Since the end of the Cold War, the international security environment has been transformed and nuclear weapons have been marginalized in the West. However, the NATO security policies remain almost unchanged: deterrence is still considered as a...

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,...

In December 2003, Japan decided to be the second country in the Asia-Pacific to deploy a ballistic missile defense (BMD) system. Started in the 1980s as a defense industry cooperation initiative, BMD efforts have been highly prioritized since the...

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. It argues that deterrence fails...

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...

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...

"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...

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...

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. The challenges in...

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...

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. To what extent...

Renewed interest throughout the globe in harnessing nuclear energy has raised concern about security threats from states and non-state actors while holding out the promise of more electricity for more people. The focus of this paper is on assessing...

This paper takes a careful look at China's perceptions of the role of nuclear weapons in its national security policy and defense posture. This is important because China is perceived to be the only country among the five original nuclear-weapon...

Despite the resumption of high-level diplomatic contact between Washington and Pyongyang in late 2009, realization of a non-nuclear Korean Peninsula remains a very remote prospect, with the DPRK insisting that a peace agreement between the U.S....

Over the past decade, there has been much talk about a new world order, in which American "unipolarity" would be superseded by more equal arrangements between the great powers. One such idea is a return to the Russia-China-US triangle. In truth,...

One of the most puzzling - if positive - phenomena of the past half century is the non-use of nuclear weapons. This essay seeks to probe the underpinnings of nuclear weapons restraint, the strength and durability of the so-called nuclear "taboo" -...

The nuclear numbers game has changed. During the Cold War, deterrence strategists claimed that the nuclear balance mattered, even at extraordinarily high numbers. By this musty logic, the United States now has more deterrence leverage against Russia...

Dennis Gormley analyzes the recent developments in U.S. conventional capabilities that have become key to counter-proliferation policy at a time when nuclear arsenal reductions regain increasing attention. The author gauges the evolution and...

Like much of the international security environment, the challenge of Chemical and Biological Terrorism has become more complex and uncertain in the last decade. Many issues related to CBW terrorism continue to be hotly debated, and new ones have...

The nuclear taboo is customarily seen as a black and white norm, separating the world of the familiar from that of an unknowable afterlife. Though consequences of a breaking of the nuclear taboo use are certainly unpredictable, one can imagine at...

Unstable dynamics surrounding Iran's nuclear program may be pushing the world closer to the use of nuclear weapons than is generally realized – perhaps closer than any time since the Cuban missile crisis. This paper proposes a number of near-...

Although North Korea maintained nuclear ambiguity for two decades, it finally gave up the pretense of having a "virtual nuclear weapons program" in October 2006 whereas Iran continues on the path of nuclear brinkmanship. Whether Iran is going to...

Yury Fédorov's analysis looks for the meaning of nuclear strategy in the international security context after the end of the Cold War. Will nuclear weapons really lose their importance - as some scholars suggest - or will they rather get new...

On 13 February, the Fifth Round of the Six-Party Talks ended with the adoption of an 'Action Plan' for the North Korean nuclear issue. The Action Plan represents the lowest common denominator for the parties involved. In agreeing to it, all parties...

Buy the article on CAIRN websiteAbstractThe use of pathogens as biological weapons was considered since their early discovery. Attacks using 'natural' virulent germs, such as the bacillus of plague or anthrax, were perpetrated during the 20th...