Military Regimes and Resistance to Nuclear Weapons Development

Abstract

Few military regimes have seriously pursued a nuclear weapons capability, and only Pakistan has succeeded. I argue that military regimes governing nonnuclear weapons states are likely to prefer to invest in conventional rather than nuclear forces, even in the presence of external security threats. I identify two domestic sources of nuclear proliferation behavior in military regimes: the resource distribution preferences of the military organization and the need to manage the domestic conflicts that threaten the regime’s political survival. I test this theory using case evidence from Egypt, Brazil, and Pakistan. This study suggests that while external conditions are certainly important, domestic factors also have a significant impact on state security behavior.