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.

On April 7, The Rt. Hon. Lord Christopher Patten of Barnes delivered the Spring 2005 Payne Lecture before a large audience in the Bechtel Conference Center.

Lord Patten's address - The Transatlantic Family: Counseling, Mediation, or Divorce - although focused on American-European relations, extended to a myriad of global issues facing the transatlantic partnership. The lecture drew on Patten's exceptional public service experience, notably as the last British Governor of Hong Kong (1992-1997), EU Commissioner for External Relations (1999-2004) and Chancellor of Oxford University (2003-present).

Patten began by rebutting the notion that the U.S. is or should be an imperial power. Speaking about America, Patten observed: "You bucked what some historians going back to Thucydides believed to be almost a dictate of natural law, and refused to translate power into territorial aggrandizement and conquest. There is no real American settlement abroad. Most Americans who live overseas inhabit rich countries, not poor ones. Your universities do not, unlike Milner's Oxford, train an imperial cast of administrators. You don't seize territory though you're concerned about military bases and energy sources." America has pursued the most successful great power strategy since Augustus's Rome, Patten argued, not through imperialism, but by a tri-part policy of building institutions of global governance, persuading Europe to turn its back on xenophobic nationalism, and using American economic power and development assistance to foster market-based prosperity abroad. "That was the world in which I grew up, a world where there was stability, peace and growing prosperity year after year, but there wasn't much gratitude for the superpower."

From the very beginning many Europeans showed ingratitude and demonstrated "a particular European condescension masquerading as sophistication" Patten remarked. France in particular has displayed "petulant ingratitude". Even during the Clinton presidency, he added, there were some rows, though on the whole it was a storm-free relationship. Since 2001 however Americans and Europeans have perceived a growing gap between them on several issues, including the Middle East Peace Process, changes in US policy over North Korea, and abrogation of the ABM Treaty. The Bush administration's position on the Kyoto Protocol, in particular, impacted European public opinion negatively. By the time the Iraq crisis unfolded, Patten asserted, it appeared to confirm for many Europeans that America has turned to unilateralism. Patten emphasized that unlike President Bush who, he argued, won the 2004 Presidential election as a war President, in Britain Tony Blair, if he wins the general elections on May 5th this year, will do so not because of the war but despite it. Patten also expressed the fear that the Iraq experience will make it far more difficult to secure public support for any course of action, which will involve asking the public to put their trust in governments, and in the intelligence community in particular. About the wider Middle East he stated: What is a geostrategic issue for the United States is Europe's backyard.

Turning to what should be done to prevent the fracturing of the Transatlantic Alliance, Patten stressed that a rupture would be bad for Europe, the United States and the world at large "because whether you are talking about matters political or economic, the world is best served when transatlantic relations are in good shape". To prevent the relationship from deteriorating Americans and Europeans should first manage the relationship better. "We shouldn't take one another by surprise", he observed. Europe should also spend more on security, especially on better airlift capacity and special forces. "If we're going to be treated seriously as a partner, we have to be able to punch a little closer to our economic weight from time to time", Patten said; "too often Europeans are reluctant to accept that the maintenance of the international rule of law does sometimes require the use of force", he added. America and Europe should also spend more on development assistance, and the promotion of democracy, the rule of law and good governance. The objective of spreading democracy to the countries of the Arab League is not an impossible one. More broadly, Patten observed that "We need to identify those areas where it's imperative that we work together". Europe is never likely to be a significant contributor to a political settlement in Korea, he argues, but it can play a big role in Africa, the Balkans, in the Middle East, in Iran, and in dealing with Russia. On the latter, Patten was decisive: "If we want peace and stability in Moldova, in the south Caucuses, in the Ukraine, then Russia is going to have to stop creating trouble. It's got to abandon its present attitude to spheres of influence, and this is a point which we should put pretty bluntly, in my judgment, to President Putin. We talk in Europe regularly about a strategic relationship with Russia based on shared values. I have to say I don't see much evidence of the shared values."

The approach to global governance since World War II has been remarkably successful, Patten concluded. Recent surveys about attitudes in international affairs show that the majority of Americans, even after the Iraq war, want Europe to play a larger part in sharing world leadership. Patten expressed hope that that is a challenge Europeans will live up to. Europeans should be America's "super partners", Patten concluded, rather than its "supine followers" or "super snipers".

Chris Farrell: Remember the dot-com boom of the 1990s? It seemed as if every entrepreneur with a good idea and a PC could challenge established companies for customers. Brick-and-mortar companies jumped on the e-commerce bandwagon. The demand for digital workers soared. Long-time computer professionals hopped from job to job, pulling down more money with every employer. Newly minted college graduates juggled multiple job offers. But when the Y2K problem emerged in the latter part of the '90s business and government quickly realized there still weren't enough IT workers on hand to find and repair the computer glitch. The quick fix? Hire computer professionals overseas. And that temporary solution permanently changed the global economy.

Paul Saffo: Y2K was huge in getting the ball rolling on offshoring.

Farrell: Paul Saffo is director of the Institute for the Future, a high-tech think tank in Silicon Valley.

Saffo: But once they went overseas, they discovered it's not just a matter of cost. These programmers overseas are often better than the best you can get in the United States.

Farrell: Ireland, the Philippines, and Israel were among the more popular destinations for offshoring Y2K programming fixes. But India became the offshore capital. It had plenty of high-tech companies staffed with well-educated English speaking digital workers. Thanks to India's steep import barriers in the 1980s, no one could afford new computer systems. So Indian tech workers were the world's leading experts in the older software languages that needed upgrading. Suhas Patil is chairman emeritus of semiconductor maker Cirrus Logic.

Suhas Patil: And they were listening to their customers and what their needs were, and as the recognition came that systems had to be upgraded to not have the problem based on the Y2K issues, that's how they got their break.

Farrell: And made the most of the opportunity. AnnaLee Saxenian is Dean of the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California, Berkeley.

AnnaLee Saxenian: I think the importance of Y2K was overwhelmingly about establishing Indian companies' reputation among US customers and helping begin a set of customer supplier relationships that have simply taken off in the last four years.

Farrell: Of course, Y2K contracts ended in 2000. Yet many Indian companies took advantage of their now sterling programming reputations to negotiate for more sophisticated work. Research. Software development. Accounting services. Long-distance medical advice. Rafiq Dossani is a senior research scholar at Stanford University.

Rafiq Dossani: India is now growing at 70-80 per cent a year in offshored services ... services which are maintaining an accounting system, maintaining an HR system, doing claims processing, that's growing easily at 70 per cent, maybe even higher.

Farrell: Offshore also came onshore during Y2K. The town of Mountain View lies at the heart of California's Silicon Valley. Housed in one of the many nondescript low-rise office buildings that crowd the region's business avenues is the Indus Entrepreneur, or TIE. It is a networking base for the Indian high-tech Diaspora.

Shankar Muniyappa: Y2K was a big opening as early as 98.

Farrell: Shankar Muniyappa is director of information systems for TIE. He came to America for Y2K-and stayed.

Muniyappa: Myself and many of us believe still believe this is the place where you need to be if you want to be middle of innovation.

Farrell: Some 30,000 Indian IT professionals now live and work in the Valley. Rafiq Dossani of Stanford University:

Dossani: At least 25 per cent of the start ups have Indian employees at fairly senior levels working for them. And ... there's a whole infrastructure therefore being built around them because it's a substantial number now, so you see shopping malls you see business services and so on catering to this particular immigrant community.

Farrell: That community is adding vitality to the American economy. Still, many American high-tech workers are threatened by the offshoring of white collar jobs. The numbers are murky, but according to Mark Zandi of Economy.com 370,000 non-manufacturing jobs moved overseas over the past fours years-with most of the information technology jobs going to India. Salaries are down too. Still, the big factor behind the loss of 1.5 million jobs lost since Y2K is improved business efficiency or productivity - not offshoring. And Y2K also played an important role in boosting business efficiency.

Economists initially looked at Y2K as a productivity killer.

Imagine a town threatened by a rising river. Every able-bodied person in town is put to work stacking sandbags. It's necessary work to save the town - but it's unproductive work. Nothing gets built. No food gets grown.

With the Y2K bug, programmers, chief information officers, project managers, and other digital workers were getting paid to do unproductive work - stacking sandbags of silicon. No innovative investments. No new productivity enhancing software.

But economists were wrong. Y2K wasn't a flood. Instead, think of it as clearing a path choked with underbrush. Once the trail is open, it is much easier to zip from point A to point B. Y2K gave companies an excuse to clean up their software and hardware underbrush - a critical factor in today's improved business productivity. Paul Saffo:

Saffo: A lot of companies said well, gosh, if we're going to have to spend all this money to fix our software let's also see what else we can do at the same time, so it was an invitation to replace a whole bunch of stuff. ... So it forced people to ask hard questions about how they were using things and in the best instances people really did become more efficient.

Farrell: The result? Companies used the new systems they installed to cut costs and work smarter - and hire fewer workers.

[Voice of Leonard Nimoy: "Do you have hard copies of all your important documents ... such as bank statements."]

That's Leonard Nimoy, Mr. Spock from Star Trek. He's narrating the Y2K Family Survival Guide video - one of thousands of products peddled by prophets of doom. Y2K did bring home how reliant we all are on computers. Many of us still don't back up critical data at home. The same isn't true for business and government. Many learned from Y2K just how vulnerable information systems are to a malicious attack or unforeseen disaster. Case in point: Y2K actually helped some businesses survive 9/11.

[News broadcast of President George W. Bush: "I've directed the full resources of intelligence and law enforcement communities to find those responsible and bring them to justice."]

The attack on the World Trade Center stopped trading on the New York Stock Exchange. Against the odds, that citadel of capitalism opened six days later.

John Koskinen: The reason the markets, securities markets, were able to open the Monday after the Tuesday of 9-11 was they still had the test scripts that had been developed in 1998 and 99.

Farrell: John Koskinen credits preparations for Y2K. He was President Clinton's Y2K czar.

Koskinen: ... they were able to in effect take all of those Y2K scripts and make sure that all the transactions with all of the major players would close. Without that they never would have been able to do it in the time frame with the confidence they had.

Farrell: A record 2.4 billion shares traded on the New York Stock Exchange the day it reopened.

Y2K was a unique economic event. Earlier jolts to the economy, like the 1973 oil price hike and the 2001 attack of 9/11, were shocks. But the Year 2000 arrived right on schedule. The surprise was how little immediate impact the much-feared transition had on the economy. Yet we're still living and working with the economic impact of Y2K five years later.

For Marketplace and American RadioWorks, I'm Chris Farrell.

By Dawn Levy

Responding to a terrorist attack employing biological or chemical agents requires knowledge spanning many disciplines. Three Stanford researchers were among nearly 135 leading scientists and technical experts from industry, academia and government invited to participate in the Gordon Research Conference on Chemical and Biological Terrorism Jan. 30-Feb. 4 in Buellton, Calif. The conference brought together public and private sectors to discuss what has worked, where problems are now and may appear in the future, and what needs more attention in responding to and preventing terrorism. The goal was to move toward a better "systems approach" to defense.

The Stanford participants were Margaret E. Kosal, a science fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) with a doctorate in chemistry; Steven M. Block, a professor of applied physics and of biological sciences and senior fellow, by courtesy, at the Stanford Institute for International Studies; and Mark A. Musen, a professor of medicine (medical informatics) and, by courtesy, of computer science.

The conference included discussions of public health surveillance and response, food supply vulnerabilities and agricultural security, forensics of biological and chemical evidence, and the changing nature of the threat environment.

Both biological and chemical terrorist attacks have the potential to cause a large number of causalities and overwhelm medical capabilities, or "surge capacity." The nation's terrorism defense plans focus on mass-effect bioterrorism--events with the potential to infect tens of thousands and kill more than a thousand. But those plans may not effectively counter small-scale biological or chemical attacks, much less nuclear or radiological attacks, Kosal asserted.

Musen spoke about the computational problems of automating surveillance for possible bioterrorism using "prediagnostic" indicators that become available even before health-care workers can identify a specific epidemic.

"There is enormous enthusiasm--and enormous spending--for combining databases of over-the-counter drug sales, absenteeism records, 911 calls and admitting diagnoses to emergency rooms and clinics," he said. "There has been virtually no empirical evaluation of any of these efforts, despite all the excitement."

Musen discussed difficulties computers have making sense of high-volume, low-signal data streams, including basic problems with the way that the data typically are represented, difficulties of integrating disparate data sources and uncertainty in how to present the results of computational analyses to public-health officials in an optimal way.

"Although there is enormous political pressure to be 'doing something' to monitor for bioterrorism, it's also important to take a step back and to engage in the research needed to determine what we really should be doing," Musen said.

Chemical threats are underestimated

The focus on bioterror threats may miss a more frequent occurrence--chemical attacks. In a presentation titled "The Shifting Face of Chemical Terrorism: Assessing an Emerging Threat," Kosal examined the growing trend of non-state actors to use improvised chemical devices (ICDs) that may include choking and blistering agents.

"The path from the 'street chemistry' of improvised explosive devices [IEDs] to ICDs incorporating commercial chemicals is very short, whereas the path from IEDs to transgenic biological agents effectively weaponized is a substantial leap for states and even more so for terrorists," Kosal said. "While U.S. policy is focused on defending against a mass-effect bioterrorism attack, we may be missing a lower-tech threat of much higher probability."

Half of the U.S. fatalities in Iraq have been due to IEDs, typically roadside bombs, Kosal said. "This strongly suggests there is a substantial tacit knowledge base and readily available materials for constructing these types of weapons--one guy has not been making them all in a Mosul garage." While incorporating chemicals into roadside bombs would not dramatically increase military casualties, incorporating them in devices employed in enclosed spaces could, Kosal said.

An analysis of terrorism between 1910 and 2003 from open-source information shows the lion's share of 265 terrorist attacks--76 percent--were chemical. Only 17 percent were biological, 0 percent nuclear (involving fissile material, such as that powering an atomic bomb) and 7 percent radiological (involving radioactive elements that cannot be used for fission or that contain less than a critical mass of fissionable material, such as those employed in "dirty bombs").

It used to be that the major threat of chemical weapons came from state-based programs. Chlorine and mustard gases were used extensively in World War I, for example. The United States and the former Soviet Union amassed stockpiles exceeding 40,000 tons, which are still being destroyed. International efforts to control the exchange of certain chemicals, such as precursors for nerve and blister agents, have been effective. Kosal cited the refusal in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq war of the world community to sell Iraq the key precursor to mustard gas.

Nowadays, terrorists both foreign and domestic may disperse traditional chemical warfare agents using improvised methods. In 1995, for example, the Aum Shinrikyo group crudely dispersed a nerve agent in a Tokyo subway--killing 12 and panicking thousands--using umbrellas to puncture 11 garbage bags, each filled with a common solvent and about a pound of sarin. Today's chemical weapons may just as likely come from common commercial sources, such as agrochemicals. Radical Islamists have even attempted to weaponize a research chemical, osmium tetroxide, used to prepare biological specimens for electron microscopy.

In contrast with nuclear or mass-effect biological weapons, chemical weapons may not require sophisticated knowledge to produce. In 2003 at a rented storage space in Tyler, Texas, government agents seized half a million rounds of ammunition, more than 60 pipe bombs, remote-controlled bombs disguised as briefcases, pamphlets on how to make chemical weapons and improvised hydrogen cyanide dispersal devices hypothetically capable of killing thousands in a minute. The stockpiler, William J. Krar, described as a white supremacist and anti-government extremist, was sentenced to 11 years in federal prison. His specific objectives remain unknown to authorities.

Kosal said terrorists do not appear to be concocting new chemicals; they're co-opting existing ones. "Chemical terrorism is likely to be a crime of opportunity and familiarity with chemicals and chemistry," Kosal said. "Perhaps the basic knowledge and materials--commercial dual-use chemicals in this instance--are too globally widespread to justify efforts to control the capability of terrorists to co-opt them for malfeasant uses. . . . The best threat-reduction policy may be to reduce the motivation.

"Much of the academic and policy dialogue segregates the folks discussing motivation from the folks discussing capacity and vulnerability. The former tend to be historians and social scientists and the latter, biologists, chemists and physicists. It may prove that decreasing terrorist motivation is unfeasible in the near term, but here is an example where those with the technical knowledge and those with the social science knowledge need to be working cooperatively, the type of interaction that the CISAC Science Fellows program fosters," Kosal said.

Ten thousand fingers on the bioterror "button"

Block's talk focused on the growing threat of bioterror. While chemicals have killed more people to date than have biological weapons, future biological attacks using infectious, untreatable pathogens have the potential to kill more people than chemicals. Block wryly called such biological attacks "the gift that keeps on giving."

Block said post-9/11 restrictions aimed at keeping pathogens out of the wrong hands have backfired. One is the Department of Health and Human Services' "Select Agent Rule," which establishes requirements regarding possession and use in the United States, receipt from outside the United States and transfer within the United States of a particular list of agents and toxins.

"We're shooting ourselves in the foot," Block said. "We've made it so hard to work on these pathogens that even our so-called 'A-Team' can't do research with them." World-renowned plague researcher Stanley Falkow of Stanford and famed anthrax expert John Collier of Harvard have stopped working on live pathogens because of restrictive effects of recent legislation, according to Block. They now confine their research to a handful of cloned genes. "It's almost impossible to hire grad students or postdocs to work on Select Agents. Such research has been driven underground or into our national labs, which historically have not had the biological expertise found in the top academic labs and biotech companies."

Much of our response to bioterror threats is based on how we've historically responded to nuclear terror threats, Block said. "With nuclear weapons, only two things can be made to go 'boom'--plutonium and highly enriched uranium," he said. That made it comparatively easy to track and control materials, and to get a handle on the problem. "We tried to keep nuclear secrets secret. Not everyone knows how to make an atomic bomb."

In contrast, the genie has long been out of the bottle when it comes to biological agents. Virtually all research is reported in the open literature. "Even if we were to stop publishing everything now, there'd be enough public information to keep bioterrorists busy for at least another 50 years," he said.

"Back in the nuclear age, only a few countries were nuclear powers, and only a few people were authorized to have their 'fingers on the button,'" Block said. "Like them or not, they were responsible people. Contrast that with a world where genetically engineered weapons can be produced by, say, 10,000 people. Someone is guaranteed to press that button. We can't stop [bioterror acts] at the source any more than we can stop a computer virus at the source."

Rather than futilely attempting to thwart biological threats at their sources, which are ubiquitous, Block advocated shoring up the public health system so it can respond nimbly once threat turns to reality. A new generation of antitoxin, antiviral and antibacterial agents may mitigate ill effects, and improved vaccines may prevent damage altogether. "We need to work the problem from the other direction," he said. "To confine our attention to Select Agents alone is essentially putting on blinders. The future threats we may face may bear little relation to the organisms on the current list."