Notes

1.  Herman Kahn, The Emerging Japanese Superstate (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 94,130.

2.  Robert F. Byrnes, ed., After Brezhnev: Sources of Soviet Conduct in the 1980s (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970), xvi-xvii. I am indebted to Hugh Ragsdale, The Russian Tragedy: The Burden of History (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1996), 251, for calling attention to this passage.

3.  Another kind of unconventional risk that erodes boundaries should also be considered. In an increasingly interdependent world, the extraterritorial effects of another nation's domestic conduct may physically damage our domestic well being. Saddam Hussein offered a small, wartime taste of this type of effect when he tried to intimidate Saudi Arabia by dumping oil in the Persian Gulf. But the problem can be subtler. If, for example, global warming is accelerated by intensified use of fossil fuels, failure to address another nation's use of these fuels through negotiation and agreement (as with acid rain) may present a 21st-century challenge to our well being. Failures of health practice, refugee control, nuclear safety, or even simply control of drug lords and other criminals may similarly spill over borders and make what would otherwise be a domestic matter international. Those concerned with national security in the 21st century need to think more broadly than has been the norm.

4.  As recently as 20 years ago, more than 60 percent of the Members of Congress had military experience. In the just sworn-in 106th Congress, only 31 percent of the House and 43 percent of the Senate have been in the armed services. This last Congress to sit in the 20th century, may have the least military experience in the Nation's history. The 21st century will likely exacerbate the trend.

5.  These estimates are drawn from data provided by the Defense Manpower Data Center.

6.  Participants report that when Sergei Akhromeyev, Chief of the Soviet General Staff, visited U.S. military units in the 1980s, his first reaction was to attempt to emulate our technical achievements, but he could develop no rapid plan for rivaling our corps of noncommissioned officers. In addition to the long lead time associated with such a project, his difficulty derived from differences in our competing societies.

7.  Biological weapons are novel but not unprecedented. In the Middle Ages, bodies were catapulted over the walls of castles under siege in order to spread plaguen in America's French and Indian Wars, Indians were given blankets infected with smallpox; in our Civil War, Sherman's march to the sea was impeded by poisoned wellsn and in World War II, Japanese Unit 731 experimented with biological weapons that killed as many as a thousand Chinese civilians.

This subject is, for expository purposes, given limited space. Other types of NEW weapons should not be overlooked. Chemical weapons, the most pervasive and familiar, are somewhat more confined in their likely effects. They are also relatively easy to focus and control. Accordingly, they may be the most likely to be used. Radioactive weapons (though not necessarily explosive) lie at hand wherever there are large nuclear programs, whether developed for peaceful or military purposes. In Russia, perhaps the greatest source of risk in this regard, there are estimated to be some 2.5 million pounds of enriched uranium and plutonium. More than half of that is embedded in some 24,000 nuclear weapons, 7,000 of them mounted on missiles, 5,000 dispersed as tactical nuclear weapons, and 12,000 in storage. The balance of this weapons-grade material is in more than 50 military and civilian research institutes. With so little state power and economic well being in Russia, there are high risks that this radioactive material will be bought or stolen and used for traumatic attack.

8.  The appropriate absence of an offensive program and limited test information and experience make these estimates subject to debate.

9.  War and Anti-War: Survival at the Dawn of the 21st Century (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1993)

10.  Warfare of this kind is certainly not unprecedented. The allied strategic bombing of Germany and our use of atomic bombs against Japan were aimed, at least in part, at demoralizing our opponents.

11.  The value we place on civilian life renders us vulnerable in other ways as well. Regrettably, our opponents can use their own civilians as hostages and shields. During Desert Storm, the Iraqi Air Defense system could not stop the allied bombing of Baghdad. But a complete halt was forced for 4 days when Iraq publicized the deaths of its women and children in the U.S. bombing of the Al Firdos bunker. See Thomas A. Keaney and Eliot A. Cohen, Gulf War Air Power Survey Summary Report (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1993), 69. In Somalia, demonstrations of women and children surrounded, and thereby protected, armed men who threatened U.S. Marines. More recently, the Serbs used U.N. peacekeepers and Muslim civilian populations as "human shields" to prevent NATO air attacks. The development of both highly precise missiles and of nonlethal weaponry is, in large measure, an effort to respond to this tactic.

12.  Because it is exclusively focused decades ahead, this essay slights very appropriate concerns about the nearer future. Moreover, this discussion oversimplifies the disjunction between near- and far-term concerns. To the extent we successfully cope with present challenges we are likely to benefit in the future. Readiness today also raises the capabilities and morale of tomorrow's force. The ability to fight a "major regional war" may keep a near-term regional power from becoming a long-term major competitor through its use of intimidation and battlefield victories.