Avner Cohen

Avner Cohen was born in 1951

Avner Cohen was born in 1951 and grew up in Ramat HaSharon. His father, Tuvia Cohen, was a journalist covering Arab affairs for the newspaper Lamerhav and for Galei Tzahal.

He earned a B.A. in philosophy and history at Tel Aviv University in 1975 and an M.A. in philosophy at York University in 1977. In 1981 he received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, under Stephen Toulmin.

He taught philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and Tel Aviv University. In the 1980s he began studying the moral dilemmas of nuclear weapons, and after the 1986 Vanunu affair he turned to Israel's nuclear program. At Harvard in 1987 and 1988 he coined the concept of opaque proliferation with Benjamin Frankel.

In 1990 he left Tel Aviv University for a research post at MIT, where he wrote Israel and the Bomb. The military censor rejected the manuscript, and the book came out in the United States in 1998. When he returned to Israel in 2001 he was questioned for 10 days, and the investigation was closed.

From 1997 he held research posts in Washington and taught at several universities. Since 2011 he has been a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. He has written and edited 8 books.