About the event: The Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities supported by select American bombing in June 2025 changed the nuclear and political landscape in the Middle East. We will explore how much the bombing set back Iran’s nuclear capabilities and prospects, and how that may influence the political situation in Iran, Israel and the region.

About the speakers:

Siegfried Hecker was at the Los Alamos National Laboratory for 34 years, including 12 years as director. He was at Stanford University for 17 years, including 6 years as co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation. He is now part-time professor of practice at Texas A&M University and at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. Hecker has worked on nuclear matters for most of his career, including having visited all countries with declared nuclear weapons programs, including North Korea.  

He is the author (with collaborating author Elliot Serbin) of Hinge Points: An Inside Look at North Korea’s Nuclear Program (Stanford University Press, January 2023) and editor of Doomed to Cooperate: How American and Russian Scientists Joined Forces to Avert Some of the Greatest Post-Cold War Nuclear Dangers, Los Alamos Historical Society, June 2016.
 

Abbas Milani is the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University and a Professor (by courtesy) in the Stanford Global Studies Division. He is also one of the founding co-directors of the Iran Democracy Project and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. His expertise includes U.S.-Iran relations as well as Iranian cultural, political, and security issues. He taught at Tehran University’s Faculty of Law and Political Science until 1986, where he was also a member of the Board of Directors of the university’s Center for International Relations. After moving to the United States, he was the Chair of the Political Science Department at the Notre Dame de Namur University for 14 years. He was a visiting Research Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley’s Middle East Center for eight years.

Professor Milani came to Stanford in 2003 and became the founding director of the Iranian Studies Program in 2005. He also worked with two colleagues to launch the Iran Democracy Project at the Hoover Institution. He has published more than twenty books and two hundred articles and book reviews in scholarly magazines, journals, and newspapers. His most recent books include A Window into Modern Iran: The Ardeshir Zahedi Papers at the Hoover Institution Library & Archives (Hoover Institution Press, October 2019); Saadi and Humanism (in Persian), with Maryam Mirzadeh (Zemestan publisher, February 2020); and Thirty Portraits, Vol. 1 and 2 (Persian Circle, September 2022 and July 2023).
 

Or (Ori) Rabinowitz is a tenured senior lecturer (Associate Professor) at the International Relations Department of the Hebrew University and a Visiting Fellow of Israel Studies at Stanford, 2025-2026. After receiving the British Foreign Office's Chevening Scholarship, Rabinowitz completed a PhD at the War Studies Department of King’s College London in December 2011. In 2014, her book Bargaining on Nuclear Tests was published by Oxford University Press. She has published numerous peer-reviewed articles, think pieces, and op-eds in leading journals and magazines. She is the recipient of several prizes, grants, and awards, including two personal grants from the Israel Science Foundation. Her book manuscript on the evolution of US and Israeli counter-proliferation policy in the Middle East is currently under review.

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No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.