Louis René Beres
A Summit of Consequence? Great Power Diplomacy and Inadvertent Nuclear War
“In a surrealist year…. some cool clown pressed an inedible mushroom button, and an inaudible Sunday bomb fell down, catching the president at his prayers on the 19th green.”-Lawrence Ferlinghetti, A Coney Island of the...
Risks of a Nuclear War With North Korea: The Obligation of Intellect-Based Remedies
“Is it an end that draws near, or a beginning?”-Karl Jaspers, Man in the Modern Age (1951)
Intellect and National Security
In the end, nothing could be gained by approaching the North Korean nuclear threat with Trump-era seat-of-the-pants...
Living with Iran: Israel’s Strategic Imperative
This article was originally published on May 28, 2014
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: In response to the almost inevitable Iranian nuclear bomb, Israel must suitably integrate a clear nuclear deterrence posture with multi-layered active defenses. This complex effort...
Politics, Law and the Triumph of Chaos
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world….”
-William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming
Plus, ca’ change. “The more things change, the more they remain the same.” In world politics, anarchy is an...
International Law and WMD Attacks on Israel
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 808, April 24, 2018
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: In the years ahead, Israel could face the growing prospect of WMD terrorism – i.e., attacks involving chemical, biological, or even nuclear weapons. In this...
Science, Security and American Nuclear Strategy: An Intellectual Challenge
“…. science – by which I mean the entire body of knowledge about things, whether corporeal or spiritual – is as much a work of imagination as it is of observation…. the latter is...
Israel, Hamas Terror and Power Over Death
“I believe is the one great word against metaphysical fear.”-Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West (1918)
Though misunderstood by Israel, there is no more compelling form of Jihadist power than power over death. The perilous result of...
Israel versus Hamas: Proportionality, Perfidy and the Law of War
“It must not be forgotten that it is perhaps more dangerous for a nation to allow itself to be conquered intellectually than by arms.”
-Guillaume Apollinaire, The New Spirit and the Poets (1917)
Whenever Israel finds itself in...
A Time For Candor: What Have We Learned From The Pandemic?
“The enemy is the unphilosophical spirit which knows nothing and wants to know nothing of truth.”
Karl Jaspers, Reason and Anti-Reason in our Time (1971)
By definition, Covid-19 has been a crisis of biology. Nonetheless, certain core explanations for American...
American Nuclear Strategy: Challenge of Mind, not Politics
In human history, the highest achievements of war preparedness and war avoidance can be found in triumphs of intellect, or victories of mind over mind. Today, in an unstable world of growing military nuclearization, major world...