International Nuclear Relations After the Indian and Pakistani Test Explosions

India's and Pakistan's nuclear tests have dismayed the international community. However, they can be seen as a culmination of the deterioration of international nuclear relations that has taken place since the mid-1990s. The author examines the reasons for this deterioration which he finds in US–Russian relations, the Middle East and South Asia, in disputes over arms control objectives, and in normative and procedural dilemmas that emerged as the number of countries with nuclear weapon programmes was reduced to a 'hard core' of eight states. This discussion provides the background for an assessment of the consequences of the actions of India and Pakistan. Despite the dangers, the author stresses the opportunities that could lie ahead. If key states act positively and cooperatively, the climate and processes of nuclear arms control could be transformed.     

Militarism and Human Rights

Through an analysis of the impact of military spending on economic growth, the author argues that militarism and human rights are incompatible. Implementation of the economic, social, cultural, civil and political rights set out in the International Bill of Human Rights requires national mobilization of economic resources. If limited national capital is consumed in excessive military expenditures the feasibility of rights fulfilment diminishes. The article outlines initial public policies designed to limit militarism and to allow international human rights to serve as the cornerstone of domestic and foreign policy.     

Timber and Town: Post-War Federal Forest Policy, Industrial Organization, and Rural Change in Oregon's Illinois Valley

In the recent political furor over disposition of the remaining old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest, focus has been directed at the ecological shortcomings of the federal sustained yield forest management doctrine. This has occurred in part at the expense of evaluation of these policies based on social criteria. Yet the sustained yield paradigm and the post-war compact between private capital and federal forest agencies were justified in part to foster stable rural timber economies. Nowhere has this compact been more significant than in rural Oregon. And yet nowhere are its failings more apparent. The central argument of this paper is that the failure of federal sustained yield policies to sustain rural communities stems from an implicitly naive model of industrial capitalism. By ignoring the inherently destabilizing character of capitalist industry, by further failing to refine the notion of community stability, and by failing to take genuine steps to defend rural society from the upheavals of industrial change, the United States Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management have allowed community stability to languish in the dogged pursuit of accelerated cutting rates. This paper explores industrial change in Oregon's forest products sector in the post-war era of federal sustained yield management, looking specifically at southwest Oregon's Illinois Valley.     

Afghanistan observed

Barnett R. Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan: State Formation and Collapse in the International System. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. xvii + 378 pp. No price given.

Barnett R. Rubin, The Search for Peace in Afghanistan: From Buffer State to Failed State. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. xi + 190 pp. US$25.00 (paper).

David B. Edwards, Heroes of the Age: Moral Fault Lines on the Afghan Frontier. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996. xviii + 306 pp. No price given.

J.L. Lee, The ‘Ancient Supremacy’: Bukhara, Afghanistan and the Battle for Balkh, 1731–1901. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1996. i + 695 pp. No price given.