By Lt. Col. (res.) Dr. Raphael Ofek, June 24, 2019
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Iran is threatening to resume its uranium enrichment effort to the point that it will be able to produce a nuclear bomb. According to Olli Heinonen, who served until 2010 as IAEA deputy director general, Iran will be in a position to acquire nuclear weapons within six to eight months.
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By Franc Milburn, June 21, 2019
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Mainstream analysis of the current crisis in US-Iran relations revolves around “maximum pressure” sanctions and potential American military contingencies. There is another move, however, involving a unique set of knights on the regional chessboard – and one that comes straight out of Tehran’s own playbook.
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By Prof. Louis René Beres, June 20, 2019
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Israel’s presumptive nuclear deterrence posture depends upon several separate but intersecting factors. Most important, of course, are the country’s weapons, infrastructures, and missile defense capabilities. Less conspicuously urgent, but still important, are the principal defining structures of world politics. These include (as ever) the fundamentally anarchic system created after the 1648 Peace of Westphalia (“The State System”) and the more transient or temporary US-Russian rivalry. This essay casts attention on the latter set of factors, or “Cold War II.” Israel’s strategists should pay close attention to this critical expression of geopolitical “context.”
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