Israel

Bumps on the road to Helsinki: Will we ever get there?

Eleven months before the 2015 NPT Review Conference is convened, there is still no sign that the Helsinki conference on the establishment of the WMD-free zone in the Middle East will be held. In what seemed to be a glimmer of hope in Geneva on May 14-15, the conference’s facilitator, co-conveners and future state parties to the zone met to discuss the conference’s modalities.

Belief in the WMD-Free Zone: The Tel-Aviv Roundtable Process

How will we achieve progress on the long and tortuous road of eliminating WMD from the whole of the Middle East and formalizing that in verified treaties? We clearly need to address the underlying obstacles that hinder further progress on the establishment of the WMD-free zone in the Middle East, and this was the subject of a side event at the 2014 NPT PrepCom on May 7th, co-hosted by BASIC with PAX and the Israeli Disarmament Movement.

John Kerry and Benjamin Netanyahu July 2014

Will diplomacy prevail?

U.S. President Barack Obama will meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu today on the sidelines of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) annual conference. Netanyahu announced that the conversation would include the the P5+1 (U.S., UK, Russia, China, France, and Germany) and Iranian nuclear negotiations, which will continue this week at the technical level in Vienna.

More sanctions could undermine the Iran deal

The following weeks are likely to be challenging ones, domestically and internationally, for the Obama administration. While the interim deal over the Iranian nuclear programme has been welcomed as a positive first step by many in the international community and in arms control circles, US congressional support has been less full-throated.

The OPCW and Syria: learning the lessons of verification

Verification remains a key challenge on the road to nuclear disarmament and the continued non-proliferation of WMD. It is complex, politically and technically, and ultimately can only be sustainable in the long run if it is freely entered into, non-discriminatory, universally applicable and credible. Does the OPCW hold lessons for confidence in multilateral nuclear disarmament?