Peaceful nuclear cooperation—the transfer of nuclear technology, materials, or know-how from one state to another for peaceful purposes—leads to the spread of nuclear weapons. In particular, countries that receive peaceful nuclear assistance are more likely to initiate weapons programs and successfully develop the bomb, especially when they are also faced with security threats. Statistical analysis based on a new data set of more than 2,000 bilateral civilian nuclear cooperation agreements signed from 1950 to 2000 lends strong support for this argument. Brief case studies of the Indian and Pakistani nuclear weapons programs provide further evidence of the links between peaceful nuclear assistance and proliferation. The finding that supplier countries inadvertently raise the risks of nuclear proliferation poses challenges to the conventional wisdom. Indeed, the relationship between civilian nuclear cooperation and proliferation is surprisingly broad. Even assistance that is often viewed as innocuous, such as training nuclear scientists or providing research or power reactors, increases the likelihood that nuclear weapons will spread. “Proliferation-proof” nuclear assistance does not exist. With a renaissance in nuclear power on the horizon, major suppliers, including the United States, should reconsider their willingness to assist other countries in developing peaceful nuclear programs.
How can states signal their alliance commitments? Although scholars have developed sophisticated theoretical models of costly signaling in international relations, we know little about which specific policies leaders can implement to signal their commitments. This article addresses this question with respect to the extended deterrent effects of nuclear weapons. Can nuclear states deter attacks against their friends by simply announcing their defense commitments? Or must they deploy nuclear weapons on a protégé's territory before an alliance is seen as credible? Using a new dataset on foreign nuclear deployments from 1950 to 2000, our analysis reveals two main findings. First, formal alliances with nuclear states appear to carry significant deterrence benefits. Second, however, stationing nuclear weapons on a protégé's territory does not bolster these effects. The analysis yields new insights about the dynamics of "hand-tying" and "sunk cost" signals in international politics.
The capacity to build nuclear weapons—known as “nuclear latency”—is widely believed to be important in world politics. Yet scholarly research on this topic remains limited. This paper introduces a new dataset on nuclear latency from 1939 to 2012. It discusses coding procedures, describes global trends, and compares the dataset with earlier efforts to measure nuclear latency. We show that nuclear latency is far more common than nuclear proliferation: 31 countries developed the capacity to build nuclear bombs from 1939 to 2012, and only 10 of those states went on to acquire atomic arsenals. This paper provides one empirical application of the dataset, showing how the study of nuclear latency can contribute to our understanding of international conflict. We provide preliminary evidence that nuclear latency reduces the likelihood of being targeted in militarized disputes. Having the capacity to build nuclear weapons, therefore, may provide deterrence benefits that we usually associate with possessing a nuclear arsenal.
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), more popularly known as “drones,” have become emblematic of twenty-first century military technologies but scholars have yet to convincingly explain the drivers of UAV proliferation. Using the first systematic data set of UAV proliferation, this research note examines the spread of UAVs in the context of scholarly debates about interests versus capacity in explaining policy adoption. The results yield important insights for both IR scholarship and the policy-making community. While countries that experience security threats—including territorial disputes and terrorism—are more likely to seek UAVs, drone proliferation is not simply a function of the threat environment. We find evidence that democracies and autocracies are more likely than mixed regimes to develop armed UAV programs, and suggest that autocracies and democracies have their own unique incentives to acquire this technology. Moreover, supply-side factors play a role in the UAV proliferation process: a state's technological capacity is a strong predictor of whether it will obtain the most sophisticated UAVs. The theories and evidence we present challenge emerging views about UAV proliferation and shed useful light on how and why drones spread.
Do nuclear weapons offer coercive advantages in international crisis bargaining? Almost seventy years into the nuclear age, we still lack a complete answer to this question. While scholars have devoted significant attention to questions about nuclear deterrence, we know comparatively little about whether nuclear weapons can help compel states to change their behavior. This study argues that, despite their extraordinary power, nuclear weapons are uniquely poor instruments of compellence. Compellent threats are more likely to be effective under two conditions: first, if a challenger can credibly threaten to seize the item in dispute; and second, if enacting the threat would entail few costs to the challenger. Nuclear weapons, however, meet neither of these conditions. They are neither useful tools of conquest nor low-cost tools of punishment. Using a new dataset of more than 200 militarized compellent threats from 1918 to 2001, we find strong support for our theory: compellent threats from nuclear states are no more likely to succeed, even after accounting for possible selection effects in the data. While nuclear weapons may carry coercive weight as instruments of deterrence, it appears that these effects do not extend to compellence.
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