Nuclear weapons are still relevant in the twenty-first century, that much is clear to anyone who followed President Donald Trump’s 2017 Twitter war with the North Korean despot, Kim Jong Un. On the one hand, Trump’s agreement to meet Kim at the Singapore Summit in June 2018 served to underline these weapons’ almost mythical ability to grant those who acquire them a proverbial “seat at the table.” On the other hand, Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (the official name for the Iran nuclear deal) in May 2018, while other world powers decided to remain in it, brought to the fore the limits of power when nuclear weapons, and the prevention of their possible acquisition, is concerned. The United States withdrew from the agreement, placing sanctions on Iran, but the agreement persisted nonetheless. If these weapons are so potent, why then have only 10 countries developed them to date, and why did many countries consider their development, only to abandon the idea later on? Why have the majority of actors in the international community decided to eschew them?
During the Cold War, scholarly writing on these questions focused on security-related explanations, with a special emphasis given to deterrence theory. Following the end of the Cold War, several competing explanations were introduced. Largely focusing on nonsecurity-related approaches, these explanations examined such factors as economic liberalization, domestic politics, bureaucratic dynamics, norms, status, and prestige. Some of these explanations overlapped with leader-based theories centered on psychological attributes.
In Nuclear Politics Alexandre Debs and Nuno P. Monteiro introduce “a more refined security based theory of nuclear proliferation” (p. 6), refocusing the debate around the security model. They present a well-balanced, well-developed, theoretical framework that examines factors they identify as pertinent to countries considering nuclear development in the context of “a process of strategic interaction” involving not only the state actor considering nuclear acquisition but also that actor’s regional adversaries and allies, if they exist (p. 4). As the authors explain it, since the adversaries of any potential proliferator would “face a loss of relative power,” their inclusion in the process is rather intuitive. The inclusion of the proliferator’s allies in the process, a less intuitive move perhaps, is based on the assumption that such powerful allies may “lose some of their influence and face higher odds of entrapment” should the weaker protégé “go nuclear” (p. 5).
The book consists of a theoretical exploration and an empirical exploration of this thesis. Chapters 2–3 serve as the theoretical core of the book, outlining the strategic theory of proliferation and the associated historical patterns of nuclear proliferation. Chapters 4–6 discuss 16 comprehensive case studies. Significantly, when analyzing a state’s willingness to develop nuclear weapons, the authors compare the “security benefit,” which that state would potentially reap, with “the cost of the nuclear program” (p. 6), thus including in the proliferation picture only those states that face a high level of threat.
The balance of conventional power between the proliferator and its adversaries is also taken into account. According to the theory, if the proliferating state is relatively strong, its adversaries would struggle to launch a strike against it due to the high costs such a strike would incur, enabling the proliferator to effectively deter such an attack, and rendering such threats not credible. Conversely, weaker states would face problems deterring such strikes, increasing the potential cost of “going nuclear” to reflect this risk, making such threats more credible. Accordingly, allies can impact the decision to go nuclear in two distinct ways. They can either address the security concerns that caused the potential proliferator to consider nuclear weapons in the first place, thus alleviating the concern, or they can effectively protect the program, thus deterring potential strikes while the program advances. Such protection may enable the protégé to pave its way to nuclear acquisition.
The framework leads Debs and Monteiro to identify several empirical trends in nuclear proliferation, which they distill into two “causal pathways to proliferation” (p. 57). First, they find that among states that do not enjoy the protection of a powerful ally, only those that are strong enough to deter their adversaries have developed nuclear weapons. They explain that so far, “no weak unprotected state has ever managed to obtain” them (p. 11). Second, among protégé states that do enjoy an alliance with a powerful ally, the willingness and the opportunity to go nuclear depend on the existence of external security threats, coupled with unreliable or unsatisfactory security commitments by the ally. From the ally’s perspective, while threats of abandonment could be useful when trying to influence conventionally weak states, offering security guaranties is a more effective tool when dealing with conventionally powerful protégés.
The authors note that the covert development of nuclear capabilities by a weak, unprotected state could potentially void the entire theory, but they stress that it is an “exceedingly unlikely” scenario (p. 444). In this context, it is interesting to raise the case of the secret Syrian nuclear reactor that Israel bombed in September 2007. According to revelations from March 2018 published in the Israeli media, the discovery of the Syrian reactor happened almost by chance. It was an extremely “close call,” and not much was missing for the program to go undetected by Israeli intelligence, as were the previous Libyan nuclear efforts. Detection, when it occurred, happened late in the program, when the reactor was nearing completion. The Syrian case shows that “stealth programs” are not fantastic to imagine. It underscores the importance of early detection, a point noted by the authors.
Nuclear Politics makes a unique and singular contribution to nuclear studies and to political science more generally. Its scope lends credibility to the argument the authors put forward, making it a must-read for policymakers as well as students of the field. It also makes an important methodological contribution to the academic debate on the role of comparative, historical case studies in political science, a field that is currently experiencing a significant tilt away from qualitative analysis and toward quantitative analysis. However, one point of weakness in the theory is the relative marginalization of leader-based concepts and the psychological makeup of individual leaders. The authors concede that they have “little doubt” that “a leader’s psychological makeup” may influence decision making, but they qualify this by stating that they believe that “more explanatory leverage can be obtained by focusing on the features of the security environment a state faces than on the psychological makeup of its leaders” (p. 19).
Michael D. Cohen’s When Proliferation Causes Peace offers an opposing view on the importance of the psychological component in nuclear statecraft. This book is an original, innovative contribution to security studies, and to contemporary attempts to develop leader-based theories of nuclear behavior. It charts a new path for scholars interested in pursuing the application of cognitive biases in nuclear studies. Specifically, the book focuses on the “availability heuristic,” which posits that people tend to rely heavily on information that is “cognitively available” for them to recount when making judgments, such as recent information or firsthand experience.
Cohen raises the following, important, question: Does nuclear possession make leaders more, or less, aggressive? He argues that the effect nuclear weapons have on leaders develops over time, and hinges on the kind of experience the leader derives from their possession. A traumatic experience such as a fear of a nuclear war, he argues, is likely to have a considerable impact. Leaders of new nuclear powers are likely to be initially more aggressive in advancing their foreign policy agenda, but at a certain point, if this aggressiveness is countered by a nuclear-armed adversary, then the leader of the aggressive state will likely experience a deep, traumatic fear of nuclear war. For Cohen, this experience would shape the leader’s nuclear behavior in the future, causing the abandonment of his or her previously aggressive stance. Chapters 1–2 present the theoretical exploration and its contextual background, and Chapters 3–5 present the empirical exploration, which includes two large case studies, of the Soviet Union and Pakistan, and four short case studies.
While Cohen’s model is interesting and original, it does have certain weaknesses. It is only applicable for actors facing other nuclear-armed adversaries, and consequently is not relevant to attempts to study the nuclear history of Israel and South Africa, which did not face regional nuclear adversaries during the Cold War. In the Israeli case it would be interesting to explore whether the deep trauma caused by the Holocaust had a similar effect on Israeli decision makers, causing them perhaps to adopt a similar nonaggressive nuclear posture.
A second problem is the causal connection between the change of the policy and the traumatic experience that theoretically drives it. How can we determine that a certain policy shift was indeed caused solely due to trauma related to a nuclear crisis, and not due to other factors? Moreover, a deeper exploration of the intellectual history of the availability heuristic, in the larger context of psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman’s work on decision making and prospect theory, would have been helpful for readers interested in understanding the importance of these concepts, as well as the potential pitfalls associated with them. Notwithstanding these criticisms, however, Cohen’s is an important book that contributes new insights to the field of nuclear studies.
