Events Detail

A Nuclear Middle East: Strategic Balance or Annihilation?

Wednesday, February 24

10:00 AM to Noon

            Fradkin, Bar, and Ford

Can a nuclear Iran be deterred? Can nuclear conflict in a future poly-nuclear Middle East be avoided? If so, how? Optimists often point to the purported success of Cold War era security and political arrangements as a model of how nuclear conflict could be avoided. But this reasoning can be dangerously misleading as it fails to account for the importance of strategic culture in escalatory situations.

Hudson Institute hosted a critically important seminar to examine how the strategic cultures of Middle Eastern states will likely shape the command and control of the region's future nuclear arsenals. It explored what this might mean for Middle Eastern politics, for the prospects of deterrence, and for the conduct of nuclear states in escalatory situations.

Seminar speakers included Christopher Ford,  Senior Fellow at Hudson Institute and former U.S. Special Representative for Nuclear Nonproliferation, and Shmuel Bar, Director of Studies at the Institute of Policy and Strategy, Israel. The discussion was moderated by Hudson Senior Fellow Hillel Fradkin.

Betsy and Walter Stern Conference Center

Hudson Institute

1015 15th St, NW,

Sixth Floor

Washington, DC 20005

www.hudson.org