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.  

This timely study is the first to examine the relationship between competition for energy resources and the propensity for conflict in the Caspian region. Taking the discussion well beyond issues of pipeline politics and the significance of Caspian oil and gas to the global market, the book offers significant new findings concerning the impact of energy wealth on the political life and economies of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan. The contributors, a leading group of scholars and policymakers, explore the differing interests of ruling elites, the political opposition, and minority ethnic and religious groups region-wide.

Placing Caspian development in the broader international relations context, the book assesses the ways in which Russia, China, Iran, and Turkey are fighting to protect their interests in the newly independent states and how competition for production contracts and pipeline routes influences regional security. Specific chapters also link regional issues to central questions of international politics and to theoretical debates over the role of energy wealth in political and economic development worldwide. Woven throughout the implications for U.S. policy, giving the book wide appeal to policymakers, corporate executives, energy analysts, and scholars alike.

Nuclear war is generally believed to bring risks of destruction out of proportion to any gain that may be secured by the war, or to any loss that may be averted, except perhaps for the loss of national independence and group survival. Nuclear-armed states, however, continue to project military force outside their own territory in order to carry out rivalries for power and influence. Will these rival power projections lead to war, as they often did in the past? If not, how will they be resolved? This paper makes the case that, because of the recognized destructiveness of nuclear weapons, rivalries among major nuclear-armed states for power and influence outside their own territory are not likely to lead to central war among them, but that definite lines separating zones of exclusive security influence, such as prevailed during the Cold War, will reappear where circumstances prevent
other compromises. This conclusion does not hold in the case of nuclear powers that are centrally vulnerable to conventional attack from each other: in that case, nuclear deterrence is less likely to be stable. Where lines are established, they may facilitate rather than prevent cooperation in dealing with the next century's global problems.

The dissolution of the Soviet Union has brought new nuclear non-proliferation dangers and opportunities. Both revolve around the approximately thirty thousand nuclear weapons and the fissile materials for perhaps ninety thousand nuclear bombs in the former Soviet Union. The weapons are now deployed in only four of the newly independents states - most in Russia, but some still in Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine. "Loose Nukes" is the colloquial description of one aspect of the new threats.

New positive and negative assurances from all five permanent members of the UN Security Council are now vitally important, not only to provide support to Ukraine and every other non-nuclear-weapons state's legitimate concerns, but to advance the vital goals of nuclear non-proliferation prior to the critical 1995 NPT review and extension conference.

A Conference report of the Center for International Security and Arms Control. This conference report contains papers presented at a symposium sponsored by the Institute of Far Eastern Studies (IFES) of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and the International Strategic Institute at Stanford (ISIS) at Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan, June 21-30, 1988.