Making It Personal: Regime Type and Nuclear Proliferation (original) (raw)
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Nuclear Proliferation and Authority in World Politics
2009
We apply the “security-hierarchy paradox” to nuclear proliferation. Global security requires a certain amount of hierarchy. A world in which no nuclear proliferation rules exist to constrain states, for example, would not be secure. Global security requires legitimate and authoritative rules, which we define as rules that are mutually negotiated, binding to all and which provide a stable social order. Too much hierarchy, however, amounts to coercion and undermines global security. Rules that are not mutually negotiated, binding to all or do not provide a stable social order are not authoritative. We argue that North Korea and Iran have attempted to build nuclear weapons because they interpret the proliferation rules to lack authority. The coercive U.S. approaches to enforcing proliferation rules – including diplomatic isolation, preemption, and regime change – have undermined the legitimacy of those rules. When the U.S. pursues less hierarchical policies, as it has recently toward N...
The Praetorian Bomb: How Nuclear Weapons Improve Political Durability
Georgetown University-Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, 2020
This project examines the impact of nuclear proliferation on regime and leader survival, proposing two mechanisms for this interaction. First, a bomb program can generate internal legitimacy by rallying support among relevant domestic audiences. Such initiatives are particularly valuable following contentious successions, providing new leaders with a means of consolidating their rule. Second, successful proliferation attempts can boost external security by incentivizing the international community to prevent regime collapse, either deterring foreign intervention or entrapping great powers into providing costly support to tentative allies. In the former, fears of nuclear inheritance, lost fissile materials, or last-ditch nuclear use can persuade major powers to back the continued survival of nuclear-capable states. In the latter, the shadow of nuclear escalation can motivate patrons to provide costly diplomatic or material support to client states. I rely on a mixed-methods research design to test these arguments. Survival analysis, Bayesian modeling, and a battery of robustness tests establish a baseline domestic hazard rate relative to nuclear activity. Next, two in-depth case studies trace the processes linking proliferation and political survival in Israel and South Africa, showing how weapons programs generate domestic support, deter external aggression, and entrap great power assistance. These benefits hold for as long as nuclear capabilities are maintained, prolonging the lives of states that would have otherwise faced insurmountable existential challenges. The analysis concludes with fifteen vignettes that highlight the generalizability and limitations of my theoretical framework.
States’ Motivations to Acquire or Forgo Nuclear Weapons: Four Factors of Influence
Journal of Military and Strategic Studies, Vol. 17 (2016), No. 1, pp. 209-236. Abstract: Since the invention and first use of nuclear weapons in 1945, predictions on the proliferation of these weapons have traditionally been overestimating. Despite all gloomy forecasts, only nine states nowadays are considered to possess nuclear weapons: the United States, Russia, China, the United Kingdom, France, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea. Although more states have operated nuclear weapons programmes at some point in the past 65 years most of them sooner or later gave up their ambition to acquire these weapons. Taking into account the historical trends, it looks like political and academic forecasts even nowadays tend to be overemphasizing the risks of further proliferation of nuclear weapons in the near future, for example by predicting nuclear domino effects if new nuclear weapons powers would arise and cause other states to develop nuclear weapons as well. The difficulties in forecasting nuclear weapons proliferation can be explained by one key factor: it is still unclear among academics and policymakers why exactly states start nuclear weapons programmes or refrain from them. What makes nuclear weapons attractive or unattractive to the leadership of any state? True, many theories exist. The problem with all existing theories on motivations for states to acquire or not to acquire nuclear weapons is that supporting evidence may be found, but opposing evidence as well. When studying nuclear weapons (non-)proliferation, one could consider any state in the world as an individual case, each with its own international and domestic circumstances, and with all the changes herein during history. It is, therefore, not surprising that specific explanations of nuclear behaviour are repeatedly considered inadequate because they fail to account for all cases – currently more than 190 states. Without understanding what are the motivations of states to aim for or refrain from acquiring nuclear weapons, it is not only complicated to forecast nuclear proliferation dynamics, but even more important: it becomes difficult to develop policies aimed at influencing these dynamics – there is a risk of treating the symptoms while ignoring the disease. This article aims at contributing to answering this key question in the field of nuclear weapons proliferation: why do states wish for nuclear weapons – or not? This will not be achieved by developing a new theory, but by increasing the insights in the large amount of existing theories on nuclear proliferation motivations. For this purpose the many theories developed in the past decades will be grouped into four overarching groups. This analysis could be helpful to future researchers and policy makers who got lost in the current richness in theories and their critics.
Determinants of nuclear weapons proliferation
Journal of Conflict Resolution, 2007
Nuclear weapons proliferation is a topic of intense interest and concern among both academics and policy makers. Diverse opinions exist about the determinants of proliferation and the policy options to alter proliferation incentives. We evaluate a variety of explanations in two stages of nuclear proliferation, the presence of nuclear weapons production programs and the actual possession of nuclear weapons. We examine proliferation quantitatively, using data collected by the authors on national latent nuclear weapons production capability and several other variables, while controlling for the conditionality of nuclear weapons possession based on the presence of a nuclear weapons program. We find that security concerns and technological capabilities are important determinants of whether states form nuclear weapons programs, while security concerns, economic capabilities, and domestic politics help to explain the possession of nuclear weapons. Signatories to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) are less likely to initiate nuclear weapons programs, but the NPT has not deterred proliferation at the system level.
Regime Change in Nuclear Weapon States
The threat of losing control of nuclear weapons during political crises is not sufficiently prepared for by either individual nuclear powers or the international community. The relative success of securing the Soviet nuclear arsenal after the collapse of the USSR has lulled the world into a false sense of security, but the threat is real and may be increasing. Drawing upon historical case studies in which the government of a nuclear weapon state failed, the author recommends policy options for future scenarios in the hope of preventing potential nuclear disasters in newly proliferating states such as North Korea and Iran.
Falling Apart: Regional Disputes of Power and Nuclear Proliferation
Does proliferation beget proliferation? The nuclear deal reached between the P5 +1 and Iran raises fears of a nuclear domino effect in the Middle East: if Teheran gets the bomb, then Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt will follow suit. Is there a logic of proliferation cascades that applies beyond the Middle East? Recent studies on reactive proliferation start from the assumption that the proliferators sample is a random one. Yet, it is hard to foresee how Iran getting the bomb would prompt Myanmar to do the same. To fill this gap, we examine the impact of regional hierarchies on nuclear proliferation. Using survival analysis, we test whether competition for regional hegemony increases the probability of any country to engage itself in at least one of the stages of proliferation (exploration, pursuit, and acquisition). We use data from the Correlates of War (CoW) project and find that both leaders and runners-up at the regional level according to the Composite Index of National Capabilities (CINC) tend to explore the nuclear option more than other countries. Runners-up, however, are the ones more likely to pursue the nuclear option, yet there is a negative correlation between them and the likelihood to acquire nuclear weapons. The results suggest that regional disputes of power are at the core of proliferation cascades. 2
In an attempt to explain why states build weapons and accurately predict future state profliferation we must look at various other factors outside the security model to gain a deeper understanding. In the past, security concerns were a positive predictor to whether or not nuclear proliferation was an agenda of a state. These same factors are no longer present today, therefore we must look to other more reliable indicators. Why do states build nuclear weapons? This is the question that Scott Sagan attempts to answer by in his research by looking at three different theory models. In the past, the security concerns of the state were a positive prediction to whether or not they would develop nuclear weapons, but the same factors that pressured the states in the past, are no longer present today. Without these factors, would security still be a reliable indicator? Sagan argues that focusing only on the security considerations as the cause of proliferation is "dangerously inadequate". 1 While the security model accurately explains past cases of nuclear proliferation by states, it would not be reliable in current times since the factors are no longer the same. Therefore, if we want to predict which countries might develop nuclear weapons in the future, underlying security concerns can not be the only area we pay attention to. Recent proliferation cases have demonstrated that we must take the other factors that play an important role in states decisions regarding proliferation. These factors, along with security concerns, may provide a much more accurate predictor of future proliferation. First, let's take a closer look at why the security model has worked for past cases. Sagan describes the security model as "any state that seeks to maintain its national security must balance against any rival state that develops nuclear weapons by gaining access to a nuclear deterrent itself." 2 The overwhelming majority of nuclear programs were developed around WWII and the Cold War. The security model is better at predicting these behaviors of superpowers such as Russia and the United States where there is an imminent threat to state's security. The nuclear arms race between the United States and the former Soviet Union provides a case example of this security model and how it explains behavior towards nuclear proliferation. On July 16, 1945, the first atomic bomb was tested in the New Mexico Desert. 3 Less than a month later, an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan.
The Study of Leaders in Nuclear Proliferation and How to Reinvigorate It
International Studies Review, 2019
For both nuclear proliferation and nuclear weapons restraint, the individual characteristics of political leaders-their beliefs, experiences, and identities-frequently play an important role. And yet, theories of proliferation have so far paid insufficient attention to the influence of leaders, fo-cusing instead on international and domestic structures that allegedly determine states' nuclear choices. This article makes two contributions. First, by showing that important cases of both nuclear weapons pursuit and nuclear reversal cannot be fully understood when neglecting the role of the involved leaders, the article makes a systematic case for an increased analytical emphasis on political leaders in theories of proliferation. Second, the article offers practical advice for scholars seeking to develop proliferation theories that take leader characteristics into account. Specifically, it shows how scholars can preempt endogeneity concerns. Moreover, the article details how changing the dependent variable-from state behavior to leader attitude-could help scholars overcome the aggregation problem in the study of proliferation dynamics.
While North Korea and Pakistan has announced themselves as nuclear power states and they have insisted on their nuclear programs, Iran has insisted that it has not willing to build nuclear weapons and it has not decertified its membership of NPT, which North Korea and Pakistan are not a member of. Although realists think that existential threats and technological capabilities, they cannot explain why Iran has not build nuclear weapons although it has existential threats and technological capabilities like North Korea and Pakistan. Iran’s case cannot be explained by the constructivist explanations because it has also a nationalist and religious identity like Pakistan. In this paper, it is argued that the values of the nuclear weapons affect the decision over nuclear politics and the values of the nuclear weapons for the states are based on their identities and the ideas of the major actors in the decision-making process including the public opinion. The analysis of North Korea, Pakistan and Iran has supported the arguments.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION/NON-PROLIFERATION: WHY STATES BUILD OR FORGO NUCLEAR WEAPONS
Nuclear proliferation is the biggest challenge posing direct threat to international peace, security and strategic stability. International community's endeavor to halt proliferation of nuclear weapons or related technology is simultaneously a difficult mission. Central objective of this paper is to understand and explain the phenomenon of nuclear proliferation and non-proliferation by applying different theoretical models including liberalism, realism and nuclear deterrence theory. Paper highlights how liberalism directs states to cooperate and accrue benefits from international anarchic system. It sheds light on the strength of liberal philosophy in convincing states to forgo nuclear weapons. Attempt is also made to explain reasons of nuclear proliferation through the prism of security needs. The realism was therefore applied in attempt to explain nuclear proliferation behavior. Further, attempt is made to explore how possessions of nuclear weapons enable states to achieve national interests? Realism and liberalism helped assess aforementioned aspects of the study carefully.