Stopping the Bomb: The Sources and Effectiveness of US Nonproliferation Policy

By Nicholas L. Miller

This is an intense and meticulously sourced study on the topic of nuclear weapons proliferation, beginning with America's introduction of the Atomic Age... His book provides a full explanation of America's policy with a time sequence necessarily focusing on the domino effect of states acquiring a nuclear weapons capability and the import of bureaucratic decisions on international political behavior.― Choice

Stopping the Bomb examines the historical development and effectiveness of American efforts to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. Nicholas L. Miller offers here a novel theory that argues changes in American nonproliferation policy are the keys to understanding the nuclear landscape from the 1960s onward. The Chinese and Indian nuclear tests in the 1960s and 1970s forced the US government, Miller contends, to pay new and considerable attention to the idea of nonproliferation and to reexamine its foreign policies.

Stopping the Bomb explores the role of the United States in combating the spread of nuclear weapons, an area often ignored to date. He explains why these changes occurred and how effective US policies have been in preventing countries from seeking and acquiring nuclear weapons. Miller's findings highlight the relatively rapid move from a permissive approach toward allies acquiring nuclear weapons to a more universal nonproliferation policy no matter whether friend or foe. Four in-depth case studies of US nonproliferation policy—toward Taiwan, Pakistan, Iran, and France—elucidate how the United States can compel countries to reverse ongoing nuclear weapons programs.

Miller's findings in Stopping the Bomb have important implications for the continued study of nuclear proliferation, US nonproliferation policy, and beyond.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Apr 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781501717826

Book preview

Stopping the Bomb

The Sources and Effectiveness of US Nonproliferation Policy

NICHOLAS L. MILLER

Cornell University Press

Ithaca and London

Contents

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction: The Proliferation Problem

1. Theorizing the Sources and Effectiveness of US Nonproliferation Policy

2. The Sources of US Nonproliferation Policy, 1945–1968

3. The Sources of US Nonproliferation Policy, 1969–1980

4. Nonproliferation in Action: The United States and Friendly Countries’ Nuclear Weapons Programs, 1964–Present

5. The Effectiveness of US Nonproliferation Policy

6. The French Nuclear Program (1954–1960)

7. The Taiwanese Nuclear Program (1967–1977)

8. The Pakistani Nuclear Program (1972–1987)

9. The Iranian Nuclear Program (1974–2015)

Conclusion: Lessons from US Nonproliferation Policy

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

My interest in international security and nuclear weapons coalesced when I was an undergraduate at Wesleyan University, where I was fortunate enough to take several excellent courses from Doug Foyle, Erica Chenoweth, and David Kearn. In addition to sparking my intellectual interests through their teaching, these three professors helped inspire me to pursue a PhD through their mentorship and example. Under Doug Foyle’s guidance, I wrote a senior thesis on US nonproliferation policy, which provided my first exposure to the topic that would become the focus of my dissertation and, ultimately, this book.

My graduate school professors at MIT were instrumental in getting me to this point. I could not have asked for a more supportive and capable set of dissertation advisers. Taylor Fravel provided vital feedback and helped me tackle the complexity of US-China-Taiwan relations. Frank Gavin’s research on the history of US nonproliferation policy helped to stimulate my interest in the topic. He also helped connect me to the broader community of nuclear historians, whose work I admire and draw on. Vipin Narang was and continues to be an incredibly supportive mentor whose advice I regularly seek. His research on nuclear strategy and proliferation serves as a model of rigor and insight for junior nuclear scholars. Several other faculty members at MIT offered invaluable feedback and support at various points during graduate school, including Fotini Christia, Roger Petersen, and Stephen Van Evera.

I am also grateful to many friends and colleagues I met in graduate school, who offered excellent feedback on my work and provided equally important camaraderie. I want to thank in particular Daniel Altman, Noel Anderson, Mark Bell, Chris Clary, Jeremy Ferwerda, Gene Gerzhoy, Brian Haggerty, Chad Hazlett, Yue Hou, David Jae, Sameer Lalwani, Kai Quek, Rachel Whitlark, and Alec Worsnop.

I transformed my dissertation into a book manuscript while I was an assistant professor at Brown University. During my time there, I benefited from the intellectual insights and support of many colleagues, including Jeff Colgan, Nina Tannenwald, Ed Steinfeld, Rick Locke, Wendy Schiller, Peter Andreas, Rose McDermott, and Peter Gourevitch. Brown was generous enough to fund and host a book workshop for me in December 2015, where I received exceptionally helpful comments from Scott Sagan, Robert Jervis, and Etel Solingen.

This book project made it across the finish line while I was a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the Belfer Center at Harvard. I am grateful to the Stanton Foundation for their support and the Managing the Atom Project and International Security Program at Belfer for providing a stimulating intellectual environment. I am also thankful for the feedback and help I received in the publication process from the staff and editors at Cornell University Press, including Roger Haydon and the editors of the Security Affairs series.

Portions of this book draw on previously published journal articles. I would like to thank Cambridge University Press, MIT Press, and Taylor and Francis for the permission to reprint this content.

Long before I was an aspiring scholar of nuclear policy, I relied on the support of my family and close friends. My parents, Garth Miller and Ann LeSuer, provided unwavering personal support and encouraged my intellectual pursuits from a young age. My siblings—Matt, Emily, Rachael, Jacob, Nate, and Aidan—made sure I never became too full of myself. Two longtime friends, Jonathan Robinson and Kai Thaler, have helped keep me happy and sane over the years. Each of these individuals has helped make this book possible in his or her own way.

I reserve my greatest gratitude for my wife, Eugenie Carabatsos, whose love and support has enriched my life immeasurably over the last nine years. I dedicate this book to her.

Abbreviations

Introduction

The Proliferation Problem

In the summer of 1945, the United States became the first country to develop, test, and use nuclear weapons in war. Having dragged the world into the nuclear age, US policymakers were immediately forced to confront the possibility that their nuclear monopoly would not long endure. Even before the United States tested its first weapon in New Mexico, a group of Manhattan Project scientists led by James Franck argued against immediately using nuclear weapons on Japan, warning that nuclear bombs cannot possibly remain a ‘secret weapon’ at the exclusive disposal of this country for more than a few years.¹ Soon after the war ended, a government committee led by David Lilienthal and Dean Acheson came to similar conclusions about the likely spread of nuclear weapons. Contending that the basic scientific principles behind nuclear weapons are well known to competent scientists throughout the world and that the incentive to other nations to press their own developments is overwhelming, the committee recommended international control of nuclear technology as the best means to avoid proliferation and nuclear war.² From this moment onward, the US government struggled with the question of how to prevent, delay, manage, or perhaps even accept or selectively promote the spread of nuclear weapons. As this book will demonstrate, it ultimately took more than thirty years for a firm nonproliferation policy to emerge.

As the nuclear age progressed, analysts and policymakers became increasingly concerned that the spread of nuclear weapons would not be gradual but rather rapid and self-perpetuating, warning of nuclear cascades and domino effects and predicting exponential increases in the number of states pursuing and acquiring nuclear weapons.³ In 1961, in negotiations with Nikita Khrushchev over a limited test ban treaty, President Kennedy predicted that if no agreement is reached, then in a few years there might be ten or even fifteen nuclear powers.⁴ That same year, as nuclear sharing with NATO allies was a matter of public debate, Albert Wohlstetter warned in the pages of Foreign Affairs of the N+1 problem, in particular arguing that it has always been clear … that the acquisition of nuclear military power by some of our allies can impel its acquisition by enemies…. The spread occurs in chain.⁵ Two years later, Kennedy publicly warned that without effective policy interventions, the world could soon face a scenario with anywhere from fifteen to twenty-five nuclear-armed powers.⁶

These fears were strengthened immensely by China’s entry into the nuclear club in 1964. In the aftermath of China’s first test, the influential Gilpatric Committee warned, The world is fast approaching a point of no return in the prospects of controlling the spread of nuclear weapons. The committee specifically predicted that India and Japan would be tempted to pursue nuclear weapons, and that this in turn could compel Pakistan, Israel, the United Arab Republic (UAR), West Germany, and other European states to follow suit.⁷ After India tested its first nuclear device a decade later, delivering a blow to the nascent nonproliferation regime, a government report sounded a similarly pessimistic note. The report judged that the effort to prevent proliferation is now at a crucial stage … as a result of the Indian nuclear test, other non-nuclear weapons states may rethink their decisions regarding the acquisition of nuclear explosives.⁸

Yet there is a significant problem with these repeated predictions of nuclear domino effects: They have proven spectacularly wrong. As Sagan has noted, the number of states with nuclear weapons has grown slowly and steadily, with no single instance of nuclear acquisition leading to a cascade of additional nuclear states. Meanwhile, the number of states actively pursuing nuclear weapons has actually declined in recent decades.⁹ Indeed, in 1985, a National Intelligence Council report observed that the most striking characteristic of the present-day nuclear proliferation scene is that, despite the alarms rung for some decades by past National Intelligence Estimates, no additional overt proliferation of weapons has actually occurred since China tested its bomb in 1964.¹⁰ While several countries acquired nuclear capabilities in this time period—namely, Israel, India, and South Africa—none of them declared their arsenal and openly stockpiled weapons.

This apparent failure of nuclear domino predictions has motivated a large literature in recent years, producing a new consensus that holds the nuclear domino theory is invalid.¹¹ In explaining the relatively slow pace of proliferation, recent scholarship has emphasized the role of leader identity conception, norms embodied in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), regional security environments, domestic regime type, and threats of force by the adversaries of potential proliferators.¹² Other recent work has explored the role of foreign technological assistance in spurring proliferation.¹³

This book takes a different tack, emphasizing the role of US nonproliferation policy in limiting the spread of nuclear weapons, a factor that has received systematic attention from social scientists only in the last few years.¹⁴ Until recently, many adhered to Waltz’s assertion that no country has been able to prevent other countries from going nuclear if they were determined to do so.¹⁵ While there are several excellent historical works that explore the evolution of US nonproliferation policy over time, they do not theorize and thoroughly assess both the sources and effectiveness of US efforts.¹⁶

Specifically, this book argues for the importance of nonproliferation sanctions policies established by the United States in the mid-1970s, policies that were advocated by members of the US Congress and ultimately incorporated into US law. These policies credibly link nonproliferation with access to the vast economic and military resources of the United States and thereby dramatically raise the costs of proliferation for states in the US sphere of influence. I also offer a theory for the sources of US nonproliferation policies, arguing that heightened expectations of nuclear domino effects, greater government attention to nonproliferation, and political openings for nonproliferation advocates in Congress and the bureaucracy explain why US policy strengthened so dramatically in response to the Chinese and Indian nuclear tests of 1964 and 1974, leading first to the NPT and later the adoption of sanctions policies. Collectively, these two theories suggest the possibility that forecasts of nuclear domino effects have to a large degree been a self-defeating prophecy: US policy-makers anticipated domino effects and put in place policies that may have effectively prevented them.¹⁷

Why Nonproliferation Matters

The spread of nuclear weapons and the efficacy of efforts to prevent this spread are important topics for both theoretical and policy reasons. First, in terms of policy, nuclear proliferation is consequential since it affects both the risk of nuclear use and the likelihood and character of conventional interstate conflict. While theoretical arguments about whether nuclear weapons stabilize or destabilize international politics persist, a growing body of empirical work suggests that nuclear weapons may not deter conventional conflict to the extent previously thought, may provide bargaining advantages in crises, encourage greater resolve or aggression, or lead states to become more assertive in their foreign policies.¹⁸

Moreover, even the pursuit of nuclear weapons can cause regional instability and war. Fuhrmann and Kreps identify eight cases where nuclear programs were preventively attacked, in addition to ten other cases where states seriously considered preventive attacks.¹⁹ Most prominently, the mistaken belief that Iraq continued to pursue nuclear weapons was a significant motivation for the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.²⁰ Israel attacked an Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981 and Syrian nuclear facilities in 2007, and some have argued that the Soviets instigated the Six-Day War of 1967 in order to attack Israel’s nuclear program.²¹ There has likewise been widespread discussion of the possibility of an American or Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, with the threat of force publicly on the table for many years.²²

While it is impossible to say definitively whether more nuclear-armed states would increase the risk of nuclear use, scholars subscribing to the proliferation pessimism school of thought generally argue that this is the case. This argument is plausible for two main reasons. First, there will simply be more opportunities for advertent or inadvertent use as the number of nuclear-armed states increases.²³ A second perspective holds that next-generation proliferators are likely to be weaker, poorer, military-dominated states that lack the financial and institutional capacity to minimize the risk of accidental or intentional nuclear use.²⁴

This topic is also important for theoretical reasons. First, the limited amount of proliferation is puzzling from the standpoint of several existing theories. Proliferation has not accelerated even as the technology to produce nuclear weapons has diffused and become easier to master. Moreover, from the perspective of realism, which assumes that states seek security and survival above all else and argues that nuclear weapons are the ultimate guarantor of a state’s survival, it makes little sense that proliferation has been so rare.²⁵ After all, it is not as if all states with a potential motive and capability have proliferated. According to one recent estimate, there are currently fifty-six non-nuclear states with the basic technical capacity to develop nuclear weapons; moreover, many of these states have at least one nuclear-armed neighbor, generally thought to be the strongest motivation for nuclear proliferation.²⁶ Second, while it is possible that norms associated with the NPT could explain the rarity of proliferation, this argument is problematic because the NPT itself and the decisions of states to adhere to it have often been a consequence of superpower interests and pressure.²⁷ Finally, the role of sanctions in limiting proliferation that this book highlights is theoretically important since the majority of existing scholarship on sanctions argues that they are generally ineffective.²⁸ Whether for reasons of theory or policy, is it crucial to understand the sources and efficacy of US nonproliferation efforts.

Patterns of Proliferation, 1945–Present

Table I.1 below identifies the countries that have pursued nuclear weapons since 1945 along with the years they initiated their programs, acquired nuclear weapons, and/or abandoned their programs, according to Way’s updated codings.²⁹ In order for a country to be coded as pursuing nuclear weapons, they must do more than simply explore the possibility of a weapons program. They have to take additional further steps aimed at acquiring nuclear weapons, such as a political decision by cabinet-level officials, movement toward weaponization, or development of single-use, dedicated technology.³⁰

Table I.1 Nuclear weapons pursuit since 1945 (data from Way and Weeks 2014)

Table I.1 Nuclear weapons pursuit since 1945 (data from Way and Weeks 2014)

In addition to a declining rate of nuclear weapons program initiation over time, there is a striking change in the type of countries that have pursued nuclear weapons in different time periods. Prior to the mid-1970s, proliferating states were often friends or allies of the United States—for example, the United Kingdom, France, Israel, Australia, Taiwan, South Korea, and Pakistan. After the mid-1970s, by contrast, proliferating states have exclusively been states either with troubled, ambivalent relations with the United States (Argentina, Brazil) or states entirely outside the US sphere of influence (North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Syria). This book’s theory aims to shed light on this changing character of proliferation in recent decades. It also seeks to explain why US non-proliferation efforts have failed against some countries—for example, Pakistan, North Korea, and India—while succeeding against countries like South Korea, Taiwan, and Iraq.

The Evolution of US Nonproliferation Policy, 1945–1980

This book also seeks to explain changes in US nonproliferation policy over time, which I argue is central to understanding the changing patterns of proliferation. There has been significant variation in US policy historically with respect to whether the US government has sought to impede proliferation across the board or has facilitated or acquiesced to it in particular cases. In this book, I focus on the period between 1945 and 1980 for two reasons: (1) it encompasses the most important shifts in US nonproliferation policy, including the negotiation and establishment of the NPT and development of strong export controls and sanctions policies, and (2) much of the book relies on declassified government documents, which are much spottier after 1980.³¹ The arc of US nonproliferation policy in this period will be discussed in detail in chapters 2 and 3, but a brief summary demonstrates the oscillations in US policy.

After early efforts to restrain proliferation in the 1940s, namely the failed Baruch Plan and the Atomic Energy Act, which sought to limit national access to nuclear weapons and nuclear technology, policy in the mid-1950s became markedly more permissive. The Eisenhower administration sought to increase the control of NATO allies over nuclear weapons through the NATO stockpile plan and Multilateral Force (MLF), secured revisions of the Atomic Energy Act to allow the United States to provide aid to Britain’s nuclear weapons program, and launched the Atoms for Peace program, which promised to spread nuclear technology globally. While some of these initiatives can be interpreted as non-proliferation measures in the sense that they sought to dissuade fully independent nuclear programs and maintain a semblance of American control over the spread of nuclear technology, materially they resulted in increased access of states to nuclear weapons and technology. Moreover, Eisenhower himself was clearly open to selective proliferation, as chapter 2 will explore. Nonproliferation policy in the early 1960s was schizophrenic, with significant efforts to impede proliferation such as the Limited Test Ban Treaty and the installation of permissive action links (PALs) on US nuclear weapons in Europe, but also a refusal to give up the plan for the MLF in NATO and the decision to offer additional aid to the French and British nuclear weapons programs. From 1964 to 1968, US policy shifted strongly in favor of nonproliferation, most notably with the scrapping of the MLF and the conclusion of the NPT. After a down-weighting of nonproliferation from 1969 through 1973, which included a Nixon administration decision not to press for NPT adherence, from 1974 through 1980 US policy again shifted strongly in favor of nonproliferation with the establishment of strong supplier controls and sanctions policies.

The Argument

This book advances theories to explain both the evolution of US nonproliferation policy over time and its effectiveness, which I argue sheds light on the changing character of proliferation. With respect to the sources of US nonproliferation policy, I argue that the Chinese and Indian nuclear tests (1) strengthened expectations of nuclear domino effects; (2) caused the US government to pay greater attention to nonproliferation; and (3) provided a political opening for nonproliferation advocates. Expectations of nuclear domino effects—the notion that proliferation in one state increases the probability of proliferation in other states—was crucial in leading US policymakers to prefer an across-the-board rather than a selective nonproliferation policy. More specifically, I argue that the consequences of proliferation for the United States and the costs of enforcing nonproliferation differ from state to state as a function of whether that state is an enemy, ally, or unaligned and therefore that an across-the-board nonproliferation policy makes sense only when nuclear domino effects are perceived to be strong, in other words when policymakers believe proliferation cannot be contained to individual cases of friendly states.

The Chinese and Indian nuclear tests also played two subsidiary roles in causing the changes in US policy, namely by leading the US government to focus more attention on nonproliferation and creating political openings for actors with a strong stake in nonproliferation, for example arms control bureaucrats and members of Congress. While heightened expectations of domino effects helped change many policymakers’ preferences on nonproliferation policy, greater government attention and openings for nonproliferation advocates helped ensure the implementation of policy changes.

The second theory explains how US nonproliferation policies—in particular the threat of sanctions established in the mid-1970s—have helped to limit proliferation and alter its character. As a global hegemon with unparalleled military and economic resources, the United States has long maintained important security and economic relationships with a large number of countries that provide leverage the United States can bring to bear in the nuclear realm. Specifically, by credibly threatening to cut off or weaken economic and military support to states that pursue nuclear weapons, the United States dramatically raises the costs of proliferation for states that depend on the United States and therefore has the power to deter states from pursuing nuclear weapons in the first place. This rationalist argument, where states calculate the risk of sanctions and refrain from proliferating if the threat is credible and the costs are too heavy to bear, implies that sanctions will succeed in compelling countries to give up ongoing nuclear weapons programs only when they underestimate the risk of sanctions. This could occur because they started their programs prior to the development of US sanctions policies or because they faced multilateral sanctions of unexpected strength.

The deterrent effect of US sanctions sheds light on why US allies and friends have ceased pursuing nuclear weapons in recent decades, thus rendering nuclear proliferation an activity exclusively in the purview of rogue states like Iran, Libya, Syria, Iraq, and North Korea. It also helps explain why unilateral US sanctions have often failed—because they were targeted at countries with low dependence on the United States who were rationally undeterred—while multilateral sanctions have proven crucial at halting recent proliferators.

Roadmap for the Book

The body of the book develops these two theories in more detail and then tests their observable implications using a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods. Chapter 1 begins by reviewing the literature on the causes of nuclear proliferation and US nonproliferation policy and then offers new theories on the sources and effectiveness of US policy. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 empirically assess the theory on the sources of US nonproliferation policy. In chapter 2, I draw on archival documents and secondary sources to trace the evolution of US policy from 1945 to 1968 as well as investigate the motivations for these changes. Chapter 3 conducts a parallel analysis for the 1969–1980 period. In chapter 4, I use declassified documents to explore how well the theory performs in explaining US policy toward individual countries pursuing nuclear weapons after 1964. In particular, I examine whether the United States did indeed oppose proliferation across the board in this time period, and I assess what motivated US nonproliferation efforts in these cases.

Chapters 5 through 9 test the theory on the effectiveness of US nonproliferation policy. In chapter 5, I quantitatively assess the theorized deterrent effect of US sanctions policy, examining whether countries with higher degrees of dependence on the United States are less likely to pursue nuclear weapons after the development of credible sanctions policies. Chapter 5 also assesses the argument on when sanctions are likely to succeed at halting ongoing nuclear programs by examining the universe of cases where the United States threatened or imposed nonproliferation sanctions. Chapters 6 though 9 offer four in-depth case studies of the effectiveness of US nonproliferation efforts against countries with ongoing nuclear weapons programs. In chapter 6, I examine US policy toward the French nuclear program in the 1950s to assess whether US nonproliferation policy was indeed more permissive in this time period, thus providing openings for the acquisition of nuclear weapons. The next two chapters examine US policy toward Taiwan and Pakistan, both of which had ongoing nuclear programs and faced threats of sanctions when US nonproliferation policy tightened in the 1970s, thus allowing us to assess directly the effect of changes in US policy. In chapter 9, I assess US nonproliferation policy toward Iran from the 1970s to 2015, seeking to explain why Iran agreed to significant limits on its nuclear program in the late 1970s, resumed its nuclear weapons program in the 1980s, and then agreed to limits again in 2015. The final chapter concludes with a discussion of implications for theory and policy as well as avenues for future research.

CHAPTER 1

Theorizing the Sources and Effectiveness of US Nonproliferation Policy

How effective has the United States been at limiting the spread of nuclear weapons? And what explains the evolution of US nonproliferation policy over time? This chapter proposes theories on both the sources and effectiveness of US nonproliferation policy. On the sources of US policy, the theory emphasizes expectations of nuclear domino effects, the level of government attention to nonproliferation, and political openings for nonproliferation advocates, all of which can be heightened by tests by new nuclear states. Expectations of domino effects are crucial because they lead policymakers to prefer across-the-board rather than selective nonproliferation policies, since domino effects imply that proliferation cannot reliably be contained to friendly countries. Meanwhile, greater government attention to nonproliferation and political openings for non-proliferation advocates—generally members of Congress and arms control advocates in the bureaucracy—facilitate translating these preferences into actual policy changes.

On the effectiveness of US policy, the theory emphasizes the credible threat of US sanctions, established through congressional action in the mid-1970s, in deterring states from pursuing nuclear weapons. Because of the United States’ preeminent economic and military power and its internationalist foreign policy, many countries depend on Washington for economic resources or for their security. By credibly threatening to cut off economic and security support, the United States can make proliferation so costly for countries with high dependence on the United States that it deters them from even starting nuclear weapons programs. Because countries highly dependent on the United States are likely to be rationally deterred from starting nuclear weapons programs by the threat of sanctions, those countries that seek nuclear weapons and endure the imposition of US sanctions are likely to have low dependence on the United States. As a result, they will be unlikely to concede since they have little to lose from the sanctions. This rationalist framework implies that sanctions are likely to succeed against ongoing nuclear programs only when states underestimate the risk of sanctions, for example because they started their nuclear programs prior to the establishment of US sanctions policies, or face unexpectedly stiff multilateral sanctions. In tandem, these two theories suggest that predictions of nuclear domino effects may to a large extent be a self-defeating prophecy, as these predictions have motivated US officials to put in place policies that have succeeded in limiting the extent of proliferation.

Before turning to the theories, this chapter begins by reviewing the literature on proliferation and nonproliferation. For organizational purposes, I divide the literature into (1) works that focus on the causes of US nonproliferation policy and (2) the much larger literature on the causes of proliferation and nuclear reversal.

Causes of US Nonproliferation Policy

There are five main perspectives in the literature on the causes of US nonproliferation policy, each of which prizes a different motivational variable to explain US efforts. These explanations suggest that the US government pursues nonproliferation in order to (1) preserve its conventional power-projection advantages; (2) reduce the risk of nuclear war; (3) maintain influence over allies; or (4) selectively benefit its liberal, Western, or democratic allies while constraining its enemies. An additional theory holds that Democratic administrations support strong nonproliferation policies while Republican administrations do not. This section will discuss each explanation in turn, highlighting gaps in existing explanations that motivate a new theory of the sources of US nonproliferation policy.

The first explanation for nonproliferation policy suggests that the United States strictly enforces nonproliferation—both against allies and enemies—in order to maintain the conventional military advantages derived from its unparalleled power projection capabilities. Kroenig argues that power-projecting states incur high costs from proliferation, since it is more difficult for them to threaten force against nuclear-armed states and their offers of security guarantees are less valuable to nuclear powers. Moreover, proliferation is likely to trigger regional instability in areas that power-projecting states care about.¹ In a related vein, Gavin notes that the United States has worried that nuclear states might become emboldened to act more aggressively, making them more difficult to deter or contain.²

This power projection theory is deductively compelling and certainly helps to explain why the United States and Soviet Union were two of the strongest advocates of nuclear nonproliferation: because they had so much to lose from its effects. What it cannot explain, however, is why there has been such temporal change in US nonproliferation policy—why it became so much stronger in the 1964–1968 and 1974–1980 periods. Nor can it explain why US policymakers at times perceived strategic benefits to proliferation in particular cases, or why the United States reacted strongly against proliferation even in countries where Washington had neither a strong alliance relationship nor any desire to use military force.

The second explanation holds that US policy has been motivated largely by fears of nuclear war. Sokolski develops this explanation in its most systematic form, examining five specific US nonproliferation initiatives: the Baruch Plan, Atoms for Peace, the NPT, export control regimes, and military counterproliferation. According to Sokolski, each of these policies was a response to a feared nuclear war scenario.³ Gavin likewise argues that US officials have worried about accidental or intentional nuclear wars, including being entrapped in a nuclear war initiated by allies.⁴

Like a focus on power projection, the emphasis on fears of nuclear war contains an important element of truth: It is certainly the case that US officials have worried about proliferation increasing the risk of nuclear conflict, in addition to constraining America’s conventional military power. Just as with the power-projection theory, however, this explanation cannot account for why American nonproliferation efforts were particularly intense in the 1964–68 and 1974–80 periods, nor can it easily explain that the United States opposed proliferation even in countries where US officials did not perceive a significant risk of nuclear war.

A third argument suggests that the United States became strongly committed to nonproliferation in 1960s because of the realization that the acquisition of nuclear weapons would allow US allies to become more independent. This argument, advanced by Coe and Vaynman, purports to explain both US and Soviet nonproliferation behavior. They argue that both superpowers originally saw the proliferation of nuclear weapons as a way to balance against the rival bloc. However, once they realized it could undercut their leadership of their respective alliance systems, they decided to cooperate and develop a nonproliferation regime.⁵

Unlike the arguments that focus on US power projection and fears of nuclear war, Coe and Vaynman usefully note that the United States did not always strongly support nonproliferation across the board. Instead, they identify an important turning point in the 1960s—the US experience with a nuclear France—which taught US policymakers that nuclear weapons make allies less pliable. This argument is not without its shortcomings, however. In particular, the historical evidence presented in this book suggests that it was Chinese (and not French) acquisition of nuclear weapons that was the key trigger for strengthened US nonproliferation efforts. Moreover, this argument cannot explain why the United States tightened its nonproliferation policy further following the nuclearization of India, an unaligned country.

A fourth explanation for US nonproliferation policy suggests that the motivation for US efforts is to protect the interests of its liberal, democratic allies while constraining its enemies. Chafetz, for example, argues that psychological in-group biases lead the US government to selectively enforce nonproliferation policies in a way that benefits friends of the United States while keeping US enemies down.⁶ Maddock offers a similar argument, suggesting that US nonproliferation policy has fostered a situation of nuclear apartheid, whereby NATO allies and Israel were allowed access to nuclear weapons while non-Western states were constrained.⁷ This explanation fits with what Peter Lavoy calls the political relativism approach to nuclear proliferation, which holds that proliferation is dangerous only when unfriendly or aggressive states undertake it. Or, as he puts it, bad states do bad things; bad states armed with nuclear weapons will do dreadful things.⁸ Hayes likewise makes the case that the United States has viewed the Iranian nuclear program as more threatening than the Indian nuclear program because Iran is nondemocratic whereas India is democratic.⁹

At first glance there may appear to be a correlation between alliance, regime type, and Western identity on the one hand, and the firmness of US nonproliferation policy toward particular countries on the other. However, the over-aggregation of distinct time periods confounds this correlation. The fact that US nonproliferation efforts toward adversary nations like Iraq, Iran, and North Korea are harsher than prior efforts toward France and the United Kingdom is not solely because the latter countries are US allies but also because they proliferated at different times. As this book will demonstrate, US nonproliferation policy was greatly strengthened in the late 1960s and 1970s. In other words, US policy toward the French and British nuclear programs was more lenient because these countries proliferated when US nonproliferation policy was weaker. Indeed, US allies that were engaged in proliferation after US policy tightened experienced quite harsh pressure, as subsequent chapters will document.

A fifth and final explanation focuses on the political party of the president as a driver of US nonproliferation policy. Although preventing the spread of nuclear weapons has generally been considered a bipartisan endeavor in the United States, there is some face validity to the notion that Democrats have been stronger advocates for nonproliferation, at least during the Cold War. After all, Kennedy was the first president to strongly emphasize the issue, the Johnson administration concluded the NPT, and Carter made nonproliferation a top agenda item; meanwhile, Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, and Reagan have all been described as adopting laxer, more selective approaches that tended to be less stringent toward allies’ nuclear ambitions.¹⁰ Sokolski, for example, identifies Reagan-era Hawks as supporting at least some allies’ acquisition of nuclear weapons technology.¹¹ This alternative explanation therefore overlaps with the selective enforcement argument but argues that it only holds for Republican administrations.

While it may be the case than Democratic administrations have adopted more vigorous nonproliferation policies on average, one obvious limitation of this approach is that it cannot explain variations in policy within a given president’s administration. For example, the Chinese and Indian nuclear tests were followed by changes in nonproliferation policies within Johnson’s and Nixon’s presidencies. Moreover, the argument that Democrats are stronger on nonproliferation than Republicans risks conflating the preferred tools for achieving nonproliferation with the intensity of commitment to that goal. For example, much of the criticism of Nixon, Ford, and Reagan on nonproliferation stems from their preference for using inducements like security assistance and peaceful nuclear trade to induce nuclear restraint, in contrast to Johnson and Carter, who emphasized treaty commitments and sanctions.¹²

Causes of Nuclear Proliferation

The much larger literature on the causes of proliferation explores both what motivates states to pursue nuclear weapons and what enables them pursue or acquire nuclear weapons from a technical perspective. Collectively, this literature suggests four factors that may affect a state’s nuclear decision-making independent of US nonproliferation efforts: the nature of the security environment, domestic regime characteristics, normative commitments, and the supply of nuclear technology.

According to the security model of proliferation, states pursue nuclear weapons in order to ensure their survival against nuclear or overwhelming conventional threats, particularly when these states are isolated and lack allied nuclear umbrellas.¹³ Paul expands upon the security model, arguing that states pursue nuclear weapons for security reasons but may refrain from proliferating in order to prevent costly arms races.¹⁴ Debs and Monteiro argue that a severe security threat is a necessary condition for proliferation, but contend that whether a state successfully acquires nuclear weapons depends on the behavior of its patron (if one exists) and whether there is a credible threat of military force against its nuclear program.¹⁵ The quantitative literature on the determinants of proliferation has provided considerable support to elements of the security model. Studies have found that states in enduring rivalries, those with a recent history of militarized disputes, and those facing major conventional threats are more likely to initiate nuclear weapons programs.¹⁶ Nuclear rivals are associated with the pursuit of nuclear weapons in some studies but only the exploration of nuclear weapons in others.¹⁷ In contrast to pursuit, exploration is defined by Singh and Way as a country seriously consider[ing] building nuclear weapons, even if they never took major steps toward that end.¹⁸ The evidence is similarly mixed with regard to the effect of alliances with nuclear powers.¹⁹

While extant research on the security model surely explains a significant portion of the variance in nuclear proliferation behavior, it does not tell the whole story. Put simply, security factors do not explain the changing character of proliferation over time: States dependent on the United States are less likely to pursue nuclear weapons after the mid-1970s even after one controls for measures of security threat, as shown in chapter 5. While Debs and Monteiro place a heavy weight on the threat of military force as a deterrent, which they argue should be credible against relatively weak states without allies, this cannot explain why countries like Libya, Iran, or Iraq were not deterred from pursuing nuclear weapons in the first place.

Turning to the literature on the domestic sources of proliferation, Etel Solingen advances the most prominent argument. Solingen argues that since the NPT was signed in 1968, inward-looking nationalist regimes with few ties to the international economy have been more likely to pursue and acquire nuclear weapons when compared to their internationalist counterparts. For regimes that rely on integration with the international economy, the costs of nuclearization are prohibitive because of the potential for international sanctions, the inflationary effect of excessive military spending, and the general air of instability nuclear caused by proliferation, which may deter investment. Meanwhile, for inward-looking regimes, these costs are lower; indeed, these regimes may benefit from the strengthening of bureaucratic interest groups and nuclear weapons may bolster nationalist myths that leaders can exploit for domestic purposes.²⁰ More recent work on domestic political motivations for proliferation finds that personalist regimes and leaders with rebel experience are more likely to pursue nuclear weapons.²¹

Solingen’s work is a crucial contribution to the literature in that it highlights important disincentives for proliferation and recognizes that these have not been constant over time. However, there are a couple ways in which these disincentives could be more precisely specified, a step this book aims to take. First, Solingen argues that proliferation has had negative consequences for regimes integrating into the international economy after 1968, but this book argues that this has only been the case since the United States instituted sanctions policies in the mid-1970s. Moreover, this has not applied equally to all internationalizing countries, since regimes without major ties to the United States have little to lose from these sanctions, even if they are integrated into the global economy. Second, by focusing on the economic dimension of global integration, Solingen underplays the important security dimension—pursuing nuclear weapons threatens not only regimes that depend on the United States economically but also those that depend on United States for security purposes, even if they have closed economies. Moreover, if the goal is to understand why some countries pursue nuclear weapons while others do not—one of the main aims of this book—we must move beyond Solingen’s work, which examines only countries that did explore or pursue nuclear weapons at one time or another.

The normative model of nuclear proliferation argues that states may pursue nuclear weapons as a way of garnering prestige or of fulfilling particular conceptions of national identity.²² Hymans offers the most developed work in this tradition, arguing that only leaders with oppositional nationalist identity conceptions—those who see the world in us vs. them terms and view their nation as higher or at least equal in status to their primary reference nations—are likely to undertake pursuit of nuclear weapons.²³ With respect to the efficacy of the nonproliferation regime, Hymans argues it is effective only against leaders with subaltern identities: those who perceive their nation as lower in status and power than their relevant comparison nations.²⁴

A second strand of the normative literature focuses on the role of anti-nuclear norms, particularly those embedded in the NPT, in stigmatizing proliferation and reducing the probability that states pursue nuclear weapons.²⁵ According to Rublee, these norms have played a major role in several countries’ decision to forsake nuclear weapons.²⁶ Muller and Schmidt similarly tout the importance of the norms propagated by the NPT and argue that nonproliferation norms act most strongly on democratic or democratizing states.²⁷ Walsh finds that regime commitments [to the NPT] appear to strengthen or consolidate a decision to forgo nuclear weapons and in some cases induce a renunciation decision.²⁸ In a related vein, Tate argues that the nonproliferation regime established a norm against proliferation and that this norm can account in large part for the failure of the dire predictions about nuclear devolution to materialize.²⁹ Indeed, Fuhrmann and Lupu find that membership in the NPT significantly reduces the odds that a country will pursue nuclear weapons.³⁰

However, there are both theoretical and empirical shortcomings in the normative literature on nuclear proliferation, both with respect to the leader identity argument and the