LOS ALAMOS, N.M. — On this remote mesa where the atom bomb was born, a fresh question is in the air: Does the U.S. need new nuclear weapons?

Some 15 years after the Cold War, and at a time when the U.S. is demanding others restrain their nuclear ambitions, the Bush administration thinks the answer is yes. With little notice, it has been pressing Congress to fund research into a new generation of nuclear weapons.

Lawmakers have twice turned down proposals to design a new nuclear “bunker-buster” bomb, to blow up buried caches of weapons. But last month, with little debate, Congress approved $25 million for research into what is supposed to be a sturdier, more reliable warhead than those designed during the Cold War. If the work is successful, the U.S. could someday spend billions of dollars replacing much of the current arsenal.

The U.S. hasn’t designed or built a new nuclear warhead since the late 1980s. It hasn’t tested one since 1992. U.S. officials say the aging arsenal is becoming increasingly difficult and costly to maintain, and was designed to deter a foe far different from those the U.S. now faces. “You would not create the current stockpile if you were starting now,” says Linton Brooks, head of the Energy Department’s National Nuclear Security Administration, which maintains the arsenal.

President Bush has committed to deep cuts in the U.S. nuclear arsenal. The overall stockpile numbers are classified. But by 2012 the cuts would leave the U.S. with about 2,200 nuclear warheads deployed on long-range launchers, along with some 700 short-range weapons. In addition, the Pentagon is expected to keep some 3,000 backup warheads, as a hedge against technical failures or a resurgent Russia. Mr. Brooks says with a more dependable warhead, along with a revival of the weapons-production complex, the U.S. should be able to make “significant” cuts in the hedge.

Critics say any international perception that the U.S. is strengthening its nuclear capability with new warheads could severely undercut its credibility at a time when it is pressing North Korea and Iran to curb nuclear appetites. “You cannot tell people that nuclear weapons are bad for you but we are modernizing ours,” says Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Some also question the technical rationale. Currently, the U.S. spends billions of dollars each year to monitor its stockpile and extend the weapons’ life. Critics say some minor changes in this maintenance effort could buy even more time.

Some also say any plan to build new warheads without testing them — which is the administration’s declared goal — could leave more doubt, not less, about the arsenal’s reliability. “We’ll have to see how much of a change they’re proposing, but it’s hard to understand how a redesigned warhead that’s never been tested would give you higher confidence than warheads which have been tested more than a thousand times,” says Sidney Drell, a Stanford University physicist and member of the Jasons, a scientific group that advises the government on weapons issues.

Scientists at Los Alamos are engaged in their own vigorous debate. Joe Martz, a chemical engineer, heads a small team working on a preliminary design for a more-reliable warhead. He says new technology should permit crafting one that is easier to build, cheaper to maintain and safer to store, and that wouldn’t need testing. At the same time, he fiercely opposes the Pentagon’s proposed nuclear bunker-buster, saying any change that might make it more tempting to use nuclear arms would be “destabilizing.”

When the Defense Department chose this spot in late 1942 as the site for its secret atom-bomb program, there was little here but farms and the Los Alamos Ranch School, built to toughen up sickly East Coast boys. The military put up a barbed-wire fence around the newly created town, then an interior fence around the lab itself, to keep the work secret even from scientists’ families.

Reminders of that history are never far away. Los Alamos, now a town of 18,000, has an Oppenheimer Drive (after J. Robert Oppenheimer, head of the Manhattan Project), a Trinity Drive (after the desert site of the first test) and two atomic-bomb museums.

Inside the lab’s security fences today, scientists are focused on more recent history and what they fear is a steady erosion of skills. “The really scary thing is that there are only two designers [of warheads' plutonium triggers] left at the laboratory who have underground-test experience,” says James Peery, one of the weapons program’s directors.

The U.S. got out of the business of making nuclear weapons almost by inadvertence. By the late 1980s, the Cold War was winding down and the once-sacrosanct weapons complex began to face public scrutiny. Under pressure from Congress and environmental groups, the Energy Department admitted in 1988 to causing radioactive and toxic pollution at installations in a dozen states.

The next year, federal agents, looking into allegations of illegal dumping and falsified records, raided and closed Colorado’s Rocky Flats plant, which produced all of the arsenal’s plutonium triggers. Then the first President Bush, amid his unsuccessful 1992 re-election campaign, reluctantly agreed to a congressionally mandated moratorium on testing.

A reprieve of sorts came in the mid-1990s. The Clinton administration, committed to a test-ban treaty that the Senate never did ratify, agreed to spend billions at the labs for technology to ensure the nuclear stockpile’s continued reliability without test explosions.

Even after more than 1,000 test blasts, scientists had a limited understanding of what happens inside a nuclear warhead in the few billionths of a second as it explodes. They had still less experience with the effects of aging on warheads that once were replaced every 15 or 20 years. Today, in a program known as stockpile stewardship, the U.S. uses elaborate machines to try to determine how well its aging nuclear arms would work if the U.S. ever needed to detonate one.

A 220-foot-long electron accelerator, housed inside a thick concrete blockhouse here, produces some of the world’s most powerful X-rays to photograph the inside of a mock nuclear warhead as it’s subjected to the searing heat and pressure of a conventional explosion. Supercomputers then extrapolate the resulting data to gauge how the components would hold up under the far greater extremes generated by a nuclear chain reaction.

On a recent morning, scientists provided a taste of what their mix of real and virtual testing can do. They used computers to simulate the stress on foam used to hold a nuclear warhead together for the few microseconds needed to ensure that its series of explosions goes off.

Inside a small room called the Cave, engineers projected a greatly magnified three-dimensional model of the foam’s cellular structure as it was compressed by a virtual nuclear explosion. Projected on the floor, ceiling and three walls, the yellow foam’s branches, looking like undersea coral, sprouted dots of red as the foam began to break down under the pressure. The engineers then replayed this slowed-down virtual explosion, rotating the foam and the blast direction to get a view from all sides. The process enables them to see whether the foam holds up without setting off a warhead to find out.

The stewardship program has given the labs enough confidence that it plans to begin replacing certain aging components of a 30-year-old warhead called the W-76, the most numerous one in the arsenal. The plan is to extend its life another 30 years.

Still, the Bush administration came to office questioning how long this arsenal could be maintained without new testing, and determined to revive the weapons production complex and begin developing new warheads. A 2001 review identified a new set of potential adversaries, including Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Syria and China. It called for a broader array of nuclear capabilities, including weapons that could go after hardened, deeply buried targets, and less-powerful warheads to reduce “collateral damage.”

Officials saw the huge warheads that deterred the Soviets as much less credible against today’s far weaker adversaries. Leaders of nations such as North Korea or Iran, they argued, would be unlikely to believe a U.S. president would order even a retaliatory strike with arms that might kill hundreds of thousands.

Hobson’s Choice

Early proposals from the administration to study new nuclear weapons met little congressional resistance. But in 2004 it ran into an unexpected foe: an Ohio Republican congressman named David Hobson, head of the House subcommittee that funds nuclear-weapons programs. He was critical of what he saw as poor security and management problems at the labs. But more than anything, he opposed a new nuclear bunker-buster.

“We can’t tell other countries don’t build any nuclear weapons, but we’re so superior that we’d like a new weapon of our own,” he says. Mr. Hobson has stared down both the administration and the nuclear labs’ top congressional patron, Senate Energy Committee Chairman Pete Domenici of New Mexico, blocking funding for design of a bunker-buster that would put a harder case around an existing warhead.

At the same time, Mr. Hobson has become the leading proponent of building a new, sturdier replacement warhead, an idea pitched to him by Los Alamos scientists. He says it makes technical sense and would also help head off pressure to build new designs such as the bunker-buster. The reliable warhead “only replaces what we have — there’s no new mission,” so it should be easier to explain internationally, he says. When the administration sought money last year to study weapons that would have new missions, he redirected the funds to what his staff dubbed the Reliable Replacement Warhead.

By spring of 2005, the administration’s Mr. Brooks also had become a champion of the replacement warhead. He spoke of designing a new stockpile that was more reliable, less expensive, more environmentally sound and ultimately smaller.

He also made clear, in congressional testimony, that the administration set its sights beyond that. The reliable-warhead program, he said, would help create a flexible nuclear infrastructure able “to provide new or different military capabilities” if needed. And he pressed for funding to begin planning for a new plutonium-trigger plant, replacing Rocky Flats. This year, when the administration asked for $9.4 million to study the reliable warhead, Congress, at Mr. Hobson’s urging, appropriated nearly three times that.

Exactly how new this warhead would be isn’t yet clear. Teams at Los Alamos and at California’s Lawrence Livermore Lab now are working on competitive designs. They’ve been told to design a warhead that has the explosive power of the W-76, but inside the larger body of a more powerful warhead, the W-88.

The end of the Cold War makes this possible, says Los Alamos’s Mr. Martz. When the U.S. was packing 10 warheads on a single missile to confront the Soviet Union, the labs were told to design the most powerful warheads they could with the least size and weight. So they took risks, such as using the smallest possible amount of plutonium that would ignite a full thermonuclear explosion.

Not having to make a warhead so light gives designers more options. For instance, instead of surrounding the plutonium “pit” with beryllium, which is light but toxic and creates cleanup issues, they can use a heavier metal such as titanium or even stainless steel. They also can put in more-effective trigger locks, to make it harder for a terrorist who stole a warhead to set it off.

Mr. Martz says the freedom to make a heavier warhead could also include a heftier plutonium pit, to ensure the full explosion ignites. As a result, he believes — though he won’t guarantee — that all these changes wouldn’t require testing. He says he also can’t guarantee there will never be a need to test older warheads to confirm their reliability.

Quiet Preparations

Outside Las Vegas, the government’s Nevada underground test site is quietly preparing for such possibilities. The test site has stayed alive by doing its own share of virtual testing. Almost 1,000 feet below the desert floor, inside a maze of well-lit tunnels, engineers do “subcritical” experiments: compressing aging plutonium samples nearly to the point of a chain reaction to see how they perform.

Since the Clinton administration, the site has been kept three years short of readiness to conduct new tests. The Bush administration won funding to shorten that to two years.

Early next year engineers will lower a new plutonium trigger, made experimentally at Los Alamos, into a 600-foot hole, drilled in the 1970s. They’ll then implode it, short of a nuclear explosion. The experiment will give crane operators their first practice in over a decade in lowering a test canister. Other technicians will get experience in feeding in diagnostic cables.

Such simulations lead some to wonder if this administration or a future one might use the reliable-warhead program as an excuse to resume testing or — something now forbidden by law — as an opening to build new military capabilities. “I don’t trust this group….We have to be on guard,” Rep. Hobson says.

Raffi Papazian, Los Alamos’s lead engineer at the site, says he and his colleagues are aware the actions might be misread. “We’ve worked with the State Department” to explain to embassies there’s no plan to violate the test moratorium, he says.

The clarity of the British position contrasts unfavorably with the ambiguity of the Bush administration’s statements on the subject of evidence acquired through torture, and on the permissiblity of torture itself.

LONDON, Dec. 8 – Britain’s highest court thrust itself into the middle of a roiling international debate on Thursday, declaring that evidence obtained through torture – no matter by whom – was not admissible in British courts. It also said Britain had a “positive obligation” to uphold antitorture principles abroad as well as at home.

“The issue is one of constitutional principle, whether evidence obtained by torturing another human being may lawfully be admitted against a party to proceedings in a British court, irrespective of where, or by whom, or on whose authority the torture was inflicted,” said Lord Bingham, writing the lead opinion in a unanimous ruling for the Law Lords. “To that question I would give a very clear negative answer.”

The ruling dealt specifically with 10 men who were detained after the attacks on the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, and were held without charge in Britain on suspicion of being terrorists. But while the question at hand concerned only British courts, the ruling seems to have been made with the current international situation very much in mind. Several of the concurring opinions referred explicitly, and not flatteringly, to the United States.

Speaking of what he said was England’s justifiable pride in its common-law rejection, centuries ago, of torture as a means to an end, Lord Hoffman brought his argument forward to the current era. “In our own century,” he wrote, “many people in the United States, heirs to that common-law tradition, have felt their country dishonored by its use of torture outside the jurisdiction, and its practice of extra-legal ‘rendition’ of suspects to countries where they would be tortured.”

The Law Lords struck down the Court of Appeal decision in strong, stirring, indignant language that referred to centuries of English common-law precedent, to the moral weight of international treaties and obligations like the United Nations Convention Against Torture, and to the rights of individuals as enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights.

“The principles of the common law, standing alone, in my opinion compel the exclusion of third-party torture evidence as unreliable, unfair, offensive to ordinary standards of humanity and decency and incompatible with the principles which should animate a tribunal seeking to administer justice,” Lord Bingham wrote.

He referred to authorities from as far back as the 15th century to make the case that torture has no place in English law, or indeed in any law. He quoted the historian Sir William Holdsworth, who wrote in 1945 that “once torture has been acclimatized in a legal system, it spreads like an infectious disease” and “hardens and brutalizes those who have become accustomed to it.”

The prohibition against torture “has now become one of the most fundamental standards of the international community,” Lord Bingham continued.

“This prohibition is designed to produce a deterrent effect, in that it signals to all members of the international community and the individuals over whom they wield authority that the prohibition of torture is an absolute value from which nobody must deviate.”

Iraq is a mess, Afghanistan a disappointment, our allies loathe us, and the promise of a foreign policy based on humility has turned into finger-wagging lectures about responsible discourse — not to mention declarations about being either with us or against us. This (admittedly caricatured) view of the current American predicament has yielded up a yearning for what the managing editor of Foreign Affairs has called “the perennial hangover cure” for American foreign policy — realism. No less a pillar of the establishment than Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to the father, has deplored the foreign policy of the son, and in print, no less, and has done so on the basis of this doctrine.

The realists — members of the policy and intellectual elite who approve and even envy the cool acumen of a Talleyrand, Metternich or Bismarck — believe that in foreign policy what matters is the national interest coolly calculated, the relationships of power, and the incurable nastiness of the human condition. They agree with Charles de Gaulle that “states are cold beasts,” and that international relations are about the hard, unsentimental doings of statesmen. Domestic politics, including massacre or mere repression, is no one else’s business: Foreign policy is the purview not of do-gooding charities and international organizations, of crusading idealists or enthusiastic naïfs, but of prudent politicians, who understand that attempting to carry the values of American civil society beyond our shores can lead only to trouble.

You know that you are about to get a lecture on the merits of realism when someone reaches for a line by John Quincy Adams, that superbly successful diplomat and unhappy president. The United States, he said, “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.” But herein lies a misunderstanding.

The unrealistic quality of realism can be found in this oft-quoted dictum, which formed a tiny part of a July 4 speech that Adams delivered in 1820. Yet he also insisted in his peroration that the Declaration of Independence was “the first solemn declaration by a nation of the only legitimate foundation of civil government. It was the corner stone of a new fabric, destined to cover the surface of the globe . . . It stands, and must for ever stand alone, a beacon on the summit of the mountain, to which all the inhabitants of the earth may turn their eyes for a genial and saving light till time shall be lost in eternity, and this globe itself dissolve, nor leave a wreck behind.”

Not very Bismarckian, is it?

The realist air of weary wisdom is deceptive because it seeks to simplify our history and codify as doctrine what is, in fact, only part of a much more complicated truth. That truth is that American foreign policy partakes of both realism and idealism, and always has. Was Franklin Roosevelt an idealist when he cut deals with Stalin in order to maintain the coalition against Hitler? Or was he, on the other hand, a realist when he proclaimed the Four Freedoms? Was Ronald Reagan a realist when he called the Soviet Union an evil empire and challenged its leaders to tear down the Berlin Wall? Or was he an idealist when he made deals with Communist China and Islamic fundamentalists to contain and roll back Soviet power?

And is George W. Bush a realist when he proclaims the universal aspiration of men and women to rule themselves, including in the Middle East? Can we really call him an idealist when he refrains from criticizing too harshly the brutal means used by Russia to suppress the insurgency in Chechnya?

Realism is right in its description of much, though not all, of international politics — of the logic of the quest for and fear of power; and of the dominance of states in the international system. But contemporary realists have wandered far from, say, a Thucydides, who described the contest between Athens and Sparta in terms of fear, honor and interest, but who also, in the Funeral Oration, gave us a glowing depiction of a free society that still inspires those who read it. They have wandered very far from more recent realists like Raymond Aron, who denounced fascism and communism not merely as threats to the national interests of France, but to the survival of free societies everywhere.

Above all, the realists have it wrong when they try to root in the United States a foreign policy of which a dissolute 18th-century aristocrat would approve. For at the heart of American identity is the belief that this country’s founding and flourishing rest on universal values. Such was the message of Jefferson’s insistence that “all men are created equal” in a document announcing what was, after all, only the severance of a relationship between colony and metropole. Such too was Lincoln’s assertion that the Civil War tested not whether there would be one rather than two countries between Canada and Mexico, but rather, whether “any nation so conceived and so dedicated could long endure.”

American foreign policy will, inevitably, steer a middle course, making unhappy compromises of its principles in the name of power realities, or taking paths that seem to contradict its interests, narrowly defined, in the name of broader goals. When examined closely, the careers of all of its presidents embody such uneasy inconsistencies — the Wilson who fought for the League of Nations also sent the Marines to Vera Cruz (and not for benevolent reasons), and even his Fourteen Points for ending World War I embodied both idealistic aspirations and prudent concessions to reality (such as that which foreswore attempts to restructure the government of Germany, or that which merely called for negotiation between colonial peoples and their European rulers).

The upshot, of course, is that the United States will find itself accused of cynicism, inconsistency and moralistic fatuity. So be it. At our best, we are a country of unillusioned idealists, of the Lincolns and Roosevelts, in which true realism consists of understanding the dangers of hunting monsters — but also the dangers, to ourselves and others, of failing to do so.

Mr. Cohen is Robert E. Osgood Professor of Strategic Studies at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.

No Exceptions
By ABRAHAM D. SOFAER
November 26, 2005; Page A11

…Official U.S. policy is to abide by its commitment to the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. The convention was drafted and adopted with U.S. involvement, and it has been ratified by 140 States. It had the full support of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Violations of the convention are made criminal by U.S. law.

Despite the official policy of applying the convention to all U.S. officials everywhere, the Department of Justice has issued an opinion claiming that Article 16 of the treaty applies only in the territorial U.S. This conclusion is wrong. It has created confusion in the field, and it exposes the president and the nation to criticism.

Art. 16 imposes on every State Party the obligation to prevent, not only torture, but also “cruel, inhuman, or degrading” acts in any “territory under its jurisdiction.” When the convention was presented to the Senate for ratification, Sen. Jesse Helms raised several issues, including the possibility that other states or tribunals might claim that the words of Art. 16 should be construed more broadly than the “cruel or unusual punishment” clause of our Constitution. He felt that U.S. officials should not have to deal with different sets of standards where the words involved were so similar.

The Reagan and Bush administrations agreed, proposing a reservation to the treaty aimed at limiting the meaning of the term in Art. 16 — “cruel, inhuman or degrading” — to what is prohibited by the U.S. Constitution. Although this reservation involved the scope and meaning of treaty terms, the current Department of Justice has claimed that this reservation limits the U.S. obligation to enforce Art. 16 to the geographic territory of the U.S., on the grounds that the Supreme Court has held that the Eighth Amendment is inapplicable beyond U.S. territory. DOJ’s position is untenable for several reasons.

Most fundamentally, the purpose and language of the reservation was not intended to restrict the U.S. commitment geographically, and would give the words “territory under its jurisdiction” a more limited meaning under Art. 16 than the DOJ agrees the same words have under Article 2, which requires State Parties to take measures against acts of torture. Restricting enforcement of Art. 16 to U.S. territory would fundamentally undermine the treaty’s purpose of preventing “cruel, inhuman or degrading” treatment by any State in any place it has “jurisdiction.”

The administration moreover claims that its proposed reading and amendment are not intended to allow U.S. officials actually to engage in “cruel, inhuman or degrading” acts outside the U.S., but only to preserve “flexibility” and protect such officials from charges that they have engaged in such acts. This is unsustainable: Any exception to the treaty’s requirement is understandably seen as an effort to allow illegal acts, undermining our diplomatic initiative to change America’s image abroad. Actually, a territorial limitation for Art. 16 creates risks for officials who might violate the provision. No other State Party is likely to accept the U.S. view, and all of them are obliged to enforce the treaty if the U.S. fails to do so. Meanwhile, U.S. courts could reject the Justice Department position and subject officials to the criminal statutes passed to enforce the convention.

While the administration says that the post-9/11 world demands greater flexibility to use “cruel, inhuman or degrading” pressure or punishment, the convention includes a provision that precludes this argument: “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.” To be sure, the treaty’s terms are vague as written, but Defense Department guidelines have provided interrogators adequate guidance as to the permissibility or impropriety of all known forms of interrogation.

Congress can and should authorize a system of judicial review that ensures consistent and authoritative interpretations. The notion that the conduct of the enemies we face is so lawless that we should make exceptions to the normal rules is a formula for subjectivity and lawlessness. The rule of law allows the U.S. to punish terrorists harshly after affording them due process, and such punishment may properly generate cooperation from those seeking leniency.

In order to end the uncertainty created by the Justice Department’s position, Sen. John McCain introduced an amendment to the Defense Department’s authorization bill that would establish the Army Field Manual as the uniform standard for all U.S. interrogations, and would prohibit cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of persons in U.S. custody anywhere in the world. The amendment is supported by former Secretary of State Colin Powell, and by over 30 retired generals of the U.S. armed forces. Nonetheless, the administration objects to this provision and has insisted that at least CIA officials should be exempt. If U.S. policy prohibits such conduct, however, why immunize CIA interrogators who violate U.S. policy? Despite a threatened veto, the Senate voted 90-6 to adopt the amendment.

President Bush should accept the McCain Amendment. He has repeatedly affirmed that the dignity and equality of all human beings stems from natural law that overrides the claims of particular societies and ideologies. The Torture Convention represents an effort to translate this principle into practice, through universal adoption and enforcement. The U.S. does not need to violate its provisions, anywhere, to win the war on terror.

Mr. Sofaer, the George P. Shultz Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, was a legal adviser to the U.S. State Department and presented the Torture Convention to the Senate for ratification in 1990.

Why Latin Nations Are Poor

With hysteria mounting about the political shift leftward in Latin America and 11 presidential races in the region over the next 13 months, the World Bank’s “Doing Business in 2006″ survey merits a read. We mentioned it two weeks ago but a fuller airing is in order.

The annual report, by the research side of the bank, measures the regulatory burden and property rights in 155 countries. This year’s results demonstrate clearly that despite persistent claims that the region has tried the “free-market” model and found it wanting, Latin America is stubbornly stuck in a statist time warp.

When it comes to burdensome government and weak property rights, Latins don’t fare as badly as Africans but their freedoms lag behind those in much of Asia and the former Soviet satellites of Europe.

It’s been 20 years since Hernando de Soto’s Lima-based Institute for Liberty and Democracy published “The Other Path,” documenting the burdens that the Peruvian state was heaping on the backs of the struggling underclass. But in two decades little has changed in a region mostly known for caudillo government and its capacity to disappoint. More than ever, the Latin predatory state is driving entrepreneurs underground and forcing the most industrious citizens to emigrate, mostly to the U.S.

Take for example Mexico, which has enormous oil reserves and open trade with North America. Its economy is sadly underperforming. Mexican Finance Minister Francisco Gil Diaz has managed the macro side of things exceedingly well. But on the micro side, Mexican businesses face crippling regulation and inadequate legal protections, weakening the potential for market competition, investment and productivity gains.

In the category of the World Bank report that deals with “hiring and firing,” Mexico ranks 125th out of the 155 countries surveyed, not least because it costs a firm almost 75 weeks of wages to fire a worker. Mexico also ranks 125th in “protecting investors” against fraud, self-dealing and other corporate abuses. Correspondingly, it ranks 100th in the “enforcing contracts” category, meaning that when two parties strike a deal, neither knows whether it will hold up.

Peru gets a better overall rating than Mexico, but it can hardly be said to encourage entrepreneurship. In “starting a business,” Peru ranks a low 106th because of the red tape Mr. de Soto wrote about so long ago. Firing a worker costs almost 56 weeks of wages, discouraging employers from hiring and risking huge costs if business takes a turn for the worse. A medium-sized business in Peru can expect a tax burden reaching almost 51% of gross profits, which is part of the reason Peru has the 133rd worst tax burden. “Enforcing contracts” takes 381 days on average, leaving Peru in 114th place in this category.

Argentina, still saddled with Peronist labor laws, has an even less flexible labor market than Peru, at 132nd in “hiring and firing.” Moreover, a medium-sized company must theoretically pay almost 98% of its gross profit to the tax man, which explains a high rate of tax evasion.

In 25th place globally, Chile has the best business climate in the region but is inexcusably behind Malaysia, Estonia and Lithuania. It badly needs to advance reforms undertaken in the 1980s, but instead the Socialist government of Ricardo Lagos has yielded to union activists by increasing labor law burdens.

Colombia — at 66th — has dreadful ratings in “hiring and firing” (130th) and in “paying taxes,” where a medium-sized business has a total payable tax of 75% of gross profits. Venezuela doesn’t enforce contracts (129th), doesn’t protect investors (142nd) and makes paying taxes a bureaucratic nightmare (145th). There are some notable improvements among small countries. Honduras gets better marks for making property registration more efficient. El Salvador has quickened “business entry” but still ranks far down the list in this category due to the cost of starting a business.

The correlation between economic freedom and prosperity is clear from reading the World Bank ratings. As one would expect, overtaxing and overregulating economic activity stunts growth, as do weak property rights. Much of the region’s stagnation is attributable to burdens inflicted by government.

Why hasn’t democracy in Latin America produced change? The answer can be found in public-choice theory — a school of economics made famous by Nobel Prize winner James Buchanan. Public choice views politics as a market, where the highest bidders have the power to “purchase” what they want. Deregulation may be best for the majority, but politicians don’t have an incentive to do it when their most powerful, best-organized constituents — the ones who put them in office — prefer the status quo. That includes not only labor unions but rich, established oligarchs and government bureaucrats. Most Latin countries don’t have large enough middle classes to counter these oppressive forces, thanks to the twin curses of overregulation and weak property rights.

At the cost of a civil war, El Salvador has had some success in awakening the power elite to the need for change. But most of the region is more like Mexico, where labor unions and a handful of wealthy individuals — like telecom mogul Carlos Slim and media giant Ricardo Salinas Pleigo — see no need to reform a system that serves them so well.

On reviewing the World Bank study, it is worth noting that external forces also militate against reform. The International Monetary Fund, the U.S. Agency for International Development, World Bank loan officers and the United Nations provide easy money — “aid” — to support failed governments and an entrenched ruling class. “Conditionality” has been a dismal failure. IMF assistance to Argentina worked against challengers to Peronism in the 2003 election and ensured victory for the present anti-market government.

Rich-country bureaucrats also often tie their handouts to objectives favored by rich-country pressure groups, such as environmental and labor “protections” that in the name of “social justice” add more red tape and further destroy individual initiative. All the while, Godzilla government is leaving Latin America’s underclass living in the shantytowns and favelas with little opportunity or hope.

Sudan’s Department of Gang Rape

Kalma Camp, Sudan

When the Arab men in military uniforms caught Noura Moussa and raped her the other day, they took the trouble to explain themselves.

“We cannot let black people live in this land,” she remembers them telling her, and they used racial epithets against blacks, called her a slave, and added: “We can kill any members of African tribes.”

Naka Nathaniel/NYTimes.com

Noura is one of thousands of women and girls to be gang-raped in Darfur.

Ms. Noura is one of thousands of women and girls to be gang-raped in Darfur, as part of what appears to be a deliberate Sudanese government policy to break the spirit of several African tribes through mass rape.

This policy is shrewd as well as brutal, for the exceptional stigma of rape here often silences victims even as it terrorizes the entire population and forces people to flee.

Ms. Noura, 22, expected to be married soon, and the neighbors said she probably would have received a bride price of 30 cows. These days, they say, she will be lucky to find any husband at all – and will not get a single cow.

This is the first genocide of the 21st century, and we are collectively letting the Sudanese government get away with it. Sudan’s leaders appear to have made a calculated decision that some African tribes in the Darfur region are more of a headache than the international protests that result when it depopulates large areas of those tribes. In effect, it is our acquiescence that allows the rapes and murders to continue.

The solution isn’t to send American troops. But a starting point is to convey American outrage – loudly and insistently – and demonstrate that Darfur is an American priority.

Ms. Noura’s saga began when the Sudanese Army and janjaweed militia burned down her village a year ago and killed her father. She and her family fled here to Kalma, but she is the eldest child and needed money to support her younger brothers and sisters.

So she ventured out of Kalma to cut grass in the nearby fields to sell. That was when the men raped and beat her, leaving her unable to walk home.

Rape leads to particular injuries in Darfur because many girls, as part of female circumcision rites, have their vaginas sewn shut with a wild thorn. The resulting physical trauma from rape also increases the risk of H.I.V. transmission. In addition, the attackers sometimes rape women with sticks or bayonets, causing internal injuries that leave the victims incontinent.

Sudan has backed off a bit in response to protests about the rapes, and it has stopped arresting women who go to foreign aid workers to seek medical treatment. But the rapes themselves are continuing, unabated. The Sudanese police and military are everywhere in the area, but they don’t secure the fields outside the camp where the attacks take place.

In just one of eight sectors in Kalma, I found three women who acknowledged on the record that they had been gang-raped this month within a few days of each other.

Arifa Muhammad, 25, told of being caught by 10 men as she planted okra to have a little more food for her three children. One of the men said, “I know you are Zaghawa, so we will rape you.” Afterward, they beat her with the butts of their guns.

The very next day, Saida Abdukarim, also 25, was tending her vegetables when three men with guns seized her. She pleaded with them, pointing out that she is eight months’ pregnant.

“They said, ‘You are black, and so we can rape you,’ ” she recalled. Then they gang-raped her and beat her with sticks and their guns. She absorbed the beating, trying to protect her unborn baby, and although she was too battered to walk, she has so far not miscarried.

To me, Ms. Noura, Ms. Arifa and Ms. Saida are among the heroes of Darfur. There is no shame in being raped, but plenty of stigma should attach to those who ignore crimes against humanity. In my book, it’s the politicians who don’t consider genocide a priority who aren’t worth a single cow.

These three women have the backbone to stand up and be counted. We in the West have so much less to lose, yet we can’t even find our own voices. Let’s hope that the courage of these three women may inspire President Bush, Kofi Annan and other world leaders finally to show a little more backbone and stand much more firmly against genocide.