Arms Control & Regional Security

Director

Emily Landau

Program Associates

Ephraim Asculai

Yair Evron

David Friedman

Tamar Malz-Ginzburg

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Research Assistant

Keinan Ben-Ezra

Recent years have witnessed increasing challenges for arms control and non-proliferation efforts in the nuclear realm that impact on Israel and the world at large. The past years have underscored the deficiencies of the existing international treaties for stopping proliferation, namely, their lack of effectiveness as a means for deterring and containing determined nuclear proliferators. At the policy level, recent challenges – Iraq, Libya, North Korea, and first and foremost Iran – have spawned some new arms control directions in an effort to bolster the international regime and contain proliferation.

The proliferation challenges of the new millennium and the exposed shortcomings of traditional modes of dealing with nuclear proliferation necessitate a shift in the focus of arms control and non-proliferation research – away from the study of international treaties per se, with their technical features and legal obligations, to renewed efforts to understand what it is that drives states to proliferate and how to confront their motivation. As focus shifts to hotbeds of proliferation and the challenge of convincing proliferators to return to the fold of non-proliferation commitments, the state and its interests and security concerns take center stage.

There has also been a sharp rise in concern regarding non-conventional terrorism in general and bioterrorism in particular. At the same time that the international community has succeeded in mitigating the inter-state biological and chemical threat somewhat, focus has shifted to the non-conventional terror threat. The war on terror includes the fight to prevent the possible use of such weapons by terror organizations.

The INSS Arms Control and Regional Security Program highlights the nexus of weapons control and international relations. The role of interests, security concerns, negotiations, regional security dialogue, and regional cooperation in the emerging efforts to control the destructive potential of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of states is a major research concern. Other principal topics that the research covers include: the Iranian nuclear crisis; options for renewing regional security dialogue in the Middle East; US and European efforts to stem proliferation; Israel's position on arms control efforts; prospects for the international arms control regime; non-conventional threats and non-state actors; and bioterrorism.

In addition to its published research, the program convenes closed arms control conferences and forums, which bring together members of the Israeli arms control community from the security establishment, think tanks, and academia – joined occasionally by international experts – for frank exchanges of ideas on arms control issues on the Middle East agenda.