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INTERNATIONAL PEACE AND SECURITY Today, despite the end of the Cold War, the demise of the Soviet Union, and the independence of eastern and central European states, the presence and the proliferation of nuclear weapons, not to mention chemical and biological weapons, still pose a grave threat to international peace. Now that India and Pakistan have joined the exclusive "Nuclear Bomb Club," we are witnessing the revival of old arguments and rationalizations. All the declared nuclear powers — the United States, Russia, Great Britain, France, and China and now India and Pakistan (Israel is an undeclared nuclear power) — insist they possess nuclear weapons only to deter others from using them. Yet there have been times in the past, and there will surely be occasions in the future, when major powers have used their nuclear capability to gain some political end by intimidation. What should be of particular concern to all is the element of chance and accident under conditions of political anarchy, civil war, and the malfunction of antiquated radar or other detection systems, not to mention the Y2K problem. Added to these dangers is the precarious state of Russia. In the post-Cold War era, Russia is experiencing an interlocking series of crises — economic, political, military, and social — that have set back Russia's national development by decades and undermined its grip on its nuclear arsenal and weapons-grade materials. In view of these looming problems, it is both logical and imperative that the Corporation continue its decade-long policy of making nonproliferation of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction, as well as developments in Russia and other former Soviet states, central features of the International Peace and Security program. Building on our past experience in arms control and nonproliferation, the program will pay particular attention to the secure storage of nuclear weapons and weapons-grade materials and the safety of their command-and-control systems. Concerning Russia and other post-Soviet states, rather than offer prescriptions for change, we will concentrate on the sharing of experience and expertise on critical problems between high-level groups there and in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere. The program will also address new and emerging threats to world peace, following up the work of the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, such as the decline of natural resources, and conflicts between the principles of territorial integrity and self-determination as they are being played out in various parts of the world. The consolidation of peace once it has been won, which entails the reconciliation of grievances among rival groups and other aspects of post-conflict peacebuilding, will be another area requiring Corporation attention. Finally, we will be looking at the effectiveness of sanctions and incentives imposed by governments and international organizations on recalcitrant states. In the category of new dimensions of security, proposals will be accepted only at the Corporation's invitation. In all of these areas, the Corporation will continue to bring the best available knowledge to bear, funding analyses of selected critical issues and drawing the attention of policymakers, scholars, the media, and the public to the findings through publications, conferences, and other means of informing the public. A crosscutting initiative with the Education program, described below, will be aimed at assisting higher education institutions in the former Soviet Union and supporting the disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities. NONPROLIFERATION OF WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION The world has moved from an era of high risk and high stability into one of low risk but also low stability, as former Senator Sam Nunn has defined it. While the danger of the deliberate use of nuclear weapons by a major nuclear state has diminished, the threat of inadvertent or unauthorized use has risen since the end of the Cold War. The nuclear weapons of all the nuclear powers are aging and require continuous upgrades of their command and control systems. Russia still possesses a huge stockpile of nuclear warheads, tactical nuclear weapons, highly enriched uranium and plutonium, and chemical, biological, and conventional weapons, as well as a tremendous pool of scientific talent. In view of the country's economic problems and political uncertainty, the international community has real reason to worry about the possible degradation of Russia's central nuclear command and the potential this offers for the illegal disposition of its fissionable material. Clearly, it is in the world's interest to be certain that Moscow retains control over Russia's weapons of mass destruction. Through the Nunn–Lugar Amendment to the Soviet Nuclear Threat Reduction Act of 1991, the United States is devoting about $400 million a year to assist the Russians in their control and disposal of nuclear warheads, a sum that constitutes only one-tenth of 1 percent of the U.S. defense budget. The United States has agreed to help ten Russian atomic cities start commercial, nonmilitary ventures and train Russian nuclear specialists in business planning. The $30 million allocated for this purpose, however, is hardly sufficient to cope with the problems of these cities, which were artificially created to serve the Soviet nuclear buildup. While maintaining central command and control over Russia's nuclear arsenal represents the most urgent problem, there are other sources of security concern. China is modernizing its nuclear weapons program at full speed in an environment devoid of bilateral and multilateral negotiations aimed at nuclear arms control. The newly acknowledged nuclear capabilities of India and Pakistan have also raised the security threshold of the Non-Proliferation Treaty regime. In view of the Indo–Pakistani tests and the recent firing by North Korea of a missile over Japan, the latter is now rethinking its position on not pursuing a nuclear option. There are rumblings from Taipei that Taiwan may reconsider the weapons program that it stopped in the 1980s — rumblings that will grow louder with the recent news of more Chinese missiles targeting the island. From the point of view of China, the prospect of the United States selling missile defense systems to Japan (and possibly to Taiwan) is a cause of anxiety. Finally, the START II agreement, intended to reduce the number of nuclear warheads held by Russia and the United States by half, to 3,500, has not yet been ratified by Russia. Added to the nuclear problem is the precipitous spread of chemical and biological weapons worldwide. Where such weapons were once viewed as the exclusive property of advanced nation-states, they are now available in a virtual global supermarket, in which the most eager potential customers are states that threaten world security and nonstate actors, including terrorist groups. The Corporation will be financing research on all these areas, exploring their policy implications and raising public awareness. In addition to work aimed at integrating China into a wider arms control regime, we may recommend a small number of targeted grants focusing on the Asian continent, which presents possibly the gravest arms control challenge of the next century. Grants will bring together arms control experts with regional specialists and support efforts to educate policymakers about this critically important part of the world. RUSSIA AND THE OTHER POST-SOVIET STATES Russia's nuclear predicament is, of course, an integral part of the country's economic troubles. In 1992, the Russian government began an ambitious effort to privatize most of its economy. By 1997, Russia (and its Western advisors) were hailing the program's success as more than 100,000 enterprises were declared to be in private hands. Privatization, however, has not produced effective owners or profitable enterprises. Instead, a handful of insiders, namely Soviet-era directors in cooperation with trade union officials, have gained controlling shares in three-quarters of all large enterprises. Through complex arbitrage schemes, delays in paying workers, state subsidies, and the stripping of assets, the heads of these enterprises have amassed individual wealth while their companies operate in the red. In contrast, private companies that were interested in attracting investments and market share are greatly undercapitalized. The statistics about Russia's economy are alarming. In August 1998, Russia sanctioned a 34-percent devaluation of the ruble, unilaterally suspended payments on short-term government debt, and imposed a moratorium on debt payments by banks and companies to foreign corporations. Since then, Russian gross domestic product (GDP) has fallen by at least 50 percent (according to some reports by as much as 83 percent) and capital investments by 90 percent. Despite privatization, only 27 million of Russia's 67 million workers are in the private sector, leaving 40 million officially on the state payroll. The debt in unpaid wages amounts to a staggering 25 percent of GDP. Real wages have dropped by 78 percent between 1991 and 1997. Two-thirds of those nominally employed are not being paid fully or on time. In the agricultural sector, meat and dairy livestock supplies have fallen by 75 percent. More than 95 percent of the country's arable land remains under the control of inefficient state-run farms, with 80 percent of the farms in the red. State subsidies have dried up, and equipment is grossly outdated. The disruption of the grain transportation system has left produce to rot in fields for want of railway cars. Today, Russia imports half of its food as well as most of its consumer goods and produces very little except for oil, natural gas, and minerals. Russian officials speak of nuclear weapons as guarantors of Russia's international weight, and have stated their commitment to retaining a triad of land, naval, and air nuclear forces. But in the current circumstances the government does not have the financial means to upgrade Russia's nuclear arsenal, much less have the money to reform, reduce, and streamline its armed forces. Russia thus finds itself in an unprecedented situation, described by some as the literal demodernization of a twentieth-century country. We are witnessing a phenomenon where national and international financial obligations are not met, taxes are not collected, trade is conducted on the basis of a barter system of exchange of goods and services, and the entire infrastructure of production, technology, science, transportation, heating, and sewage disposal is disintegrating. Some 75 percent of the population lives below or barely above the subsistence level and an estimated 15 million face the threat of starvation. Even if the country's economic conditions were stabilized and economic growth were to resume, Russia would need decades to regain what it has lost in the 1990s. Russia's population today is roughly comparable to that of the United States in 1950, but its current total economic product has only about 25 percent of the value of the U.S. economic product in 1950. In the unlikely event that Russia could match the 3.3 percent current annual growth rate of the United States, the value of the Russian economic product would not match even the 1950 U.S. level until the year 2040. Russia is an integral part of Europe and a bridge to Asia. It holds the key to peace in the world. A democratic Russia as well as a strong Russia is essential to the stability of the region. It matters, therefore, whether Russia evolves along liberal democratic or authoritarian lines. Isolating Russia, attempting to take advantage of its current weaknesses, or denying Russia's legitimate political interests would be shortsighted. Russia needs somehow to get hold of its own future. What the West can provide, short of a massive Marshall Plan to assist in Russia's modernization — which does not seem within the realm of possibility — is support, encouragement, and, perhaps most importantly, patience. Let us recognize that Russia is neither a major enemy nor a country we can fundamentally alter by our actions and influence — and keep in mind that even a small East Germany needed $100 billion a year to be part of a unified modern Germany. At the official level, programs should be pursued that strive to reduce the threat posed by Russia's weapons of mass destruction, without meddling in Russia's internal politics and developments. At the unofficial level, one must work to deepen Russia's ties to the West and do it on the basis of equal partnership whenever possible. The Corporation will assist Russian leaders in four different sectors and their counterparts from the United States, Europe, and elsewhere to share experiences and expertise on critical problems. These groups are the business community, policymakers, the upper-level military, and the intelligentsia. The Corporation's efforts are likely to encompass similar groups from other states of the former Soviet Union. Since it is important for the West to pursue policies best suited to ensuring the region's stability, the Corporation will also promote research and dissemination in the United States on Russia and the other post-Soviet states in order to keep abreast of the region's domestic and foreign policy developments. We will also consider programs aimed at training the next generation of American scholars on the post-Soviet states through institutions that offer field study opportunities and fellowships. NEW DIMENSIONS OF SECURITY If the mission of the program is to identify threats to world peace and work on reducing those threats, it must also be alert to new and emerging dangers. Over the next two years, the Corporation will engage in grantmaking that reflects and builds upon the work of the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict. Staff members will examine what the commission has identified as the most significant factors creating or exacerbating conflict situations and determining the best preventive strategies. Given the breadth of the commission's final report, it is impossible to consider every recommendation therein. We have therefore selected four areas that are in critical need of attention by policymakers and the analytic research community. Resource scarcity. A great deal of attention is being paid to escalating energy demands and to new sources of oil and natural gas, notably in the Caspian basin. Much less heed is being given to the most basic human need — water. In 1996, the United Nations Development Programme reported that there were ten countries in the world, largely in Africa, where more than half the population did not have access to potable water. The sharing of water resource has the potential of bringing rival nations together in common cause, just as the manipulation of the water supply by those who control it can lead to conflict and violence, as we already see in the Middle East and could witness in Asia and Africa. Self-determination/Territorial integrity. The Cold War precipitated a series of secessionist impulses, especially in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. There was violent state collapse in Yugoslavia and a peaceful breakup of Czechoslovakia. There were internal secessionist movements in the newly independent states of the former Soviet Union and in the Transdniest region of Moldova; in Nagorno-Karabakh; Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia; and, most dramatically, in the bloody conflict in Chechnya. For each of these movements, and also in the Serbian province of Kosovo, with its 90-percent ethnic Albanian population, what is at issue is the right of an ethnic group to secede unilaterally in defiance of internationally accepted norms of the inviolability of established international borders — even if these borders were artificially created. These and other conflicts that have flared up in the post–Cold War period point to the need to explore new thinking on creative and innovative arrangements that would help reconcile divergent internationally recognized norms. Peacebuilding. Consolidating peace after conflict has ceased is key to the prevention of renewed violence. Peacebuilding goes far beyond the peace accords and cease-fires. It includes reconciling grievances among rival groups, building democratic institutions, restructuring economies with more equitable distribution of resources and opportunities, establishing the rule of law, and guaranteeing human rights. Where the intervention of international actors is necessary and desirable, it is critical that they seek out the best blend of political, humanitarian, economic, and/or military aid. Attention to this set of issues is all the more appropriate at a time of increased acceptance of human rights as a factor in foreign policy decision making. Sanctions and incentives. Economic sanctions as a punishment of miscreants in conflict situations are an instrument of choice for many governments and international organizations. The United States alone currently imposes sanctions on more than seventy countries. Yet there is little by way of empirical findings or policy-relevant theory concerning the conditions that make sanctions work effectively. The need for research to guide policy is all the more urgent because sanctions tend to punish the most vulnerable sector of the target country's population and inflict severe collateral damage to neighboring states. The Corporation will support efforts to understand the relationship between access to vital resources and conflict; explore possible solutions to area-specific problems that have the tension between self-determination and territorial integrity at their core; examine practical applications of multi-tiered assistance strategies in peacebuilding with recommendations tailored to specific conflicts; and assess the efficacy of economic measures as instruments of conflict prevention. CROSS-PROGRAM INITIATIVE ON HIGHER EDUCATION IN THE FORMER SOVIET UNION The dramatic disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, with its accompanying political, social, and economic dislocations, has wrought havoc on the highly centralized educational system at all levels, not only in Russia but also in all the former constituent states of the Soviet Union. In Russia the end result has been a major "brain drain," both externally, as the best and the brightest flee Russia, and internally, as members of the intellectual community seek employment in more lucrative professions. This dire situation is all the more tragic when we consider both the centrality of Russia's intelligentsia to the country's recovery and its importance to the West. As two experts, Loren Graham and Andrew Kuchins, observed in a recent op-ed piece, "The scientific and academic communities have traditionally been the most pro-Western segments of Russian society. Throughout the Soviet period the most prominent calls for democracy and human rights came from their ranks — Andrei Sakharov, the noted physicist and father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, is only the best known of a number of leaders in the human rights movement during the Soviet period." Now, they write, in an ironic and potentially tragic twist, the academic and scientific communities in their plight turn to the Communists they once repudiated. "The leader of the Communist Party, Gennady Zyuganov, is making a direct appeal to intellectuals, saying he will support them in a way Boris Yeltsin does not, and he has adopted as the official seal of his new Communist Party, in addition to the traditional hammer and sickle, 'the book,' adding scholars to workers and peasants as bulwarks of the political order he seeks to create." The academies, research institutes, universities, and libraries of Russia and elsewhere face awesome tasks of reforming and modernizing in a way that balances research and teaching, addresses the problem of oversupply of scientists, mathematicians, and other skilled labor, and compensates for the erosion of financial support for education. Thus far, U.S. and European governments have been mainly concerned with the plight, and flight, of post-Soviet natural scientists. There have been few concerted efforts to help the disciplines of the social sciences and humanities and their expert scholars or to prevent the further decline of Russian and non-Russian universities. Since the Russian intelligentsia has played, and will continue to play, a major role in the advancement of science, scholarship, culture, and the cultivation of leadership, it is imperative that U.S. and European cultural and educational institutions and foundations assist institutions of higher education in Russia and the other states of the former Soviet Union until such time as they are able to develop plans to solve their own educational problems. Working with the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and other organizations, the Corporation will assess the needs of the social sciences and humanities and seek ways in which, within the terms of the charter, it can strengthen institutions of higher learning and research in the post-Soviet states. This will be a cross-program initiative carried out in cooperation with the Education program. Proposals will be accepted only at the invitation of the Corporation.
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