Annihilation of S-wave quarkonia and the measurement of alpha_s

We analyze the relativistic corrections to annihilation rates of S-wave quarkonia within the framework of NRQCD. We show that order v^2 corrections can be expressed in terms of the heavy quark pole mass and the quarkonium mass. The ratio of hadronic to radiative annihilation rates for eta_b and eta_c can therefore be predicted accurately. The contributions of color-octet operators to the hadronic decay rates of spin-triplet quarkonia are shown to be significant, even though they arise at order v^4 in the velocity expansion. We provide a rough estimate of the color-octet contributions and extract the value of alpha_s from the experimental data on Upsilon decays.