WHEN DOES A STATE BECOME A “NUCLEAR WEAPON STATE”?

Abstract

When does a state become a “nuclear weapon state”? How we choose to answer this question has significant implications for proliferation assessment, analysis, and policy. Traditionally, the standard demarcation line has been a state's first nuclear test, but in recent years analysts have increasingly focused instead on the accumulation of a significant quantity (SQ) of fissile material. The article argues that although the test/no-test indicator clearly has problems, its replacement by the SQ/no-SQ indicator would be highly counterproductive. The article instead proposes supplementing the traditional test/no-test indicator with a theory-driven approach that focuses on the incentives and disincentives to test.

Keywords:

• Nuclear weapon states
• non-nuclear weapon states
• nuclear testing
• fissile material

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author thanks Rieko Kage, John Mueller, Gaukhar Mukhatzhanova, Benoît Pélopidas, William Potter, Maria Rost Rublee, Scott Sagan, and participants at the “Forecasting Nuclear Proliferation” project workshop in summer 2008 for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this article. A slightly different version of this article will appear in William Potter and Gaukhar Mukhatzhanova, eds., Forecasting Nuclear Proliferation (forthcoming 2010, Stanford University Press).

Notes

1. Caterina Dutto, “ElBaradei Remarks at Georgetown University,” Proliferation Analysis, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, October 24, 2006, <www.carnegieendowment.org/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&id=18816>. My critique of ElBaradei's focus on the “virtual” NWS status of states with an SQ should not be confused with alarmist critiques of the careful distinction ElBaradei makes between “virtual” and “latent” NWS. On the latter point see Scott D. Sagan, “Nuclear Latency and Nuclear Proliferation,” in William Potter and Gaukhar Mukhatzhanova, eds, Forecasting Proliferation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010).

2. Thomas B. Cochran, “Adequacy of IAEA's Safeguards for Achieving Timely Detection,” in Henry D. Sokolski, ed., Falling Behind: International Scrutiny of the Peaceful Atom (Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute, 2008), pp. 121–58.

3. Joseph Cirincione, Bomb Scare: The Past and Future of Nuclear Weapons (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), pp. 128, 105.

4. CIA, Directorate of Intelligence, “A 10-Year Projection of Possible Events of Nuclear Proliferation Concern,” marked “Secret,” May 1983, p. 5. Document 2 of Robert A. Wampler, ed., North Korea and Nuclear Weapons: The Declassified Record, National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 87, April 25, 2003, <www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB87/>.

5. Only the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research dissented from the NIE's conclusion. Leon Sigal, Disarming Strangers: Nuclear Diplomacy with North Korea (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 90.

6. Only the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research dissented from the NIE's conclusion. Leon Sigal, Disarming Strangers: Nuclear Diplomacy with North Korea (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 91–92.

7. CIA assessment provided to Congress, November 2002. Document 22 of Wampler, North Korea and Nuclear Weapons.

8. See, e.g., Fred Kaplan, “The Unspeakable Truth,” Slate.com, January 7, 2003, <www.slate.com/id/2076468/>; Karen Elliott House, “The Lesson of North Korea,” Wall Street Journal, January 3, 2003, p. A10.

9. Quoted in David E. Sanger, “When a Virtual Bomb May Be Better than the Real Thing,” New York Times, December 5, 2004, <www.nytimes.com/2004/12/05/weekinreview/05sang.html>.

10. Jacques E.C. Hymans, “Assessing North Korean Nuclear Intentions and Capacities: A New Approach,” Journal of East Asian Studies 8 (May–August 2008), pp. 259–92; Jacques E.C. Hymans, “Discarding Tired Assumptions About North Korea,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists online edition, May 28, 2009, <www.thebulletin.org/web-edition/op-eds/discarding-tired-assumptions-about-north-korea>.

11. Robert Adcock and David Collier, “Measurement Validity: A Shared Standard for Qualitative and Quantitative Research,” American Political Science Review 95 (September 2001), pp. 529–46.

12. Robert Jervis, The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution: Statecraft and the Prospect of Armageddon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989).

13. To assess whether there has or has not been a test is actually very difficult and depends crucially on superior long-distance seismological, radiological, and other sorts of monitoring. But in general, this is one scientific field that has more than fulfilled its promise. See Torrey Froscher, “Anticipating Nuclear Proliferation: Insights from the Past,” Nonproliferation Review 13 (November 2006), p. 467–77.

14. Donald Mackenzie and Graham Spinardi, “Tacit Knowledge, Weapons Design, and the Uninvention of Nuclear Weapons,” American Journal of Sociology 101 (July 1995), esp. pp. 89–91. Hugh Gusterson also makes this point, as well as noting other, more social functions that testing performs for the nuclear weapons laboratory design community. Hugh Gusterson, Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

15. Ashley Tellis, India's Emerging Nuclear Posture: Between Recessed Deterrent and Ready Arsenal (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2001), pp. 198–99.

16. William Potter, “Remembering Nonproliferation Principles,” in Jeffrey Laurenti and Carl Robichaud, eds., Breaking the Nuclear Impasse: New Prospects for Security against Weapons Threats (New York: Century Foundation Press, 2007), pp. 61–68.

17. Tellis, India's Emerging Nuclear Posture, p. 368.

18. Martin J. Sherwin, A World Destroyed: Hiroshima and Its Legacies, 3rd ed. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).

19. Marc Trachtenberg, History and Strategy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), ch. 1.

20. Dan Lindley, “What I Learned Since I Stopped Worrying and Studied the Movie: A Teaching Guide to Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove,” PS: Political Science and Politics 34 (September 2001), pp. 663–67.

21. The phrase is Jacques Derrida's. Bryan C. Taylor, “Pictures and Metapictures,” American Literary History 9 (Autumn 1997), p. 567.

22. For more on this, see Jacques E.C. Hymans, “The Roots of the Washington Threat Consensus,” in Betty Glad and Chris J. Dolan, eds., Striking First: The Preventive War Doctrine and the Reshaping of U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), esp. pp. 41–42.

23. Albert Wohlstetter, Gregory Jones, and Roberta Wohlstetter, “Why the Rules Have Needed Changing,” Part I of Towards a New Consensus on Nuclear Technology, vol. 1 (Los Angeles: Pan Heuristics, 1979), p. 36. Emphasis in original.

24. Albert Wohlstetter, Gregory Jones, and Roberta Wohlstetter, “Why the Rules Have Needed Changing,” Part I of Towards a New Consensus on Nuclear Technology, vol. 1 (Los Angeles: Pan Heuristics, 1979), p. 36. Emphasis in original, p. 37.

25. Moreover, they also argue that the IAEA's traditional estimates of how much fissile material is needed to constitute an SQ are generally far too high. See Sokolski, ed., Falling Behind, esp. p. 25.

26. Avner Cohen, Israel and the Bomb (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).

27. Note, however, that there is some indication that Israel may have engaged in testing jointly with South Africa during the 1970s. If Israel did cooperate on testing with South Africa, then there is no Israeli exception to the rule and the case for moving away from the test/no-test indicator more or less falls apart. On Israeli-South African cooperation see Purkitt and Burgess, South Africa's Weapons of Mass Destruction, pp. 51–52.

28. Most recently Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. See Philippe Naughton, “Olmert's Nuclear Slip-up Sparks Outrage in Israel,” Times Online, December 12, 2006, <www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article752059.ece>.

29. Adcock and Collier, “Measurement Validity,” p. 531.

30. Avner Cohen and Benjamin Frankel, “Opaque Nuclear Proliferation,” in Frankel, ed., Opaque Nuclear Proliferation: Methodological and Policy Implications (London: Frank Cass, 1991), pp. 14–44.

31. See, e.g., Keith B. Payne, Deterrence in the Second Nuclear Age (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1996); Paul Bracken, Fire in the East: The Rise of Asian Military Power and the Second Nuclear Age (New York: HarperCollins, 1999); Victor Cha, “The Second Nuclear Age: Proliferation Pessimism versus Sober Optimism in South Asia and East Asia,” Journal of Strategic Studies 24 (2001), pp. 79–120; Noah Feldman, “Islam, Terror and the Second Nuclear Age,” New York Times Magazine, October 29, 2006, <www.nytimes.com/2006/10/29/magazine/29islam.html?pagewanted=all>.

32. E.g., Shlomo Aronson with Oded Brosh, The Politics and Strategy of Nuclear Weapons in the Middle East: Opacity, Theory, and Reality, 1960–1991—An Israeli Perspective (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992).

33. See Zeev Maoz, “The Mixed Blessing of Israel's Nuclear Opacity,” International Security 28 (Fall 2003), pp. 44–77.

34. Recent years have also seen a selective opening up of the Israeli archives on the subject, possibly the result of a strategy to normalize the Israeli bomb in the eyes of the world. For his part, Avner Cohen explicitly embraces this normalization as his political objective; see Cohen, Israel and the Bomb, pp. 339–49.

35. Though it must also be said that few want Israel to leave it.

36. Whether they were ever in it is a judgment call. In my view, among these four only Pakistan is a likely case of operational induction of nuclear weapons without prior testing. See Table 1.

37. Avner Cohen, “Israel: A Sui Generis Proliferator,” in Alagappa, ed., The Long Shadow, pp. 241–68. In his original work on “opaque proliferation,” Cohen had already made reference to sui generis aspects of the Israeli case, but only to strongly reject the idea that these aspects reduced the generalizability of the Israeli model. He now places much more stress on its unique character.

38. “Documents Seemingly Counter US Intelligence Claims on North Korean Plutonium Production,” Global Security Newswire, May 29, 2008, <gsn.nti.org/gsn/GSN_20080529_94E038D3.php>.

39. David Albright, “North Korea's Alleged Large-Scale Enrichment Plant: Yet Another Questionable Extrapolation Based on Aluminum Tubes,” Institute for Science and International Security press release, February 23, 2007, <isis-online.org/uploads/isis-reports/documents/DPRKenrichment22Feb.pdf>.

40. Barton Gellman, Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency (New York: Penguin Press, 2008).

41. Dafna Linzer, “Nuclear Capabilities May Elude Terrorists, Experts Say,” Washington Post, December 29, 2004, p. A1.

42. For more on this point see Hymans, “Assessing North Korean Nuclear Intentions and Capacities.”

43. Farah Stockman, “US, North Korea Met on Nuclear Program,” Boston Globe, May 19, 2005.

44. Jungmin Kang and Peter Hayes, “Technical Analysis of the DPRK Nuclear Test,” Nautilus Institute Policy Forum Online 06-89A, October 20, 2006, <www.nautilus.org/fora/security/0689HayesKang.html>.

45. The best the US intelligence community could do was to state that it was “probably” a nuclear explosion. <www.dni.gov/press_releases/20090615_release.pdf>

46. George Soros, “The Bubble of American Supremacy,” Atlantic Monthly, December 2003.

47. E.g., Sokolski, ed., Falling Behind.

48. Hymans, The Psychology of Nuclear Proliferation, ch. 1.

49. Elizabeth Kier and Jonathan Mercer, “Setting Precedents in Anarchy: Military Intervention and Weapons of Mass Destruction,” International Security 20 (Spring 1996), pp. 77–106.

50. The importance of choosing obvious and salient focal points was first elaborated in Thomas Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960).

51. Richard Ned Lebow, The Tragic Vision of Politics: Ethics, Interests, and Orders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

52. See, for example, the International Panel on Fissile Materials, <www.fissilematerials.org>.

53. Adcock and Collier, “Measurement Validity,” p. 542.

54. Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein, We All Lost the Cold War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).

55. Robert Keohane, Gary King, and Sidney Verba, Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).

56. Peter Liberman, “The Rise and Fall of the South African Bomb,” International Security 26 (Autumn 2001), pp. 45–86; Purkitt and Burgess, South Africa's Weapons of Mass Destruction.

57. See Michael E. Brown, Owen R. Coté Jr., Sean M. Lynn-Jones, and Steven E. Miller, Offense, Defense, and War: An International Security Reader (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). For a dissenting view, see Elizabeth Kier, Imagining War: French and British Military Doctrines Between the Wars (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).

58. Keir A. Lieber, War and the Engineers: The Primacy of Politics over Technology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005).

59. See S. Paul Kapur, Dangerous Deterrent: Nuclear Weapons Conflict and Deterrence in South Asia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007).

60. Froscher, “Anticipating Nuclear Proliferation.”

61. Purkitt and Burgess, South Africa's Weapons of Mass Destruction, p. 45.

62. For the internal U.S. government debates on the matter, see Jeffrey Richelson, ed., “The Vela Incident: Nuclear Test or Meteoroid?” National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 190, 2006 <www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB190/index.htm>. These debates were mainly technical in nature. Based on their political analysis, Purkitt and Burgess in South Africa's Weapons of Mass Destruction conclude that there was indeed most likely a test (pp. 44–45).

63. Liberman, “The Rise and Fall of the South African Bomb,” p. 53.

64. Richelson, Spying on the Bomb, p. 346.

65. Richelson, Spying on the Bomb, chs. 6 and 8.