Event: Lessons Learned from Eliminating WMD

September 12, 2016

The James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies held a special event in Washington, DC, to launch a special double issue of the Nonproliferation Review on “The Elimination of Weapons of Mass Destruction: Lessons Learned from the Recent Past.”

Rose Gottemoeller, who will soon assume the office of NATO deputy secretary general in Brussels, delivered the keynote address in one of her last public events as US under secretary of state for arms control and international security.

Panelists included Rebecca Hersman, director of the Project on Nuclear Issues at the Center for Strategic and International Studies; Robert Peters, senior research fellow at the Center for the Study of Weapons of Mass Destruction at National Defense University; and Dr. Philipp Bleek, assistant professor at the Middlebury Institute for International Studies at Monterey and a fellow at CNS.

Dr. Chen Kane, director of CNS’s Middle East nonproliferation program, chaired the event, with NPR Editor Joshua H. Pollack providing welcoming remarks.

The new issue of NPR concludes a year-long project led by Dr. Kane and Dr. Bleek and funded by the Department of Defense’s Project on Advanced Systems and Concepts for Countering WMD. It captures the conclusions from a two-day workshop in November 2015 held in collaboration with the Lugar Center. This special issue includes articles on the strategic, diplomatic, legal, technical, and inter- and intra-agency dynamics related to WMD elimination, as well as six case studies-post-Soviet cooperative threat reduction, Iraq in the 1990s and 2003, South Africa, Libya, and Syria. It also includes reflections on the future of WMD elimination.

The special NPR issue will be temporarily available free to download, courtesy of Taylor and Francis.