Louis René Beres
Sovereignty and Survival
Special to Jewish Website
Abstract: Core issues surrounding Iran's nuclear weapons program have generally been strategic or political rather than legal. Nonetheless, if Israel should sometime decide that it no longer has any reasonable alternative...
Foundations of Nuclear War Avoidance: An Intellectual and Legal Challenge
“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)
Nuclear weapons...
A New Film’s Hidden Message: “Oppenheimer,” Escalation Dominance and Inadvertent Nuclear War
Introduction: The new film about Manhattan Project physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer raises counter-intuitive questions about nuclear weapons as instruments of peace. Despite serious misgivings about the bomb he had created (“I am become death, the destroyer...
Thinking About the Unthinkable, Again
In 1962, Herman Kahn riveted the US defense community with a book titled Thinking About the Unthinkable. Far ahead of its time, the American physicist’s seminal work displayed a rare combination of conceptual imagination, intellectual capacity...
“…Like A Field Of Ripe Corn” -The Origins Of American “Mass”
“The readers of the Boston Evening Transcript Sway in the wind like a field of ripe corn.” -T S Eliot
For the most part, what Americans receive as their daily news is reflection. Any more penetrating thought concerning such...
When Aggression and Genocide Combine: Putin’s ‘Hiterlite’ War Against Ukraine
Vladimir Putin’s multiple crimes against Ukraine include aggression and genocide. But what happens when these two categories of criminality come together? Among other things, this result is not “merely” additive; it is also synergistic. Hence, the...
How and why international law and strategy should be merged when engaging Middle Eastern...
ISRAEL, COUNTER-TERRORISM AND INTERNATIONAL LAW: ANALYTIC CHALLENGES OF SYSTEM
“The existence of `system’ in the world is obvious to every observer of nature, no matter whom.”
-- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (1959)
Whether...
If and when to strike first – A guest essay on Israeli preemption
IF AND WHEN TO STRIKE FIRST
ISRAEL, PREEMPTION AND ANTICIPATORY SELF-DEFENSE
Louis René Beres (Ph.D., Princeton, 1971)
Emeritus Professor of International Law
Purdue University
Abstract: “The safety of the people,” declares Cicero in The Laws, “is the highest law.”...
Legal Order In World Politics: A Hobbesian Dilemma
“Where there is no Common Power, there is no Law….”- Leviathan, Chapter XIII
A Hobbesian World
The seventeenth century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes associated world politics with the “state of nature.” In this anarchic state, war is...
King Charles III’s Coronation at the Convergence of Policy, Sovereignty, and Immortality
It’s an uncommon association, but certain connections have been suggested between sovereignty (the highest form of earthly authority) and offerings of immortality. For the most part, at the level of philosophical investigation, such connections have not...