteria had built up to such an extent that people went into shock and died.

It's impossible to save those who've entered the fulminant phase and difficult to save those who've entered the prodromal phase. But if people can start treatment after exposure but before symptoms appear, there's a good chance that they will survive--a conclusion Wilkening draws from work by colleagues at Stanford's Center for Health Policy. Treatment primarily consists of antibiotics such as ciprofloxacin, doxycycline or penicillin. While a vaccine to prevent anthrax exists, it is not yet available for the general public but would be made available to people exposed to anthrax, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website.

In his study, Wilkening ruled out two of the four models because they either did not fit the Sverdlovsk data or the nonhuman primate data, or both. "There are two models that people have used that should no longer be used to predict fatalities, models B and C." (The four models used in his analysis are labeled A-D for convenience.)

Using the two remaining models A and D, he predicted that a hypothetical attack releasing 1 kilogram of anthrax spores in Washington, D.C., would infect between 4,000 and 50,000 people, most of whom would die if not treated quickly with antibiotics. The difference of a factor of 10, Wilkening points out, is "an uncertainty with which we must live for the time being until better data can resolve which of the models A or D is more accurate."

Regarding decontamination efforts, the higher the probability of becoming infected at low exposure levels, the greater the need for effective decontamination, especially for indoor environments. Spores "by nature are hardy," Wilkening says. In the soil, out of the way of sunlight, they can last for a decade. "Residual contamination can be a very serious problem in the wake of an attack," Wilkening says. "Unfortunately, both models A and D predict that residual surface contamination from anthrax spores will be a problem. Consequently, we need to come up with effective indoor decontamination strategies."

Analysts such as Professor Lawrence Wein of the Graduate School of Business are considering the issue. Last year, he assessed decontamination and concluded cleaning buildings to make them safe to reoccupy was a billion-dollar proposition.

In addition, the four models make very different predictions about when symptoms would occur. The day after exposure, they predict between 10 and 1,000 people feeling sick, with more people getting sick in the viable versus discredited models.

"In terms of detecting the outbreak rapidly, this is a good thing because it says that doctors could recognize it [sooner]," Wilkening says.

In terms of treating people before they reach the prodromal phase, however, this is a bad thing because people become sick quicker. Wilkening's analysis may help policymakers reassess how fast antibiotics need to reach people. His best model says administering antibiotics by day three saves 90 percent of exposed people. "Today we cannot meet the three-day requirement," he warns.