Strategies of Counterproliferation | Rachel Whitlark

About the Event: What explains the use of different strategies of counterproliferation? Drawing on her new book, All Options on the Table: Leaders, Preventive War, and Nuclear Proliferation, Rachel Whitlark will explore the use of preventive military force as a counter-proliferation strategy by the United States and Israel against a variety of adversaries pursuing nuclear weapons. Discussing a new book project, she will also examine the use of targeted assassination of nuclear scientists as a counter-proliferation strategy and its potential consequences.

About the Speaker: Rachel Whitlark is an Associate Professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She is also a nonresident senior fellow in the Forward Defense practice of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security as well as a fellow with the Bridging the Gap Project. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from George Washington University. Whitlark has previously been a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow with the Project on Managing the Atom and International Security Program within the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. She was also a Pre-Doctoral Fellow at Harvard and a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Security Studies Program. 

Whitlark's interests lie within international security and foreign-policy decision-making, with a focus on the role of the individual executive in foreign and security policy, as well as on nuclear technology, nuclear proliferation, and counter-proliferation. She has regional interests in the Middle East and East Asia. Her book, All Options on the Table: Leaders, Preventive War, and Nuclear Proliferation, was published with Cornell University Press’s Studies in Security Affairs Series and investigates the use of preventive military force as a counter-proliferation strategy, drawing on archival research conducted at multiple U.S. Presidential Libraries. 

She has published in Security Studies, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, International Studies Quarterly, The Washington Quarterly, International Studies Perspectives, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and Survival, among other outlets. Her research has been funded by, among others, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the Stanton Foundation, and a variety of Presidential library foundations.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.