Security strategies

Stephen Philip Cohen, Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy Studies Program at Washington’s Brookings Institution asks, "How do we explain the decline in American and international interest in regimes and treaties to contain weapons of mass destruction and missile delivery systems?” Dinshaw Mistry’s book — Containing Missile Proliferation: Strategic Technology, Security Regimes and International Cooperation in Arms Control — says Cohen, provides "a wealth of information about the spread of missiles... offers a sobering analysis of the difficulty in maintaining such regimes and presents an original explanation of their rise and decline.”

International efforts to contain the proliferation of long range ballistic missiles come under Mistry’s microscope. The Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) aimed to confine their ownership by denying technological assistance for weapons development to regional powers. This "supply side regime,” Mistry says was "generally necessary but rarely sufficient as a non-proliferation tool.” Countries like Argentina, Brazil and South Africa accepted the restrains. Nations like Israel, India, North Korea, Pakistan however created their own indigenous technology because of their domestic political considerations and perceived threat to national security.

Mistry: assessing international treaties

Apart from international treaties on non-proliferation, other attempts by the US to control the spread of such technology in the developing world has been the use of sanctions and embargoes on certain spheres of trade and aid. These have often worked on countries like India and Pakistan by delaying the fruition of their ballistic abilities. But with countries like Iran, isolated from the US and much of the trade of the western world, such sanctions have had little effect, notes Mistry.

Currently assistant professor and director of Asian studies at the University of Cincinnati, Mistry has written extensively on technology and politics, regional security and international cooperation in The New York Times, Security Studies, Contemporary Security Policy and other publications, as per the blurb on the jacket of the book.

This 252-page publication of the University of Washington Press began as Mistry’s doctoral thesis in 1999, sections of which were published in such professional publications as Security Studies and Contemporary Security Policy and in conference papers presented to policy makers developing the MTCR’s code of conduct and other missile nonproliferation initiatives, as notes the author in his Preface. The study was supported by fellowships from Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation and the University of Illinois’ Program in Arms Control, Disarmament and International Security and its Department of Political Science.

A son of Jehangir and Behroze Mistry, Dinshaw studied at Bombay’s Cathedral and John Connon School before proceeding to the US in 1988 to pursue undergraduate studies at the University of Sewanee in Tennessee. Acquiring his doctorate degree from the University of Chicago (Urbana Champaign) Mistry completed a year-long stint at the Brookings Institution, the US government’s policy-making think-tank, his father informs us. A teaching assignment at Stanford University was followed by another at Harvard University, Massachusetts. Mistry’s current occupation at Cincinnati involves teaching and research. Jehangir adds that Dinshaw is also managing editor of India Review, a Frank Cass Journal published from London. Dinshaw’s brother Hormuzd is a computer projects manager in New York, his sister Farah is pursuing MBA studies in Bombay.