Managing Emerging Nuclear Powers

• In Event: The Process of Nuclear Proliferation and Nonproliferation

Abstract

For decades, preventing the spread of nuclear weapons has been one of the top foreign policy objectives of the United States. However, these efforts have not met with universal success; since the United States first acquired and used nuclear weapons in 1945, nine more countries have acquired the bomb, including allies like the United Kingdom and Israel, enemies like the Soviet Union and North Korea, and unaligned powers like India. In each of these cases, U.S. policymakers have been forced to grapple with the question of how to manage the country’s nascent nuclear arsenal. This paper introduces a new typology of policy choices for dealing with new nuclear powers: the United States can support a new nuclear arsenal, ignore it, seek to coopt it, endeavor to keep it secret, seek to contain it militarily, or pursue complete rollback. Due to its general preference for nonproliferation and managing risks of nuclear war, I theorize that the United States is unlikely to either support or ignore an emerging power’s arsenal. In choosing among the four remaining options, I expect the decision to be driven by two main factors: the state of the nonproliferation regime (pre- or post- Nonproliferation Treaty, NPT) and the political relationship between the United States and the emerging power. Before the NPT of 1968, which granted legitimacy to the five existing nuclear states and stigmatized further proliferation, the United States was free to accept the emergence of new nuclear powers, seeking to contain enemy and neutral arsenals and coopt friendly arsenals into U.S. alliance structures in order to increase U.S. control over them. After the NPT, however, accepting new nuclear powers became politically untenable, pushing the United States to conceal friendly arsenals without aiding them and seek to roll back enemy and neutral arsenals. The paper tests this theory by examining the US response to the nine other countries that have acquired nuclear weapons.

Author

• Nicholas Miller, Dartmouth College