Your World

by Richard Seltzer, Central Intelligence Agency, North Atlantic Treaty Organization

What's likely to happen next in the War on Terrorism or in the Balkans? What issues matter most in Europe or Africa? Is there any way out of the recurring pattern of terror, retaliation, and war in Israel or in Kashmir? What challenges do Russia and Eastern Europe face? What patterns of crisis and crisis management do we see emerging in the post-Cold War world? Does nuclear disarmament finally have a chance? What steps might bring us closer to enduring peace and/or to a world with more wide-spread prosperity, less ethnic hatred, and greater respect for humanitarian values?

This CD ROM contains background texts that can help you understand the implications of current world trends, crises, and issues, including over 2200 documents from the UN, over 1200 documents from NATO, and the 2001 CIA World Factbook with up-to-date information about every country in the world, including images of maps and flags.

The UN material includes basic facts about the organization and its history, plus Security Council Resolutions (1946-2002) , Secretary-General Reports to the Security Council (1994-2002), Reports of Missions of the Security Council (1992-2002) , and Secretariat documents (annual reports and other reports of the Secretary-General 1992-2002)

The NATO material includes the historical documents which established the organization's role and structure and which set its future direction in the post-Soviet era, plus the massive NATO Handbook, descriptions of NATO-related historical events, Fact Sheets, and the NATO Review (a magazine with thoughtful articles by NATO leaders and world leaders about the role and future of the organization, 1991-2002).

The CIA World Factbook is a self-contained, interlinked set of hundreds of HTML documents and related images.

Many of the documents included here are in plain text format. Some, however, are only available in .pdf format and can be read on your computer screen or printed using the free Adobe® Acrobat® Reader.

Intended for use with Windows PCs (not Macintosh), this CD includes the full text of thousands of documents, organized for easy access. To get started, you just open the index document in either Word or a Web browser. (For instance, you can click on My Computer, then on your CD drive, then on index.html) From the index document, you can click to a major section (like UN Security Council Resolutions), then click on an individual item to see the full text in your browser.

The entries in the index (including Security Council Resolutions) have descriptions, not just arbitrary numbers. That means that you can use the search/find function in your browser or word processor to quickly find whatever documents you want. For instance, if you are interested in "Palestine" or "Afghanistan" or "Bosnia", you can search for that, repeatedly, to get to all the relevant UN and NATO documents on that topic. Just use the "find" function in your browser (under Edit/Find in both Netscape and IE). You can also use that same capability to find any word or phrase within any of the documents.

The heart of the CD is the massive detailed index document -- it would take over 110 pages to print it out single-spaced.

CD-ROM