The overarching question imparting urgency to this exploration is: Can U.S.-Russian contention in cyberspace cause the two nuclear superpowers to stumble into war? In considering this question we were constantly reminded of recent comments by a prominent U.S. arms control expert: At least as dangerous as the risk of an actual cyberattack, he observed, is cyber operations’ “blurring of the line between peace and war.” Or, as Nye wrote, “in the cyber realm, the difference between a weapon and a non-weapon may come down to a single line of code, or simply the intent of a computer program’s user.”
How feasible is it to announce the Persian Gulf as a Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) Free Zone?
MTA/ISP Fellow Mansour Salsabili will address the question of the possibility of cooperation to reach a WMDFZ in the Persian Gulfas a Sub-regional Approach to the Middle East Free Zone. A conceptual framework for military feasibility study of such a comprehensive regime of cooperation in security affairs is designed and then research conducted through a comparative military analysis between Iran and Saudi Arabia as the two major rational actors in the region. This is to delve into, and explain the plausible behavior of Iran and Saudi Arabia, to join a novel security arrangement in the Persian Gulf as the Weapons of Mass Destruction Free Zone. This study is based on the calculation of the utility of the WMD’s for each state to speculate the possibility for its total abandoning.