Spreading Temptation: Proliferation and Peaceful Nuclear Cooperation Agreements

Abstract

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.

Splitting Atoms: Why Do Countries Build Nuclear Power Plants?

“…Nearly three dozen states have relied on nuclear power plants to meet their energy needs over the last five decades. Since the 2000s many countries have expressed a newfound interest in civilian nuclear development as part of the so-called "nuclear energy renaissance" (for example , Fuhrmann 2009b;Miller and Sagan 2009). Yet, there is considerable variation in the degree to which countries have embraced nuclear power.…”

Varieties of Assurance

“…The correlations reported in these two studies -by Fuhrmann and by Mü ller and Schmidt -are not statistically significant, which means the better interpretation might be that they find no relation between security guarantees and nuclear weapons programs. 53 The statistical studies do not attempt to measure the impact of negative security assurances, nor do they consider other possible types of positive assurance beyond a defense treaty. The fact that some studies find a modest but not necessarily significant impact for positive assurances, while others do not, might be due to variations across individual cases in the importance of such assurances.…”

Interests, Trust and Security in US–Jordanian Nuclear Relations

“…Some scholars (Fuhrmann, 2009b;Sagan, 1996;Gartzke and Jo, 2009) threat from external states with which each had already fought at least one conventional war with at the time that they began to pursue nuclear weapons. 4 But this leaves un-addressed questions of nuclear proliferation where external existential threats are not present, are unlikely to emerge in the short-to medium-(or even long-) term and does not account for other forms of insecurity.…”