The Most Embarrassing Graph In American Drug Policy

When it comes to drugs, it’s all about prices.

The ability to raise prices isâ€" at least is perceived to beâ€"a critical function of drug control policy. Higher prices discourage young people from using. Higher prices encourage adult users to consume less, to quit sooner, or to seek treatment. (Though higher prices can bring short-term problems, too, as drug users turn to crime to finance their increasingly unaffordable habit.)

An enormous law enforcement effort seeks to raise prices at every point in the supply chain from farmers to end-users: Eradicating coca crops in source countries, hindering access to chemicals required for drug production, interdicting smuggling routes internationally and within our borders, street-level police actions against local dealers.

That’s why this may be the most embarrassing graph in the history of drug control policy. (I’m grateful to Peter Reuter, Jonathan Caulkins, and Sarah Chandler for their willingness to share this figure from their work.) Law enforcement strategies have utterly failed to even maintain street prices of the key illicit substances. Street drug prices in the below figure fell by roughly a factor of five between 1980 and 2008. Meanwhile the number of drug offenders locked up in our jails and prisons went from fewer than 42,000 in 1980 to a peak of 562,000 in 2007.

The second embarrassment may reflect policymakers desire to ask fewer questions that bring up the first. We have remarkably little evidence that the billions of dollars spent on supply-side interdiction have much impact. There’s surprisingly little demand in the policy community to collect such evidence, despite considerable investments at every level of American government.

In 2001, the National Academy of Sciences concluded: “Neither the data systems nor the research infrastructure needed to assess the effectiveness of drug control enforcement policies now exists.”  That remains true today, 12 years and hundreds of billions of dollars later.

That’s not to say enforcement has zero effect. The mere fact of a drug’s illegality massively increases its cost of production and distribution. To give one timely example, credible research suggests that the (untaxed) market price of cannabis might fall by as much as 80 percent if it could be legally produced at optimum scale as other agricultural commodities are.

But we have little reliable evidence that any particular change in the intensity of law enforcement exerts much influence on market prices. The few studies which examine this question fail to find much of a relationship between law enforcement intensity and illicit drug prices. A 2004 paper by Kuziemko and Levitt is one of the few rigorous analyses that found such a relationship. Examining a period when cocaine prices were actually plummeting, these authors estimated that a 15-fold increase in the number of incarcerated drug offenders raised street cocaine prices in the range of 5 percent to15 percent, compared with what otherwise would have been the case. That’s not much.

Is there hope? I think so. Drug policy has improved during the Obama years. The president and his key drug policy advisers have largely abandoned the harsh war-on-drugs rhetoric of previous administrations. The number of incarcerated drug offenders has declined for the first time in decades. On the demand side, health reform will greatly expand access to substance abuse treatment. Drug markets are less violent than they used to be, too, which creates greater political space for less punitive policies.

I’m especially heartened that conservative groups such as “Right on Crime” are asking anew whether we really need to incarcerate so many people, for such long periods,because they participated on the supply-side of the drug economy. There is interest, across the political spectrum, in violence-reduction policing strategies, such as those promoted by David Kennedy and Mark Kleiman, that offer more discriminating approaches to police illicit drug markets.

Americans across the spectrum are finally requesting more effective, more evidence-based drug control policies. Americans also are more likely to recognize the human faces of drug users, and even of drug sellers, too. That recognition, however overdue, is the foundation of improved public policies.

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300 'Game Of Thrones' Character Portraits

by Rebecca Pahle | 2:30 pm, May 26th, 2013

[View All on One Page]

Artist Txe has done 307 (and counting) A Song of Ice and Fire portraits. That’s right. 307. Some characters have gotten multiple illustrations, but the guy’s still given visual form to around 300 individual characters, from the major playersâ€"Starks, Lannisters, etc.â€"to the more obscure (Mark Mullendore? Didn’t remember him; had to look it up). A few of my favorites are behind the cut; to mix things up a bit, I’ve alternated your Daeneryses, your Aryas, and your Jaimes with people like Rhaenys Targaryen, Edric Storm (poor Edric, not in the show), and Maege Mormont. (For those of you who don’t know Maege, she is a lady warrior. She’s also the absolute best.) Check out the artist’s whole series on Facebook.

(via: Nerd Approved)

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This Is The Best Toilet Paper For Most People

What you want from toilet paper

A good toilet paper will be comfortable, friendly to plumbing, affordable, and be durable enough to get the job done without tearing. You also need toilet paper to perform. By perform, I mean to clean up as much as possible with as few squares as necessary, and to leave you feeling good about your hygiene after it is done. If you would like me to be more specific, my editor calls this factor “grip.”

Another small thing you likely haven’t given thought to: the ease of tearing one sheet from another. If it’s too difficult to tear, you end up pulling down a ribbon of paper, or tearing out useless half-squares. Along those lines, anything that is frustrating about toilet paper is a bit more frustrating than problems you might have with other disposable household items, because you are trying to minimize inconvenience at sometimes very inconvenient moments.

How White Cloud performs and compares

In a word, perfectly. Not only is it cheap, it matches or outperforms every other brand both in the rigorous tests of Consumer Reports and Good Housekeeping, as well as my own at-home testing.

…it is only 25¢ for each 100 sheets, which makes it the cheapest 3-ply toilet paper around.

White Cloud is affordable. By Consumer Reports’ calculations, it is only 25¢ for each 100 sheets, which makes it the cheapest 3-ply toilet paper around. For comparison’s sake, Quilted Northern Ultra Plush is virtually the same product, but costs 38¢ for 100 sheetsâ€"that’s about 50% more. Even crazier, Charmin Ultra Soft costs 41¢ per 100 sheets, yet is only 2-ply.

When it comes to performance, the major testing houses’ assessments matched our own hands-on impressions: White Cloud is soft to the touch without feeling decadent; it doesn’t break in use, yet consistently and quickly dissolves in water; it’s easy to tear off your desired amount; and has the “grip” you need.

Speaking of the major testing houses, there aren’t many sources for toilet paper reviews, but those sources that do test it are rigorous to the point that other tests are unecessary. When both Consumer Reports and Good Housekeeping Research Institute conduct separate, independent tests and arrive at virtually the same conclusions, there’s little need for others to enter the fray.

Consumer Reports performed notable toilet paper tests in May 2009 (subscription required). To test strength, Consumer Reports used industrial instruments made by Instron to digitally measure the force needed to push a steel ball through sheets, along with the ease of tearing along perforations. They brought in panelists with highly developed sensory perception to gauge softness and pliability (how it feels when crumpled up) “in a temperature- and humidity-controlled room.” And Consumer Reports used a beaker, a magnetic stir bar, and a stirring plate to time how long it took each sheet to break apart, suffice to pass through plumbing without clogging.

You want toilet paper that breaks down, moves along, and eventually gets eaten up and repurposed by microbes.

If you are wondering whether disintegration really matters in a toilet paper, you can look into what the current market for “flushable” wet wipes has done to various sewer systems of the U.S.: in Raleigh, N.C., in Rochester, N.Y., in Lake Charles, Louis., and other locales. You want toilet paper that breaks down, moves along, and eventually gets eaten up and repurposed by microbes.

Good Housekeeping also put their Research Institute to work on toilet paper in late 2011. Good Housekeeping is less precise in explaining its tests, but they sought the same kinds of qualities as Consumer Reports: breakdown, strength, absorption, and thickness. GH also performed surveys of consumer testers, and asked for people’s thoughts on “which paper was the softest and gentlest.” Which is helpful, because it involves more butts than magnetic disturbance tools.

White Cloud 3-Ply Ultra was both the “Best Buy” and the top-rated product in Consumer Reports‘ tests. It also tied for first place with an “A-” in Good Housekeeping‘s review. Consumer Reports gave White Cloud an “Excellent” in softness, strength, and disintegration, and a “Very Good” in tearing ease.

Good Housekeeping only had one item in the “Cons” list for White Cloud: “Sold only at (Walmart)” (which we will address in just a bit). As for its performance in the lab and among testers:

Absorbent, strong, and fast-dissolving, White Cloud Ultra is also a good value, costing significantly less than other comparable three-plies. It wasn’t as strong as other brands when wet though, and this TP earned just average softness scores from our consumer testers. Nonetheless, the rolls we looked at were high quality and offered plenty of square footage for your money, earning this Walmart-exclusive brand the distinction of being our top three-ply toilet (paper).

I also contacted the heads of other sites that might have something to say about toilet paper, including ToiletPaperWorld.com and PoopReport.com, to no avail. But as we stated earlier, it’s hard to get more conclusive than when Consumer Reports and Good Housekeeping both agree that White Cloud is the best.

That said, we like to confirm their findings with our own impressions when possible to check for things like general feel that aren’t easily captured in technical tests. So I purchased most of the toilet papers in the top 10 of Consumer Reports‘ ratings and rotated them in my homes’ bathrooms. I also brought samples to friends for blind touch-and-rate tests, and did my own (kitchen-based) absorption and break-up tests.

After a few weeks of reading and testing, I was confident that White Cloud’s 3-ply Ultra was the pick most people would be content to have in their home. It’s a 3-ply that costs far less than even some 2-ply brands (about one-quarter of a cent, $0.0025, per sheet) and it performs as well as thicker brands, while never quite feeling like it was, as one friend put it, “so thick and soft that you feel guilty using it.” White Cloud is soft, very safe to flush, and has the “grip” that you hopefully don’t need all that often.

The Walmart Factor

White Cloud is a near-exclusive for Walmart stores. Right now, I can find it on Amazon, but if you wanted to procure it regularly for a reasonable price, you would need to buy it at Walmart. There are certainly alternatives to White Cloud if you find yourself entirely opposed to shopping for anything at Walmart. Take note, though, that toilet paper is a large-scale business, and that most brands in major stores are made by large corporations with many holdings.

Buying our secondary pick, for example, involves supporting a business owned by the controversial Koch Brothers (who have, incidentally, sued White Cloud over the quilt-like design of their bathroom tissue). There are certainly smaller brands, eco-focused manufacturers, and store brands from stores that present you with no complicated feelings. But among the brands someone in Buffalo, NY could reasonably expect someone in Houston, Tex. to be able to buy, White Cloud is what I would recommend.

Environmental Factors

As with so many industries, the push for environmentally kinder products has resulted in new toilet paper products, colorful green-hued packaging design, and no small amount of consumer confusion in the market.

With a toilet paper that performs well and disintegrates easily, you can do a lot to minimize your consumption.

The best you can do, when you’re dealing with something that you absolutely cannot recycle in the traditional sense, is to find a way to use less of it. With a toilet paper that performs well and disintegrates easily, you can do a lot to minimize your consumption. But you might also seek out toilet papers that are made from recycled paper, specifically paper headed for a landfill. Second to that, you might find paper harvested from trees grown in responsibly managed forests. And finally, you avoid recycled paper that has been recolored white with bleach, which pollutes air and water.

But as you might imagine, many “green” toilet papers go the route of fewer plies, and their strength, softness, or sheet-to-sheet tearing suffer for it. As Consumer Reports puts it:

Toilet papers made from recycled content fared worse. Several are at the bottom of our Ratings because of their roughness and middling strength and tearing ease. At least they offer excellent disintegration, making them an option for larger households or those with clog-prone plumbing.

I fall in the camp of buying higher quality consumables that I’ll hopefully use less. That said, White Cloud, listed as “Wal-Mart,” gets an absolute zero in Greenpeace’s recycled tissue and toilet paper guide (PDF link)â€"as does every major toilet paper brand that is widely available, save a few natural or “green” versions.

Also Great

It's not a top performer by any means, but it's also a good compromise between environmental conscience and bathroom experience. Consider your local store's green brands too, though.

The highest rated environment-minded paper that isn’t store-specific and that fares well with Greenpeace and the Natural Resources Defense Council, and holds the top spot at GoodGuide among toilet papers, is Seventh Generation, the 2-ply variety. It is available in many grocery stores and co-ops, and on Amazon, with a Subsribe & Save option. On its own product page, Seventh Generation notes that “There’s softer bathroom tissue out there,” and, well, they are right. I tested Seventh Generation for a while, and it is not as soft, gripping, or anywhere as cheap, especially at retail prices. It does disintegrate well, and it is not quite so problematic in tearing off as Consumer Reports rated it.

When White Cloud Green Earth is more widely available (it was not at two Walmart stores I visited), I will consider it for an update of this post. In the meantime, consult the NRDC, Greenpeace, and GoodGuide ratings to see if your store has an eco-conscious brand that might best Seventh Generation.

The Competition (which is softer, but with less grip)

The closest competitor to White Cloud 3-Ply, both in third-party testing and in my own opinion, was Quilted Northern Ultra Plush. It costs one dollar more for the same 12 double-roll package at Walmart, and more at other stores, but on Amazon you can get 48 rolls for 25 dollars, which puts it on the same price footing. It rates nearly as high in Consumer Reports and Good Housekeeping tests, and is just as safe for plumbing and septic systems as White Cloud. And it is absolutely the softest toilet paper I have ever felt in my hands.

Also Great

While it's too soft for some people and can lack "grip," Quilted Northern is a great alternative for those who like their toilet paper as gentle as possible.

So why wouldn’t I recommend a paper that was softer than White Cloud? Because Quilted Northern is so smooth as to not have the kind of grip you might want, on occasion. There’s also the issue of leftover pieces. “Leftovers” are an issue cited in some Amazon reviews of Quilted Northern, and Quilted’s reputation for this even inspired the truly surreal Charmin Ultra 2010 “pieces left behind” Super Bowl ad (in which Quilted Northern is the “Rippled Brand.”). Moreover, Quilted Northern exists in that realm my friend defined: so soft and plush as to feel wasteful to certain minds. If comfort and softness are your main criteria, though, Quilted Northern is in a class of its own.

As for the many other brandsâ€"Charmin (whose Ultra Soft costs more than Quilted Northern per sheet), Cottonelle, Angel Soft, Scott, and the innumerable store brandsâ€"very few come close to the unique price, comfort, and practical performance of White Cloud. Buy White Cloud in larger packs, and the pricing advantage becomes even more clearly defined.

The real competition for White Cloud is customers who don’t live near, or shop at, a Walmart, or don’t want to have White Cloud delivered. In those cases, I would suggest Target’s Up & Up brand, which disintegrates and tears well, is very cheap per sheet, and works fairly well for a two-ply.

Wrapping it up

But buying a large quantity of a good quality toilet paper makes a lot of senseâ€"it saves money, and there is almost no chance you aren’t going to eventually use it. And when you use it, it should work, and work well. Do your butt a favor and take White Cloud 3-Ply out for a spin.

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A Legacy Feud In Tech

By QUENTIN HARDY

Published: May 26, 2013

SAN FRANCISCO â€" If the Hatfields and McCoys lived in Silicon Valley, they’d be fighting with piles of cash and lines of software code instead of knives and shotguns. And the fight would be over who wins the most customers in the computer industry’s growing “cloud” of software services.

That’s how it is for Aneel Bhusri and Zachary Nelson, whose companies are in contention over the next major shift in computing. In a way, the men are reliving history.

Two decades ago, their mentors feuded, and that time, too, the dispute took place against the backdrop of a major shift in corporate computing â€" when customers gave up their mainframes and moved to software that relied on personal computers closely connected to a server.

Mr. Nelson, the chief executive of NetSuite, used to work for Lawrence J. Ellison, the billionaire chief executive of Oracle.

Mr. Bhusri, the co-founder of a competitor company called Workday, used to work for David Duffield, a rival of Mr. Ellison’s. Mr. Duffield is the low-profile founder of PeopleSoft, a once-powerful maker of corporate software that Oracle acquired in a bitter, 17-month hostile takeover fight.

How bitter? Oracle defeated a federal antitrust lawsuit brought by the Justice Department before it could reel in its rival. And a month after PeopleSoft was acquired, 5,000 of its 11,000 employees were laid off.

Together, NetSuite and Workday are among a growing circle of tech outfits poised to cash in on the migration to cloud computing services and perhaps elbow aside today’s corporate software giants, like Oracle and the German company SAP.

“It would be a mistake to see this as a revenge play, though other people might see it that way,” Mr. Bhusri (pronounced “Bush-ree”) said in an interview, referring to his company’s efforts to take on Oracle’s business. “PeopleSoft came in second or third. This time we can be first.”

Workday and NetSuite each have annual sales of less than $400 million, about 1 percent of what Oracle sells in software, but the stock of both companies has rocketed on expectations that they are in the heart of a market that could grow five times faster than the rest of the tech industry, according to IDC, the technology research firm.

Companies in this growing area could be acquisition targets. IDC predicts that by mid-2014 the big software makers will have spent as much as $25 billion on acquisitions as they build out their cloud services.

While the market value of Oracle and SAP both reflect about four times their annual sales, NetSuite shares trades at 20 times its sales, and Workday is valued at 40 times. Last Wednesday, Workday reported revenue for its first fiscal quarter of $91.6 million, up 61 percent from a year earlier. In its most recent quarter, which ended March 31, NetSuite also had $91.6 million in revenue, up 32 percent from the same period a year ago.

The two upstarts both deliver services â€" NetSuite in accounting and Workday in human resources â€" that perform essential business functions, and from there have broadened into other areas.

Their services perform the same functions as traditional business software to manage tasks like accounting and tracking employee benefits. But instead of selling a license to own that software, which requires the customer to install it on a server, the two companies provide access to their services over the Internet and customers pay on a subscription basis.

Mr. Bhusri, 47, and Mr. Duffield started Workday in 2005. Mr. Bhusri is chairman, and the men share the chief executive role. Mr. Bhusri, a partner at the venture capital firm Greylock Partners, is on the board of several other cloud companies.

“They are all companies in the Dave Duffield model â€" the good guy model, as opposed to the other guy,” Mr. Bhusri said. An open, self-effacing man, he declined to identify the “other guy,” but added, “I would be amazed if Oracle does not buy NetSuite.”

Mr. Duffield hired Mr. Bhusri at PeopleSoft. Based in Pleasanton, Calif., about 30 miles from Oracle, it was sometimes called the “People company” and was known for its casual atmosphere.

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Why People Hate The Google Bus

Every morning and every evening the fleet glides through the city, hundreds of white buses with tinted windows navigating San Francisco's rush hour. From the pavement you can see your reflection in the windows, but you can't see in. The buses have no markings or logos, no advertised destinations or stops.

It doesn't matter. Everyone knows what they are. "Transport for a breed apart. For a community that is separate but not equal," said Diamond Dave Whitaker, a self-professed beat poet and rabble-rouser.

The buses ferry workers to and from Apple, Facebook, Google and other companies in Silicon Valley, an hour's drive south. They hum with air-conditioning and Wi-Fi. They are for the tech elite, and only the tech elite.

This month Whitaker, 75, and a few dozen other activists smashed a model Google bus piñata to pieces. They cheered each blow. The British and US governments may feel the same way, it emerged last week, when politicians in London and Washington accused Google's Eric Schmidt and Apple's Tim Cook of dodging corporate taxes.

The internet titans barely flinched. They denied wrongdoing and hit back at what they said were archaic tax codes unfit for the digital era. The defiance startled those unfamiliar with Silicon Valley's power and confidence.

It did not come as news to San Francisco. The city knows better than anyone that technology companies like having things their way, whether it be taxes, transport or lifestyle. This dominance, critics say, has produced a cossetted caste which lords it over everyone else, a pattern established during the dotcom explosion a decade ago and now repeated amid a roaring boom.

"They're really trying to make it a different structure. It's segmentation. You see it everywhere," said Michael Veremans, 27, a co-ordinator with the Occupy-linked group San Francisco Food Not Bombs.

Commuters who struggle with the crowded municipal bus service openly envy the spacious tech shuttles filled with their iPad-tapping passengers.

The San Francisco Chronicle recently swelled the chorus with an op-ed denouncing the private shuttles as symbols of alienation and division: "San Franciscans feel resentful about the technology industry's lack of civic and community engagement, and the Google bus is our daily reminder."

Techies, in other words, price locals out of the housing market, twist rules and regulations to suit themselves, and spend outrageously.

The most vilified are the likes of David Sacks, Yammer's CEO, who held an extravagant "Let them eat cake"-themed 40th birthday party last year. Facebook billionaire Sean Parker is preparing a reported $10m Game of Thrones-themed wedding, replete with fake ruins and waterfalls.

Lower down the food chain are employees who take the Wi-Fi-enabled shuttles to campuses with gourmet canteens, ping-pong tables, M&M fountains, barbers and masseurs â€" self-contained citadels allegedly inured from social realities.

Entrepreneurs and software engineers respond to that rap sheet with a mix of indignation, hurt and scorn. "This is a very expensive place tax-wise, but it feels like we're not getting an awful lot back," said Duncan Logan, 42, founder of RocketSpace, which incubates 130 start-up companies in a downtown headquarters. "A dirty city with a crumbling road network and a not great education system."

Logan, a Scot who came to tech via agriculture and banking, voiced support for Cook and Schmidt. "I welcome this uproar [over taxes] because it will pressure governments to be more effective in their spending." He said governments should "compete" in offering value for taxes.

Logan conceded that you could become blinkered when surrounded by like minds. "When you live in this world you forget how the rest of the world lives." Reality intruded only during visits to Scotland, where some still considered Twitter a newfangled marvel, he said. He sympathized with locals forced out of San Francisco by soaring property prices, but said the fault lay not with freespending techies but building restrictions: "The city has to relax planning controls."

A software engineer for a major internet company said the criticism was unfair. "We feel what we're doing helps make the world a better place. Helping people share information is a force of empowerment for individuals."

Everybody benefited from the shuttle buses, he said, since it meant fewer cars and less congestion. As for the campus perks, they were no big deal. The massages, haircuts and other services were subsidized, not free, and helped workers reach the "flow state" of optimal concentration. "Software engineering is like building something, like a craft, you become completely absorbed in the task. I really like that."

A software designer for another company was less effusive, saying the thrill of working for a charismatic CEO gradually paled with the long hours and extra shifts: "You never know if you'll have the weekend off, so you can't really make plans to hang out with friends." Her campus food and facilities were amazing, she said. "It's not that you want to be in this bubble, it's just you're so focused on work."

Mark Zuckerberg's founding of Fwd.us, an advocacy group for immigration reform, has won backing from other Silicon Valley tycoons, prompting suggestions they have matured politically.

But Victor Hernandez, 35, a software engineer who worked for more than a decade at one of the big firms, says the geek culture still has blind spots. Young, white males dominate and can make women feel uncomfortable: "It's a very homogenous environment. No one is macho, but they can be sexist."

For all their academic and business smarts, engineers and entrepreneurs often failed to connect society's dots, he said. They would grumble about the state of roads and schools but make no link to the low taxes paid by major tech companies. "There's a disconnect."

Restraints on conspicuous consumption â€" once considered gauche and tacky â€" were loosening, said Hernandez. "You'll see guys still wearing the same clothes of 15 years ago, but now they're driving Porsches."

Over time, the engineer found himself yearning for more social interaction. He traded in his iPhone for an old Nokia. "With no internet permanently available, I was forced to engage more with the people around me."

Hernandez, who is married to a nurse, then did something even more shocking. He quit and took a two-third salary cut to work as a high school maths teacher. The decision baffled most of his colleagues. Hernandez is now adjusting to a lower standard of living. The Wi-Fi shuttle buses are a receding memory. "I'm happy. I'm doing what I wanted."

This article originally appeared on guardian.co.uk

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The War Game That Almost Led To Nuclear Armageddon

According to a declassified National Security Agency history, American Cryptology During the Cold War, the "period 1982-1984 marked the most dangerous Soviet-American confrontation since the Cuban Missile Crisis." The secret history recounts that "Cold War hysteria reached its peak" in the autumn of 1983 with a NATO nuclear-release exercise named Able Archer 83, which -- according to a CIA Special National Intelligence Estimate -- caused "Soviet air units in Germany and Poland [to assume] high alert status with readying of nuclear strike forces."

Despite the ramifications of this possible nuclear miscalculation, the history of the Able Archer 83 war scare has remained largely unavailable to the public. This dearth of primary sources has even led critics -- with some justification -- to describe the study of the war scare as "an echo chamber of inadequate research and misguided analysis" and "circle reference dependency," with an overreliance upon "the same scanty evidence."

In an attempt to fill this "echo chamber," the National Security Archive has begun posting, in three parts, the largest collection of documents about the incident available on the web. These documents come from Freedom of Information Act releases by the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Department of Defense, and the Department of State, research findings from American archives, as well as formerly classified Soviet Politburo and KGB files, interviews with ex-Soviet generals, and records from other former communist states.

Today's posting includes an especially revealing document: The Air Force Seventh Air Division's After Action Report for Able Archer 83. This after-action report is the first official document to describe in detail "the transition from purely conventional operations to chemical, nuclear, and conventional operations" during Able Archer 83. In fact, it reveals that the secondary and tertiary sources that modern accounts of Able Archer 83 are based upon do not even report the correct dates (November 7-11, 1983) of the exercise.

The after-action report includes other revealing details about Able Archer 83 which suggest that the exercise included components that were more provocative than in previous exercises. These changes may have been misread by fearful Soviet intelligence organs, preoccupied with the "decapitating" Pershing II missiles soon to be installed in Europe, and tasked by General Secretary Yuri Andropov to carry out the largest peacetime intelligence operation in history: Operation RYaN. It was a search for Raketno-Yadernoye Napadenie, the KGB code name for a feared Western nuclear first strike.

These potential indicators included: a 170-flight, radio-silent airlift of 19,000 U.S. soldiers to Europe (this occurred during the much larger conventional precursor exercise to Able Archer 83, Autumn Forge 83), the shifting of NATO commands from "Permanent War Headquarters to the Alternate War Headquarters," the practice of "new nuclear weapons release procedures," including consultations with cells in Washington and London, and the "sensitive, political issue" of numerous "slips of the tongue" in which B-52 sorties were referred to as nuclear "strikes."

According to NATO's script for how the Cold War could turn hot, the conflict between superpowers began with the backdrop of a "change of leadership" within the Soviet Union in February of 1983, "growing unrest in Eastern Europe," and, eventually, a Warsaw Pact (termed "Orange Pact" in the exercise) invasion of Yugoslavia, after it requested economic and military assistance from the West.

Then, on November 3, Orange crossed the Finnish border, invaded Norway the next day, and pressed on into West Germany ("Orange Forces were attacking along the entire German border with air attacks") and then the United Kingdom ("OR attacks on UK airfields disrupted B-52 and KC-135 operations as well as destroying some aircraft").

Because it could not stop the Soviets's conventional advance, Blue (NATO) "request[ed] initial limited use of nuclear weapons against pre-selected fixed targets" on the morning of November 8. But because "Blue's use of nuclear weapons did not stop Orange's aggression," the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) "requested follow-on use of nuclear weapons late on 9 November. This request was approved in the afternoon of 10 November and follow-on use of nuclear weapons was executed on the morning of 11 November." Then, the exercise ended; there was nothing left to destroy.

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Angelina Jolie On Her Double Mastectomy

By ANGELINA JOLIE

Published: May 14, 2013

LOS ANGELES

MY MOTHER fought cancer for almost a decade and died at 56. She held out long enough to meet the first of her grandchildren and to hold them in her arms. But my other children will never have the chance to know her and experience how loving and gracious she was.

We often speak of “Mommy’s mommy,” and I find myself trying to explain the illness that took her away from us. They have asked if the same could happen to me. I have always told them not to worry, but the truth is I carry a “faulty” gene, BRCA1, which sharply increases my risk of developing breast cancer and ovarian cancer.

My doctors estimated that I had an 87 percent risk of breast cancer and a 50 percent risk of ovarian cancer, although the risk is different in the case of each woman.

Only a fraction of breast cancers result from an inherited gene mutation. Those with a defect in BRCA1 have a 65 percent risk of getting it, on average.

Once I knew that this was my reality, I decided to be proactive and to minimize the risk as much I could. I made a decision to have a preventive double mastectomy. I started with the breasts, as my risk of breast cancer is higher than my risk of ovarian cancer, and the surgery is more complex.

On April 27, I finished the three months of medical procedures that the mastectomies involved. During that time I have been able to keep this private and to carry on with my work.

But I am writing about it now because I hope that other women can benefit from my experience. Cancer is still a word that strikes fear into people’s hearts, producing a deep sense of powerlessness. But today it is possible to find out through a blood test whether you are highly susceptible to breast and ovarian cancer, and then take action.

My own process began on Feb. 2 with a procedure known as a “nipple delay,” which rules out disease in the breast ducts behind the nipple and draws extra blood flow to the area. This causes some pain and a lot of bruising, but it increases the chance of saving the nipple.

Two weeks later I had the major surgery, where the breast tissue is removed and temporary fillers are put in place. The operation can take eight hours. You wake up with drain tubes and expanders in your breasts. It does feel like a scene out of a science-fiction film. But days after surgery you can be back to a normal life.

Nine weeks later, the final surgery is completed with the reconstruction of the breasts with an implant. There have been many advances in this procedure in the last few years, and the results can be beautiful.

I wanted to write this to tell other women that the decision to have a mastectomy was not easy. But it is one I am very happy that I made. My chances of developing breast cancer have dropped from 87 percent to under 5 percent. I can tell my children that they don’t need to fear they will lose me to breast cancer.

It is reassuring that they see nothing that makes them uncomfortable. They can see my small scars and that’s it. Everything else is just Mommy, the same as she always was. And they know that I love them and will do anything to be with them as long as I can. On a personal note, I do not feel any less of a woman. I feel empowered that I made a strong choice that in no way diminishes my femininity.

I am fortunate to have a partner, Brad Pitt, who is so loving and supportive. So to anyone who has a wife or girlfriend going through this, know that you are a very important part of the transition. Brad was at the Pink Lotus Breast Center, where I was treated, for every minute of the surgeries. We managed to find moments to laugh together. We knew this was the right thing to do for our family and that it would bring us closer. And it has.

For any woman reading this, I hope it helps you to know you have options. I want to encourage every woman, especially if you have a family history of breast or ovarian cancer, to seek out the information and medical experts who can help you through this aspect of your life, and to make your own informed choices.

I acknowledge that there are many wonderful holistic doctors working on alternatives to surgery. My own regimen will be posted in due course on the Web site of the Pink Lotus Breast Center. I hope that this will be helpful to other women.

Breast cancer alone kills some 458,000 people each year, according to the World Health Organization, mainly in low- and middle-income countries. It has got to be a priority to ensure that more women can access gene testing and lifesaving preventive treatment, whatever their means and background, wherever they live. The cost of testing for BRCA1 and BRCA2, at more than $3,000 in the United States, remains an obstacle for many women.

I choose not to keep my story private because there are many women who do not know that they might be living under the shadow of cancer. It is my hope that they, too, will be able to get gene tested, and that if they have a high risk they, too, will know that they have strong options.

Life comes with many challenges. The ones that should not scare us are the ones we can take on and take control of.

Angelina Jolie is an actress and director.

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