Publications

In the long standoff regarding its nuclear ambition, Iran has cultivated ambiguity and been loath to reliably assure the international community of its ultimate intentions, complicating Western efforts to understand, let alone constrain, Tehran’s endeavors.

In December 2003, Japan decided to be the second country in the Asia-Pacific to deploy a ballistic missile defense (BMD) system.

Strong states often fail to deter vastly weaker competitors. This paper explores some reasons of this failure and identifies factors that can increase the prospects that deterrence will succeed in these situations.

Since the early twenty-first century, the international nonproliferation landscape has experienced a shift from relatively steady proliferation schemes to more complex and diverse challenges. New entities are gaining access to nuclear material and among them is a growing number of non-state...

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the threat of cruise missile proliferation is as equally challenging to NATO as the threat of ballistic missiles. Over the last two decades, the emergence of cruise missiles and UAVs as a threat has been slow, and governments, particularly the...

"Escalation", the tendency of belligerents to increase the force or breadth of their attacks to gain advantage or avoid defeat, is not a new phenomenon. Systematic thought about how to manage it, however, did not crystallize until the Cold War and the invention of nuclear weapons. 

Since 1945, nuclear deterrence has frequently been the target of continuous criticism on strategic, legal and moral grounds. In the past five years, however, the renewed debate on nuclear disarmament has been accompanied by an increase in such criticism.

Intelligence agencies play a fundamental role in the prevention of nuclear proliferation, as they help to understand other countries' intentions and assess their technical capabilities and the nature of their nuclear activities.

Nuclear weapons have traditionally occupied an important place in Russia’s national security strategy. As Russia and the United States have been reducing their nuclear arsenals since the end of the Cold War, their relationship has undergone a complex transformation. Russia, however, still...

During the Cold War, the phrase “strategic stability” gained currency both as a foreign policy objective and as an apt way of describing the fact that the United States and the Soviet Union never actually went to war.