Seeking the Bomb: Strategies of Nuclear Proliferation by Vipin Narang

Abstract

How do states acquire the nuclear bomb? Vipin Narang’s Seeking the Bomb: Strategies of Nuclear Proliferation is a compelling new contribution that answers the question comprehensively and adds a new analytical toolkit to help us understand how states pursue the nuclear bomb. Narang proposes a pivot away from focusing on why questions to how questions. In doing so, he focuses on the choices of nuclear proliferation strategy that lie in front of states seeking to build a nuclear weapon. The book, thus, marks a welcome shift away from the previous focus of the literature on why states build the bomb to really examining the process of how they do it. Furthermore, by highlighting the role of domestic political variables in the ultimate choice of a proliferation strategy, the book moves away from the standard realist assumption of the state as a unitary actor in nuclear decision-making. Contrary to the common perception that states sprint toward making a nuclear weapon as soon as they decide to acquire them, this book posits that states pursue different types of proliferation strategies: hedging (developing to build a bomb if required), sprinting (building the bomb as quick as possible), sheltered pursuit (using the cover of a patron major power to build a bomb), and hiding (secretly building the bomb). These different strategies of proliferation disaggregate what it means to pursue a nuclear weapon by highlighting the different stages of nuclear development that states might be in on their way to becoming a nuclear-weapon state. Within these different strategies, the “varieties of hedging” highlight a rich spectrum of hedging behavior—from technical hedging to insurance hedging to hard hedging—that helps us understand the actions of potential proliferators that may sometimes not seek a bomb but just a “bomb option” (p. 125). Thus, states either simply may put the technological pieces in place to build a bomb (technical hedging), or be further along the way developing the ability to have an accelerated nuclear weapons program if required (insurance hedging), or have all the pieces in place to build a nuclear weapon without overtly crossing the threshold (hard hedging). This is a useful framework that adds considerable nuance to the study of nuclear latent states, like Japan and South Korea, that are considered to have the capacity to build the bomb if they so desired.