Seeking the Bomb

Strategies of Nuclear Proliferation

Vipin Narang

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780691223063
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The first systematic look at the different strategies that states employ in their pursuit of nuclear weapons Much of the work on nuclear proliferation has focused on why states pursue nuclear weapons. The question of how states pursue nuclear weapons has received little attention. Seeking the Bomb is the first book to analyze this topic by examining which strategies of nuclear proliferation are available to aspirants, why aspirants select one strategy over another, and how this matters to international politics.Looking at a wide range of nations, from India and Japan to the Soviet Union and North Korea to Iraq and Iran, Vipin Narang develops an original typology of proliferation strategies—hedging, sprinting, sheltered pursuit, and hiding. Each strategy of proliferation provides different opportunities for the development of nuclear weapons, while at the same time presenting distinct vulnerabilities that can be exploited to prevent states from doing so. Narang delves into the crucial implications these strategies have for nuclear proliferation and international security. Hiders, for example, are especially disruptive since either they successfully attain nuclear weapons, irrevocably altering the global power structure, or they are discovered, potentially triggering serious crises or war, as external powers try to halt or reverse a previously clandestine nuclear weapons program.As the international community confronts the next generation of potential nuclear proliferators, Seeking the Bomb explores how global conflict and stability are shaped by the ruthlessly pragmatic ways states choose strategies of proliferation.

1

Introduction

Just after midnight on September 6, 2007, four Israeli F-15s and four F-16s screamed low over the desert and leveled a nondescript structure in the Syrian hinterland on the banks of the Euphrates River.¹ For years, American and Israeli intelligence satellites had noted the building but were not overly concerned—the “cube,” as it was known, was undefended. There were no suspicious traffic patterns or activity, and the facility was littered with debris, making it appear like one of the many abandoned structures in the area. There was nothing to suggest that the Syrian government even cared about the building. Not until an Israeli intelligence operation in March 2007 copied the contents of a laptop belonging to the head of Syria’s Atomic Energy Agency did the Israelis learn that the “cube”—officially called al Kibar—was in fact a replica of North Korea’s Yongbyon nuclear reactor. The eponymous cube was a superstructure to conceal what lay underneath from satellites passing overhead: a nearly complete graphite-moderated nuclear reactor. With no visible evidence that it was designed to ever plug into Syria’s electrical grid, American and Israeli intelligence concluded that the building had only one purpose: to produce plutonium for a Syrian nuclear weapons program.

As a junior varsity member of the Axis of Evil, Syria’s president Bashar al-Assad had reasonable grounds to fear that, without nuclear weapons, he might be an easy target for mid-2000s America on a regime-change binge. Nevertheless, the United States was stunned at Assad’s sheer audacity: attempting to hide an aboveground nuclear reactor built with North Korean assistance, in the year 2007, knowing that America and Israel were continuously watching overhead. The Israelis took no chances and decided to destroy the building on September 6, risking a war with Syria to flatten the reactor. The strike likely occurred weeks before fuel elements were to be added to the reactor core making it “hot,” after which it would have been nearly impossible to destroy without significant environmental damage. Syria, a member of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) in otherwise good standing, was attempting to pursue a clandestine nuclear weapons program in the most creative and brazen way possible. Syria’s nuclear program, though it was ultimately thwarted, illustrates that the way states pursue nuclear weapons rarely resembles the American Manhattan Project or China’s determined state-mobilized effort to build the bomb. This is a book about these different strategies of nuclear proliferation and why they matter.

There are two core questions motivating the book. First, how do states pursue nuclear weapons and why do they select a particular strategy of proliferation over the alternatives? Second, how do their choices of strategy affect nuclear proliferation and conflict dynamics? This is the first book to systematically analyze how states seek nuclear weapons, identifying the strategies available to them, and why they choose a particular strategy to do so. It shows that nuclear aspirants’ strategic choices follow a clear logic and have important consequences for nuclear proliferation and conflict. Different strategies of proliferation have different likelihoods of success and provide different vulnerabilities that can be leveraged by nonproliferation policies to try to stop states from attaining nuclear weapons. As the world finds itself in a new nuclear era now thirty years after the end of the Cold War, understanding the dynamics and consequences of the proliferation process—which strategies of proliferation are available to states, which strategy a nuclear aspirant might select and why, and what the international community can do to thwart nuclear proliferation depending on the aspirant’s strategy—is critical to global security.

The proliferation literature to date has almost exclusively focused on the question of why states pursue nuclear weapons. The question of how states pursue nuclear weapons, once choosing to do so, has received less attention. To the extent that scholars considered it, they have focused on the technical choices states made rather than on political choices and strategies of proliferation. Most scholarship on nuclear proliferation further assumes that states pursuing nuclear weapons prioritize speed of development and attainment over all else—a strategy I call sprinting. When nuclear pursuers stop short of a functional arsenal, scholars often assume that technological barriers or external pressure impeded them.

I correct these misconceptions. I show that states choose from four discrete strategies of proliferation and that the logic that leads them to one of these strategies has little to do with resource constraints. States that seek the bomb—or develop an option to seek it in the future—approach the problem with ruthless pragmatism, weighing their domestic and international constraints and opportunities. Security considerations motivate a state to consider developing a nuclear weapons option, but I highlight the crucial role of domestic political consensus in driving a state toward an active nuclear weaponization strategy. My theory emphasizes the degree to which proliferators anticipate attempts by outsiders to frustrate their efforts. Fear of preventive action drives many of their calculations. The danger of prevention leads proliferators to seek creative alternative strategies to develop nuclear weapons: some cultivate or exploit the protection of great powers who can deter or dissuade adversaries from mounting preventive attacks on the proliferator, while others attempt to hide their proliferation from the outside world with a clandestine nuclear weapons program.

What are these different strategies of nuclear proliferation available to states? The first part of the book offers a novel typology of nuclear proliferation strategies, which I call hedging, sprinting, sheltered pursuit, and hiding. Some states, such as Japan and Sweden, choose to hedge on their potential path to attaining nuclear weapons, seeking not the rapid development of a nuclear weapons capability but rather to put the pieces in place to weaponize at a later date if necessary. I show that hedgers do not hedge in uniform ways or for uniform reasons. My theory offers insights into what might trigger a particular type of hedger—I differentiate between technical hedging, insurance hedging, and hard hedging—to choose to exercise its nuclear weapons option. Hedgers do not fail to develop nuclear weapons; they intentionally choose to not try, yet. Identifying hedging as a proliferation strategy—unpacking it into its various forms, locating it on the continuum of the proliferation process, and identifying the circumstances that will make hedgers resume their pursuit of the bomb or make a U-turn—rather than treating it as a disconnected phenomenon is an important contribution of the book.

For states seeking nuclear weapons, rather than just a future option, there are three active strategies of proliferation. The early nuclear proliferators such as the Soviet Union, France, and China were sprinters that sought to build nuclear weapons as quickly as possible, trying to match the first-mover, the United States. Others, like Israel and Pakistan and North Korea, leveraged the complicity of a superpower patron to adopt a sheltered pursuit strategy, which exploits forbearance from a more powerful state as a shield against nonproliferation efforts. Other states, such as Iraq and Syria who cannot avail themselves of a major power shelterer, have no choice but to pursue a hiding strategy, prioritizing secrecy over speed and aiming to present their completed nuclear weapons as a fait accompli to the world. This book is the first effort to systematically identify the various strategies of proliferation available to nuclear aspirants, showing that states pursue nuclear weapons in distinct ways.

Why do states choose a particular proliferation strategy over the available alternatives? I develop a decision-theoretic framework, Proliferation Strategy Theory, identifying a sequence of security and domestic political variables to explain why a state selects a specific nuclear proliferation strategy. I apply this framework to explore empirical cases of each proliferation strategy, often leveraging primary documents and data to highlight novel features of states’ proliferation journeys. I use the framework to generate a proliferation strategy prediction for each of the 29 states that have pursued nuclear weapons (46 total strategies including over-time shifts) and find that the framework accurately predicts over 85 percent of all nuclear proliferation strategies since 1945. Subsequent chapters provide detailed case studies on almost twenty of these nuclear aspirants, those that provide crucial variation in the independent and dependent variables showing why states select the strategies they do, and why they may shift strategies.

The chapter on varieties of hedging includes what I call technical hedgers such as Brazil and Argentina that most closely resemble the concept of “nuclear latency,” insurance hedgers such as Japan and West Germany who hedged against the possibility of American abandonment, and hard hedgers such as India, Sweden, and Switzerland who stopped short of weaponizing due to ambivalence or a lack of domestic political consensus in favor of nuclear weapons. States typically make the decision to hedge for strategic reasons. I demonstrate, however, that domestic political consensus in favor of nuclear weapons is the crucial regulator for shifting from hedging to an active proliferation strategy, as in the case of India’s stilted march to nuclear weapons. This is an important revision to recent scholarship that veers toward one extreme or the other, with some scholars arguing that it is almost exclusively regime type that drives nuclear proliferation,² while others argue that security considerations alone explain proliferation.³ I argue that both are important, but in a particular sequence, with security threats providing the stimulus and domestic political consensus providing the momentum for nuclear weapons.

External protection or prevention at this stage can prove critical to whether the state ultimately attains nuclear weapons. For powerful states with the luxury to openly march for nuclear weapons without fear of prevention, sprinting for a bomb is the optimal proliferation strategy. Most states that are powerful enough to sprint, though, already possess nuclear weapons—the Soviet Union, China, and France, for example—although some potential sprinters such as Australia, Japan, and potentially Germany remain should they ever decide to pursue nuclear weapons. The remaining nuclear weapons aspirants are forced to be more creative. A preferable option, if it is available or if it can be cultivated, is building nuclear weapons under the shelter of a major power that shields the pursuer from outside pressure and refrains from applying any pressure itself. The major power essentially tolerates nuclear proliferation in pursuit of higher-priority geopolitical goals, while the proliferator attempts to weaponize before the shelter disappears. This is how Israel, Pakistan, and North Korea all successfully developed the bomb. The rest of the states who seek nuclear weapons—those that fear external coercion because they are likely the states the world least wants to possess nuclear weapons—have no choice but to hide and pursue nuclear weapons clandestinely. The very threats that motivate nuclear pursuit drive the program underground. Hiding is a high-risk, high-reward strategy that attempts to present the world with a nuclear fait accompli before the program is detected—as South Africa succeeded in doing—but risks military strikes if it is caught before it gets there, as Syria discovered.

Why are these strategies of proliferation important? First, states adopting different strategies experience differing rates of success in attaining nuclear weapons. Hedgers do not fail to attain nuclear weapons, for example. They simply have not actively tried, yet. Among active proliferation strategies, almost half of those states that have attempted to develop actual nuclear weapons have succeeded in doing so, with sprinters and sheltered pursuers reaching the finish line at very high rates. Hiders may fail at high rates, but the seduction of potentially succeeding as South Africa did motivates many to keep trying. The typology offers a valuable first cut at assessing the danger that a proliferation threat might come to fruition. Second, and related, the typology and my explanation of what drives nuclear aspirants’ choices offer hints as to how to stop different kinds of proliferators. Notably, in states that have not generated the domestic consensus for explicit weaponization, keeping domestic political consensus fractured is key to forestalling proliferation and keeping a hedger hedging. Third, the typology offers predictions about the likely consequences for international politics as a function of proliferation strategies. Hiders, ...