topics:: Nuclear Weapons
Why Do States Build Nuclear Weapons?: Three Models in Search of a Bomb
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2539273?origin=crossref
https://www.doi.org/10.2307/2539273
Notes
Introduction
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There is a question “Why do states build nuclear weapons?”. And there is no accurate answer.
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Security Reasons
- States will build or develop nuclear weapons when they face a military threat to their peace and security.
- If they do not face military threats, they might not build nuclear weapons or they might stay as a non-nuclear state.
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it is the same as other weapons which can serve as international normative symbols of modernity and identity.
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Nuclear proliferation is a problem in international security in the present and future.
- Therefore, the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) has been created to solve this problem.
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3 Theoretical framworks of why states build nuclear weapons
- “The security model” which states build nuclear weapons in order to increase and enhance national security against external threats, particularly nuclear threats.
- “The domestic politics model” which states use nuclear weapons as political tools to advance domestic and bureaucratic interests.
- And “The norms model” which states decide to develop nuclear weapons because they produce important normative symbols of a state’s modernity and identity.
The Security Model: Nuclear Weapons and International Threats
- Based on Realism train of though
- This model has been the most supported theory to explain why some nations choose to create nuclear weapons.
What are Realism assumptions?
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Due to nuclear weapon’s destructive capabilities, a state that seeks to maintain national security must balance against any rival state that develops nuclear weapons by gaining access to a nuclear deterrence against foreign threats
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“Nuclear weapons are a tool for states to safeguard and legitimize their status in the international community”.
- Strong states develop own nuclear weapons to prevent neighbors from becoming nuclear first
- John Mearsheimer: says states build nuclear weapons to gain and maintain regional hegemony.
- Powerful states are fearful/untrusting of one another (self-reliant)
- States look for opportunities to shift balance of power in their favor
- Nuclear weapons allow shift in balance of power & threaten others
- John Mearsheimer: says states build nuclear weapons to gain and maintain regional hegemony.
- Weak states join a balancing alliance with a nuclear power as a means of extended deterrence
- Strong states develop own nuclear weapons to prevent neighbors from becoming nuclear first
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States build nuclear weapons when it is threatened
- Only states with capability can make nuclear weapons tho
Case Study:
- Former Soviet republics dont see
Israel’s nuclear weapons program was conducted in secrecy with the help of France during the mid 1950s. Israel and France formed a cooperative relationship due to shared commercial and strategic interests in the formation of nuclear weapons. At the time, both France and Israel viewed this as an opportunity to maintain a degree of autonomy in foreign policy in the bipolar environment of the Cold War.
The primary reason as to why Israel chose to nuclearize was due to national security, more specifically the Arab-Israeli conflict. Tension between Israel and its Arab neighbours began after the birth of the nation in 1948. The conflict involves issues relating to ethnic and religious differences as well as disputes over territorial claims and national integrity. Essentially, the struggle is between Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews over territory that each nation claims is theirs. For Israel, the most important issue is that of national security. In 2006, the terrorist organisation Hezbollah, launched an attack against Israel in order to pressure the country into releasing Lebanese prisoners. The war ended after thirty-four days and left over a thousand of Lebanese dead or displaced. Additionally, Israel’s geographical location and close proximity to Palestine has made them a target for attacks. With an increase of military presence on the West Bank, Israel has not only become immune to the violence but has also increased conventional military power. Due to the possibility of being attacked by its Arab neighbours, Israel’s primary motivation for establishing nuclear weapons was to enhance their national security.
The primary reason Israel established nuclear weapons was for national security reasons because the bomb acts as a deterrence for other nations. Although national security was the primary force that spearheaded Israel’s decision to become a nuclear weapons state, United States toleration of Israel becoming a nuclear superpower was a secondary factor to the nation’s success in proliferation.
The most significant factor that led to the United States acknowledging and accepting Israel’s nuclear weapons program is largely due to security interests. Strong bilateral relations regarding security interests in the Middle East reinforced U.S. - Israel relationship regarding military aid, arms sales, and information sharing. More importantly, the United States helped transform Israel’s military through money and information sharing. In fact, Israel has generally been the largest annual recipient of U.S. foreign assistance by providing $3 billion in grants. United States aid was designed to maintain Israel’s “qualitative military edge” over neighbouring militaries. By helping to reinforce Israel’s national security through military equipment and monetary aid, the United States is establishing regional stability in the Middle East. Due to similar democratic values and economic interests, Israel’s national security is of great importance to the United States. Essentially, the United States is aware that re-enforcing Israel’s national security will help in stabilising the Middle East. More importantly, Israel’s national security is of equal benefit to the United States because it helps decrease traditional security threats from the surrounding Arab nations.
Israel’s acquisition of nuclear weapons is largely influenced by the Realist theory where gaining nuclear weapons is the only way to guarantee the nation’s security. In fact, nuclear weapons were seen as insurance against the day when Israel loses its conventional military technological superiority over the Arabs and needs a deterrent against an Arab chemical attack. More importantly, a state will decide to go nuclear depending on the level and type of security threats that it faces and the nature of the interactions with its adversaries and its geo-strategic environment.
Domestic Politics Model: Nuclear Pork and Parochial Interests
- Domestic political tumoil could mean focus placed elsewhere than acquiring nuclear weapons
[!Key Terms]-
- Nuclear Pork: A metaphor used in order to describe the allocation of government resources to fund the nuclear projects solely for the interests of a few domestic political actors.
- Parochial interests: are the interests that narrowly serve a small group of individual or actors especially those that are directly affiliated with those interests.
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Things that can influence decision to acquire nuclear weapons or not:
- Political actors
- Leaders create conditions that encourage acquiring nuclear weapons
- Extreme perception of hostile threats
- Promote supportive politicians
- Spending more on defense budget
- Important units within the professional military often the units under the air force and sometimes in navy bureaucracies interested in nuclear force
- Politicians with pro-nuclear followers
- Leaders create conditions that encourage acquiring nuclear weapons
- Domestic Political Structure:
- Dictatorship, authoritarian regimes are more likely to be paranoid of other states => building up military+nuclear power
- Political actors
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When all these actors form a coalition that is strong enough to control the government’s decision-making process either through direct political power or indirectly through their control of information, nuclear proliferation programs are likely to succeed.
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However, there is no well-developed domestic political theory of nuclear weapons proliferation that defines the conditions under which such coalitions are forged and become influential enough to realize their nuclear proliferation visions.
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Instead, the basic logic for this approach has been strongly influenced by the literature on bureaucratic politics and the social construction of technology concerning military procurement in the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
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In the literature, the domestic bureaucratic actors are not the recipients of top-down political decisions, instead, they create the conditions that favor weapons acquisition by inflicting extreme perceptions of foreign threats especially those of their rivals, promoting politicians who are supportive of nuclear proliferation programs, and actively lobbying for increased defense spending. This is known as the bottom-up process that focuses on the formation of domestic coalitions within the scientific-military-industrial complex.
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Initial ideas developed inside state’s laboratories where scientists favor military innovation simply because it is technologically exciting and keeps money and prestige flowing to their laboratories.
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Those scientists are then able to find, or even create, sponsors in the professional military whose bureaucratic interests and specific military responsibilities lead them to also favor the particular weapon system.
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Finally, the coalitions then build broader political supports within the executive or the legislative branches by shaping perceptions about the costs and benefits of nuclear weapons.
· Realists recognized that domestic political actors do have parochial interests toward nuclear acquisition but such interests only have limited influence on crucial national security issues. But a strong consensus among domestic actors will soon emerge once the government need to respond by developing nuclear weapons when a potential rival acquires nuclear weapons.
· In contrary to the realists’ views, the domestic politics approach refute that the nuclear weapon programs are not the solution to the international security problems but they are the solution that is looking for a problem to which it can attach itself to in order to justify their existence.
o Potential threats to a state’s national security certainly exist in the international system but the domestic politics model argues that the international threats can be very easy to interpret in a wrong way in order to project fears of the enemies and therefore are the main topic that domestic bureaucrats seek to respond to.
o Security threats are not the central cause of weapons decisions according to this model as they are merely windows of opportunity through which parochial interests leech themselves onto.
Proliferation Revisited: Addressing the India Puzzle
· The historical case that most strongly fits the domestic politics model is the Indian Nuclear weapons proliferation programs. It reveals that there was no consensus among Indian politicians when it was necessary to have a nuclear deterrent in response to the 1964 Chinese nuclear test. If according to the realists logic, the Chinese nuclear test could have prompted the Indian government to pursue nuclear weapons. At least, one of the two scenarios would have occurred. First, an immediate nuclear weapon program would have started right after the Chinese nuclear test of 1964 but there was no evidence suggesting that any program was started and moreover, given India’s advanced nuclear energy at that time, India was more than capable to produce a nuclear weapon in the mid-late 1960s and not until 1974 when India detonated their very first PNE or Peaceful Nuclear Explosion. Second, due to its close relations to both the US and the USSR, Indian government could have made an effort to acquire nuclear guarantees from both superpowers, however, the Indian political actors did not adopt any consistent policy to pursue security guarantees as they deemed the idea as opposing to India’s non-alignment status.
· It is widely understood that the Chinese nuclear test of 1964 produced a prolonged political battle in India instead of uniting them in an effort to proliferate nuclear weapons. The political battle was fought between the New Delhi political elite and nuclear energy establishment, between actors who wanted India to have Nuclear weapons and other who opposed India nuclear bomb and support global disarmament and later Indian membership in the NPT.
· Even the first detonation of PNE by India was also highly influenced by domestic political circumstances.
· Through a number of observations, addressing the domestic political concerns rather than countering international security threats were paramount.
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It is important to recognize that the decision to detonate the PNE was made by prime minister Indira Gandhi with the advice from a small circle of personal advisors and scientists from nuclear establishments.
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The decision was made quickly even with haste and focused more on immediate political concerns rather than on longer-term security or energy interests.
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The decision was made in order to boost Indira Gandhi public support and to recover her reputation from serios recession and many other social problems occurring in India at that time.
Development and Denuclearization: South Africa Revisited
· The reversal of weapon decisions was a result of major internal political changes and not because of the absence of external threats.
· There are a number of reasons:
o A new government has an opportunity to change course more easily because it can blame failed policies of the previous administration.
o Actors with parochial interests in favor of weapons programs may lose internal struggles to newly empowered actors with other interests.
o The outgoing government fearing that an incoming government would not be reliable custodians over nuclear weapons.
Norms Model
- States build nuclear weapons because weapons acquisition, or restraint in weapons development, provides an important normative symbol of a state’s modernity or identity
- New institutionalism or Institutional isomorphism: insitutions mimic each other according to the current international norm.
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States do have interests and decide through rational choice, but normative is also important
- Importance of roles, routines, and rituals of actors in thier decision as well
- Social environment that
- Promote certain structures & behaviors as rational and legitimate
- Chastize others as irrational and primitve
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Military organization and states’ weapons, like many other modern tech, can be portrayed similar to a flag, airlines, Olympic teams
- Not created for a functional purpose, but a symbolic one
- Military might is what they believe a state must posess to be legitimate and modern state
Example
- Myanmar created an airline for status of modern
- Many poor states make a science board to look modern & developed
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Not proliferation, but there are other things spurred on by international norms
- Global spread of anti-colonialism
- Abolition of African slave trade
- Elimitation of piracy at sea
- Against use of chemical weapons
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Norms may be started by individuals, but it will only be influential
Example
- Anti-slavery started by religious and liberals in US and UK, which spurred their leaders to innitiating the international norm
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Literature says “that such symbols are often contested and that the resulting norms are spread by power and coercion, and not by the strength of ideas alone.”
- Norms such as the NPT came from powerful states forcing their narrow interests on the world
- Now even the powerful states who pushed it are constrained by it
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Still we learned of owning nuclear weapons as prestigous. But how does those actions come to being so prestigous in the first place? and how it change over time?
Example
- 1960s prestige of joining ‘the nuclear club’ -> 1990s joining ‘clubs that obey the NPT’
France Case Study
- In the 1950s
“Will they (future U.S. presidents) take the risk of devastating American cities so that Berlin, Brussels and Paris might remain free?” >- To reduce France’s dependence on US — Realist’s argument for why France build nuclear weapons
- Better explanation (normative) is how possessing nuclear weapons rank you higher in the international system to be prestigous after its global-power-status is deminished after WW2
- It was also reluctant to give up nuclear testing in 1990s as weapons test were seen as symbol of French identity and status as great power
Ukraine
- After collpase of USSR in 1991, Ukrain was independent with 4,000 nuclear warheads
- It joined the NPTa few years later in 1994 and removed all warheads by 1996
- Realist criticize this decision saying Nuclear Weapons was the only way to keep Ukrain safe due to Crimea and security threat
- Ukraine’s public wanted to keep it
- We must focus on how NPT is an emerging norm in 4 ways
- Ukraine tried to separate itself from Soviet Union identity and legitimize its sovereignty (anti-nuclear)
- Identity is very important to the legitimacy, proving sovereignty from USSR
- The shift in views of calling potential nuclear states as “rogue states”: North Korea, Iran, Iraq
- Economic pressures from US & NATO allies. Not following NPT norms would result in very ‘negative economic consequences’
- The NPT heightened the credibility of these economic consequences
- Ukraine could easily accept economic help from the US in transporting and destorying nuclear weapons. With belief they’re keeping with international committments
- Ukraine tried to separate itself from Soviet Union identity and legitimize its sovereignty (anti-nuclear)
- As we can see, the international norms moved from nuclear possession as prestigous in the 1950s to everyone joining the NPT club as the new modern way
Policy Implications
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If this theory is true
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US should have policies that increase the norm to push others to do what the US wants
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In 1995, US gave up its ability to escape from the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) if it wanted to
- After 10 years
- Why? Because the international community saw US not as a NPT member due to that backdoor it had
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If the US can shape a carrot to incentivize a norm, it should be encouraging the developing of new sources of international prestige
- Maybe for Japan, Germany, and India to join the UNSC, they’d have to be non-nuclear status under NPT?
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Norms can make a better future
- Norms can become international customs and is expected behavior
- Everyone might say no one should own nuclear weapons in general in the future
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Using this norms model would conflict with others like the security model
Conclusion
In conclusion, the idea and evidence which have been presented are not enough to hold security model explanations for decisions of nuclear proliferation because of uncertain meaning in complex historical events, and depending on decision-maker. However, they could conclude that the best theories are those which explain many cases of positive nuclear weapons decisions in the past (the United State, Soviet Union, China, Israel, Pakistan), and proliferation cases today (Iraq, Libya, North Korea, and Iran) which are best explained by the basic security model.
Nuclear weapons proliferation and nuclear restraint have happened in the past so that it can happen in the future too for many reasons.**
Footnotes
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Chapter 3 Realism (main) ↩