Institute for Science and International Security

The Institute for Science and International Security was founded in 1993 by David Albright, a physicist who spent the early 1990s working with the IAEA Action Team on Iraqi nuclear documents and in June 1996 became the first non-governmental inspector to enter the Iraqi nuclear programme. That track record of technical analysis preceding official disclosure became the institute's operating model: rigorous open-source work, satellite imagery, and procurement-network mapping that governments and the IAEA later confirm.

ISIS has produced landmark assessments on North Korea's plutonium and uranium programmes, Syria's Al-Kibar reactor (destroyed 2007), and Iran's enrichment infrastructure from the late 1990s Onward. Its five-month post-strike analysis of Fordow after the June 2025 Operation Midnight Hammer strikes, concluding that Massive Ordnance Penetrators entered the centrifuge hall and rendered the facility inoperable, shaped the public consensus at a moment when the IAEA lacked access to verify the claim independently. The institute is funded by the MacArthur Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, and the US Department of Energy, and is ranked among the top 25 global Science and technology think tanks.

The abbreviation ISIS predates the Islamic State by two decades, deriving from the ancient Egyptian goddess Isis. Albright publicly urged journalists to drop the ISIS label for the militant group to reduce confusion but declined to rebrand the institute itself. In policy circles the acronym continues to refer exclusively to the non-proliferation think tank. With a small team of around four full-time analysts, ISIS punches well above its size, routinely feeding congressional briefings and serving as the media's go-to source for independent technical reads of contested nuclear intelligence.