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Nationalism and ethnic conflict "have already led to two world wars in Europe," says Stephen Larrabee, a former National Security Council staff member now at the Rand Corp. "The time to act is now, and not with hollow promises." What Larrabee and others know is that NATO has always been more than a security alliance. "We understood this at the beginning," says Larrabee. "West Germany wasn't a stable democracy before it was allowed into NATO. Belonging to the alliance helped it become one. It's silly to insist that the Central Europeans must be functioning democrats before they...
...researcher at the Rand Corp. named Paul Baran came up with a bizarre solution to this Strangelovian puzzle. He designed a computer- communications network that had no hub, no central switching station, no governing authority, and that assumed that the links connecting any city to any other were totally unreliable. Baran's system was the antithesis of the orderly, efficient phone network; it was more like an electronic post office designed by a madman. In Baran's scheme, each message was cut into tiny strips and stuffed into electronic envelopes, called packets, each marked with the address of the sender...
Such figures, startling as they are, have stirred little national attention, in part because the new immigrant families have not spread themselves uniformly across the country. A recent Rand Corp. study found that 78% of school-age immigrants who have been in the U.S. three years or less live in just five states: California, New York, Texas, Florida and Illinois. Like most statistics, this one can be misleading if it is taken to mean that the surge of immigrant students is solely a big-state, big-city concern. In absolute terms, even a small number of such students can profoundly...
...doomsday clock, stopped just before midnight as the cold war ended, is still ticking. Rand Corp. study for the U.S. Pentagon warns that the world will accumulate enough plutonium -- the radioactive ingredient used in many nuclear warheads -- to build 87,000 "primitive" bombs by 2003. Weapons dismantled by the U.S. and the former U.S.S.R. will account for 199 tons of the lethal substance. Adding to the problem will be more than 300 tons of plutonium extracted from spent uranium fuel retrieved from nuclear power plants. "Separated plutonium held in inventory," says the report, "could be diverted and reworked to make...
...Rand Corporation study found that those who had "free" health care spent 50 percent more on health care, were 33 percent more likely to enter a hospital and were 25 percent more likely to see a doctor than those who had to pay for the majority of their costs. If we are to succeed in cutting back health care costs, this system must be replaced by one in which individual consumers are placed at the center of the decision-making process...