John Barry

Nawaz Sharif was democratically elected, but he isn't a democrat. The former Pakistani prime minister, ousted last week in a coup, acted more like a despot after his landslide election victory in 1997.

Gen. Wesley Clark, supreme Allied Commander in Europe, waged and won NATO's campaign for Kosovo without losing a single soldier in action. For the U.S. military, the victory was uniquely--historically--bloodless.

It was billed as the biggest, bloodiest strike of the war. On June 7, U.S. B-52s dropped several cluster bombs on Yugoslav forces at Mount Pastrik, a strategic battlefield on the Kosovo-Albanian border.

The last time someone tried to invade their country, the Yugoslavs fought them to a standstill, tying up dozens of Nazi divisions for the duration of World War II.

As the air war in Kosovo grinds on, the inevitable question keeps coming up: why not send in ground troops to stop Slobodan Milosevic's brutality against ethnic Albanians?

Nearly two weeks before bombs and cruise missiles began to blast Yugoslavia, Bill Clinton's top advisers thought they had Slobodan Milosevic in a corner. On Saturday, March 13, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, national-security adviser Sandy Berger, Defense Secretary William Cohen and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen.

The news was worse than the CIA had imagined. Last week, in response to recent reports that China may have stolen nuclear secrets from Los Alamos and other U.S. weapons labs, President Clinton ordered a preliminary "damage assessment" to determine just how much Beijing knows about the American nuclear program.

The mystery of the Chinese prisoner begins with his name. His Shanghai family is celebrated for its resistance to Japan, and he was raised on the run by a legendary communist general who gave him his nom de guerre, Hua Di.

Our guest has gone missing,'' read the Feb. 13 message from the Taliban, the Islamic fundamentalists who rule Afghanistan. ""We did not order him to leave; we do not know where he has gone.'' And so was added one more mystery to the life of Osama bin Laden, a devout Muslim from one of the richest families in Saudi Arabia, a talented civil engineer, an agronomist, a brave war hero.

THERE WAS A TIME WHEN RONALD Reagan's opponents lampooned his vision of a space shield against incoming nukes as the raving of a Hollywood madman. But today, 16 years after Reagan's famous "Star Wars" speech, and a decade since the fall of Moscow's "evil empire," the Clinton administration is pushing ahead with the next generation of antimissile missiles.

THERE WAS DEFENSE SECRETARY William Cohen last week, giving another hair-raising briefing about chemical and biological weapons. Saddam Hussein has stored up enough VX nerve agent, Cohen warned, ""to kill every man, woman and child on the face of the earth.'' The soft-spoken former senator from Maine, who has emerged from the current showdown with Iraq as the Clinton administration's Dr.

There is not one compelling reason to buy a single additional bomber, submarine or tank today, save the preservation of the industrial base. Yet even this is a dubious cause.IN THE CORRIDORS OF THE PENTAGON, LT.

THE BEST-KNOWN EQUATION of the 20th century is E = mc(sup 2), Einstein's statement linking energy, matter and the speed of light. But another formula V = c log(sub e (sup M(sub i)/M(sub f)--has had at least as much impact on modern life.

THE IMAGES, RAW AND GRUESOME, were a crucial piece of the puzzle. In the summer of 1995, the United Nations Special Committee (UNSCOM) inspectors scouring Iraq for Saddam Hussein's elusive weapons arsenal received a rare tip: visit a chicken farm west of Baghdad.

AT THE IBM OFFICE IN Moscow, the heat was on. The big, new Russia market beckoned, free from most of the Western export controls that kept high technology out of the Soviet Union for decades.

IF EVERYONE HAS 15 MINUTES OF fame, Jessica Stern says, ""I rather hope I'm on minute 13 of mine.'' Stern is an intensely serious, 39-year-old academic. She has a master's degree in chemical engineering from MIT and a doctorate in public policy from Harvard, and she speaks Russian fluently.

BILJANA PLAVSIC, THE ELECTED president of the Serbian enclave in Bosnia, is no Joan of Arc. She supported the ethnic-cleansing campaign, arguing that Serbs were genetically predisposed to expel Muslims.

JACK SHEEHAN DIDN'T hold his tongue. Last summer the four-star marine general was invited to a closed-door conference at the Aspen Institute, a plush think tank nestled in the Rocky Mountains.

SIXTY FEET BELOW THE FLATlands of North Dakota, Lt. Chris Quaid sits behind a four-foot-thick blast door in a steel-reinforced capsule that floats gently on shock absorbers, the better to withstand what Quaid calls a "nudet"-nuclear detonation.

IN THE ARMED SERVICES, REPORTing a sexual indiscretion to the authorities can be a just act against male oppression and a necessary step toward restoring good order and discipline in the ranks.

BY MOST ACCOUNTS, THE 7,000 men and 800 women in the U.S. armed forces stationed in Bosnia are getting along well--perhaps a little too well. Banned from drinking alcohol or venturing too far from their heavily fortified compounds, bored GIs have few diversions.

EMBARRASSING AS IT MAY BE, BRENDA HOSTER'S COMPLAINT AGAINST ARMY Sgt. Maj. Gene McKinney adds little that is new to the army's sexual-harassment scandal-which is serious and which suggests the Pentagon still has not won the hearts and minds of some of its own troops in the war for a gender-neutral military.

FOR YEARS, THEY SUFFERED FROM dizziness, memory loss, stomach trouble, aches and pains and a chronic, crushing fatigue. They thought no one at the Pentagon cared about their mysterious illness.

AT LAST, THE ISSUES. THE showdown in Hartford was actually pretty substantive, with lots of discussion of taxes and the role of government. The weird sideshows--how did Al D'Amato get mentioned more often than Newt Gingrich?--were kept to a minimum.

THEY SHOULD BE HEALTHY MEN IN the prime years of their lives. Instead, they suffer from disabling ailments that won't go away: fatigue, headaches, stomach problems, rashes, aching joints, memory loss, tumors.

THE UNITED STATES GAVE A PRETTY GOOD DEMON- stration last week of what it takes to be a superpower. At Ahmad al-Jabir air base south of Kuwait City, eight F-117 stealth bombers bedded down after a 17-hour flight from an air force base in New Mexico.

IN THE FIVE AND A HALF YEARS since the Persian Gulf War, Saddam Hussein has repeatedly tested the limits of U.S. resolve -- and time and again, the United States has faced him down.

THE NAME IS OPAQUE: THE COORDInator Sub Group. Its meetings are equally impenetrable, convened in the White House's basement Situation Room or an adjoining teleconferencing center.

EVEN FOR THE MILITARY, IT WAS A NO-nonsense announcement. After two months of investigation into the fatal crash of Commerce Secretary Ron Brown's plane in stormy Dubrovnik, the air force said last week that three top commanders of the unit responsible for Brown's flight were being ""relieved.'' Maj.

The bunker is a two-story concrete control room embeded in a mound of earth and scrubby grass. We walk out through its steel door, and there , 200 feet away, sheltered under a makeshift polyethylene tent, sits the explosive device.