Avner Cohen is an Israeli-American historian and a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. He received his PhD in philosophy from the University of Chicago before going into nuclear history. He has held positions at Washington University in St. Louis, Ben-Gurion University and Tel Aviv University in Israel, Harvard, and MIT.
His 1998 book, Israel and the Bomb, is the definitive historical work to date on the Israeli nuclear program. Cohen’s 2010 book, The Worst-kept Secret: Israel’s Bargain with the Bomb, investigates Israel’s policy of “opacity,” or amimut, around its nuclear weapons.