Avner Cohen

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Avner Cohen (Hebrew: אבנר כהן, born 1951) is an Israeli-American writer, historian, and professor. He is a prominent figure in the nonproliferation and nuclear history academic communities, well known for his works on Israel's nuclear history and global nuclear history. He is currently a professor at the Nonproliferation and Terrorism Studies (NPTS) Program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, where he also serves as a senior affiliate at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies.^[1] Dr. Cohen is a member of the Editorial Board of the Nonproliferation Review, a fellow and contributing editor to many Electronic Briefing Books at the National Security Archive at the George Washington University, and the owner of the "Avner Cohen Collection" at the Digital Archive of the Woodrow Wilson Center. He is also a regular contributor to Israel's daily, Haaretz.

Cohen grew up north of Tel Aviv in Ramat HaSharon. He received a B.A. in philosophy and history from Tel Aviv University in 1975. He then studied philosophy at York University where he received his M.A. in philosophy in 1977. Four years later, in 1981, he earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. His dissertation advisor was Stephen Toulmin.^[2]

His early academic career started at Washington University in St. Louis (philosophy, 1981–1982), then at Ben-Gurion University (philosophy, 1982–1984), Tel Aviv University (1983–1990), and Hobart and William Smith Colleges (1986–1987).

Cohen started his work on nuclear weapons issues in the early 1980s from the perspective of a philosopher exploring the dilemmas of the nuclear age: acquisition, deterrence, and proliferation. It was motivated by the anti-nuclear protest of the early 1980s. Much of his early work, in the early-mid 1980s, focused on the moral dilemmas of the nuclear age. It was only in the mid-late 1980s, in part in the wake of the 1986 Vanunu Affair, that Cohen started to be intrigued by the peculiarities of the unique Israeli nuclear predicament.^[3]

During Cohen's research fellowship in 1987–1988 at the Center of Science and International Affairs (CSIA, now renamed the Belfer Center) of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, he developed and coined (in collaboration with Benjamin Frankel) the concept of "opaque proliferation", originally conceptualized as a generic reference to the features of second-generation clear proliferation (the cases of Israel, India, Pakistan, and South Africa).^[4]

Cohen previously held research and fellowship positions at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM), the National Security Archive, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Jennings Randolph Program for International Peace (USIP), and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In 1990, after he was awarded the MacArthur Foundation Research and Writing grant, Cohen resigned his position at Tel Aviv University and took a research position at the Center of International Studies at MIT. With physicist Dr. Marvin Miller as a partner, they initiated a new project aimed to study the nuclear issue in the Middle East. Cohen's seminal work, Israel and the Bomb, which chronicled the political history of the Israeli nuclear program, was researched and written while he was at MIT. While researching for the book, Cohen encountered a series of confrontations with the Israeli security apparatus that ultimately resulted in an unprecedented criminal investigation against him. This unprecedented decade-long struggle over the research and publication of Israel and the Bomb is detailed in the following section.

In 1997, Cohen left MIT to become a Jennings Senior Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace. In the following years, he held a series of short-term research positions with the National Security Archive, the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland (CISSM), the Woodrow Wilson Center, and the Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS). Cohen also taught at the George Washington University (adjunct 2001–04), the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (visiting professor, 2004) and the University of Haifa (visiting professor, 2005). Since 2011, Cohen has been a professor at MIIS.^[5]

Dr. Cohen has authored and edited eight books. Some of his books have been translated in Hebrew, French, and Farsi (an illegal publication). Cohen was also the co-editor of two special-issues of academic journals in 2018 and 2019. He co-edited more than half a dozen Electronic Briefing Books with Dr. William Burr of the National Security Archive, all posted on the Archive's website. Cohen has authored nearly one hundred academic items, including journal articles, book chapters, and others.

During the research for Israel and the Bomb, Cohen conducted tens of taped historical interviews with key individuals who were involved in the Israeli nuclear program. The transcripts of some of these interviews – including Bertrand Goldschmidt, Yitzhak "Ya'tza" Yaakov,^[6] Arnan "Sini" Azaryahu, Avraham Hermoni, Edwin E. Kintner, Elie Geisler,^[7] Myer Feldman, and Walt Rostow – are now part of the "Avner Cohen Collection" and were posted with annotation in the Digital Archive of the Woodrow Wilson Center.

Some of the distinct historical insights of Israel and the Bomb include:^[8]

• The exact circumstances of the Dimona site discovery in 1959–1960.
• The details of the exchanges between John F. Kennedy and David Ben-Gurion and Levi Eshkol on nuclear issues, and the possible connection between Kennedy's pressure on the nuclear issue and Ben-Gurion's eventual resignation.
• Details of how US visits to Dimona were conducted (1964–1969) and how Israel was able to conceal its real purpose, preventing US discovery.
• Intricate relations between various US government auxiliaries in the effort to decode the Dimona project, and US intelligence failures. The CIA ultimately understood Israel's ambitions in an approximate sense.
• The cat-and-mouse U.S.-Israeli game over the Dimona project throughout the 1960s.
• Details on the series of exchanges over the Israeli nuclear issue between US Assistant Secretary of Defense, Paul Warnke, and Israeli Ambassador in the United States, Yitzhak Rabin, also known as the Warnke-Rabin exchange.
• The secret birth of nuclear opacity as a symbiotic American-Israeli bargain under President Richard Nixon and Prime Minister Golda Meir in 1969–70 (the issue is elaborated further in Cohen's 2010 book, The Worst-Kept Secret)