The Center for the Study of Weapons of Mass Destruction (CSWMD) is a recognized leader in formal and informal WMD education and is designated by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as the focal point for WMD education in Joint Professional Military Education (JPME).
CJCSI 1801.01E, 20 December 2019
CSWMD helps build and sustain a DoD community committed to improving WMD education. CSWMD experts bring to the education mission a broad and deep expertise obtained through decades of Federal, academic and private sector experience that allows them to deliver to students and future leaders topical and incisive instruction on WMD strategy, policy, operations and technology.
The May 2020 Joint Chiefs of Staff PME Vision highlights the need to develop “strategically minded joint warfighters who think critically and can creatively apply military power to inform national strategy, conduct globally integrated operations, and fight under conditions of disruptive change.” Programs of instruction designed to achieve this goal must take account of the ways in which WMD inform strategy and shape the character of competition and war. It is for this reason that the 2018 National Defense Strategy (NDS) declares as one of its objectives "Dissuading, preventing, or deterring state adversaries and non-state actors from acquiring, proliferating, or using weapons of mass destruction."
To advance these leadership objectives CSWMD works with DoD education institutions and programs to ensure that future leaders, staff officers and strategists:
Develop basic and applied knowledge of WMD threats and responses to enable critical thinking and informed decisionmaking on strategy, policy and operations;
Understand the strategic and operational impact of WMD in Great Power Competition, as well as at all levels of conflict, from regional to global;
Apply deterrence and countering WMD strategies, concepts and capabilities in order to achieve military objectives and to provide the best risk-informed advice to senior leaders.
July 23, 2019
The INF Treaty: A Spectacular, Inflexible, Time-bound Success
This article discusses the changing dynamics that led first Moscow and then Washington to reevaluate the merit of the INF Treaty. It concludes that the treaty's relative rigidity may play a key role in its undoing and suggests that future arms control negotiations develop more flexible and resilient mechanisms of review, dispute resolution, and verification.
May 10, 2018
Iran's Strategic Culture: Implications for Nuclear Policy
Fort Lesley J McNair — This book chapter, published in Crossing Nuclear Thresholds: Leveraging Sociocultural Insights into Nuclear Decisionmaking assesses the principal drivers of Iran's strategic culture and their broader implications for the country's nuclear decisionmaking processes.
May 12, 2017
Peril and Promise: Emerging Technologies and WMD
Emerging technologies are transforming life, industry, and the global economy in positive ways, but they also have significant potential for subversion by states and nonstate actors. National security experts, lawmakers, and policymakers have become increasingly concerned about the interactions among a number of emerging technologies that could alter and increase the threats from weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
March 20, 2017
March Issue, Arms Control Today: "Deter and Downsize: A Paradigm Shift for Nuclear Arms Control"
The nuclear triad approach to nuclear arms control deserves recognition for playing an important role in limiting and ultimately contributing to the reduction of their respective deployed nuclear forces, but it is unable to address the nuclear competition within the present geostrategic environment, where multiple states view nuclear forces as critically important to their long-term security. If nuclear arms control is to play a key role in preventing friction between nuclear powers and reducing nuclear risks in the 21st century, there needs to be a shift in focus and an expansion in participants.
Sept. 25, 2016
Why the U.S.-Israel Military Aid Package Matters
After months of tense and drawn-out negotiations, on September 14 the United States and Israel
May 11, 2016
Limited and Lawful Hammers
The article by Gro Nystuen and Kjolv Egeland in Arms Control Today titled, “A ‘Legal Gap’? Nuclear
March 16, 2016
Applying Jus in Bello to the Nuclear Deterrent
On December 7, 2015, the UN General Assembly passed A/RES/70/50, titled “Ethical imperatives for a
Oct. 1, 2012
Star Wars Rebooted: Global Missile Defense in 2017
At present and for the near future, missile defense (MD) is not in peril of dismemberment. Indeed,
Sept. 1, 2012
The Presidential Nuclear Initiatives of 1991-1992
On the morning of September 28, 1991, then-Colonel Frank Klotz witnessed an historic moment at Grand