Seeking the bomb: strategies of nuclear proliferation

Abstract

In a recent report on Iran's nuclear programme, American physicist David Albright argued that the country ‘threatens the world with a program ready to produce nuclear weapons on-demand’. For Albright, understanding the pace of Tehran's nuclear build-up is critical if the United States is serious about stopping Iran from ‘going nuclear’. While there is a rich literature on what drives nuclear proliferation, there is less substantive work that focuses on how countries go about ‘seeking’ the bomb. Thus, the proliferation scholarship's emphasis on why states go nuclear does not tell the whole story. In fact, it leaves room for assumptions that fill in the gaps and subsequently dictate counter-proliferation policies. Nuclear scholar Vipin Narang is aware of this vacuum, and his new book brilliantly dissects and theorizes how states pursue nuclear weapons. Focusing on the pathways that aspirants take towards nuclearization, Narang targets the misconceptions and generalizations about nuclear proliferation that abound. For instance, he explains that not all states that develop a nuclear weapons programme end up building a fully functional arsenal. In the book, Narang introduces four strategies of proliferation: hedging, sprinting, sheltered pursuit and hiding. With his categories in place, the author develops a ‘proliferation strategy theory’ that sheds light on why different states opt for a particular strategy (and why they discard the others) (p. 27).