[ 114 ] asia policy Proliferation Logics and Our Nuclear Future in the 21st Century Christopher A. Ford Both of these valuable books offer country-specific case studies bracketed by more broadly analytical framing essays, but Etel Solingen’s Nuclear Logics is as much a work about international relations theory as an examination of the cases she presents. Nuclear Logics uses its case studies to test specific theories of state behavior against each other in an attempt to explain instances in which countries in East Asia and the Middle East have eschewed, or indeed abandoned, nuclear weapons programs. Solingen critiques traditional approaches to understanding such decisions, makes a case for models in which domestic political dynamics help explain behavior, and offers her own explanatory framework to help explain not only individual national examples but also the differences in overall regional nuclear weapons “trajectory” between a seemingly rapidly arming Middle East and a still (mostly) weaponsfree East Asia outside of China. The Long Shadow, edited by Muthiah Alagappa, is less broadly theoretical, offering a series of separately authored case studies that provide assessment and analysis of the perspectives that today’s nuclear weapons possessors in Asia (here rather broadly construed to include the United States, on account of the enduring U.S. role and alliance commitments along the Pacific Rim) bring to the issue of nuclear weapons policy. Alagappa’s introductory and concluding essays wrap these individual cases together, providing overall context and a lucid interpretation that highlights the continuing salience of nuclear weapons in the approaches that most of these countries adopt toward national security. Between them, these two books offer the reader valuable perspectives on the proliferation and nuclear weapons dilemmas of the 21st century. Interestingly, neither volume has much of anything to say about Europe, a continent that has seen its share of governments both abandoning nuclear weapons programs and maintaining sophisticated nuclear arsenals for long periods of time. It might be too much to infer that Europe is not a particularly interesting or important region from the perspective of how nuclear policy debates will play out in this new century, but the conclusion is tempting. christopher a. ford is Senior Fellow and Director of the Center for Technology and Global Security at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. He previously served as U.S. Special Representative for Nuclear Nonproliferation and as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Verification, Compliance, and Implementation. He can be reached at . [ 115 ] book review roundtable • nuclear logics & the long shadow Neither broader issues of nuclear disarmament nor those of proliferation are likely to be resolved or much advanced in Europe itself. European diplomats and national leaders may or may not play significant roles as the international community struggles with these challenges, but the locus of both the main problems and the possible solutions arguably lies elsewhere—in the wide swathe of territory stretching from North Africa across the Asian land mass to the Korean Peninsula, upon which these books focus their attention. Nuclear Logics Solingen’s book is the more ambitious of the two, insofar as Nuclear Logics suggests a theory of how countries make decisions about whether to engage in nuclear weapons development. On the way there, she offers closely reasoned critiques of other theories of state behavior, specifically traditional “neorealist” structural power perspectives that see state behavior as relatively straightforward responses to strategic stimuli, the sort of “neoliberal” institutionalism that regards international institutions as shaping state perspective and choices, “constructivist” understandings that stress the constraining effect of behavioral norms, and “democratization” theses that view behavior through the prism of regime type. It is hard not to agree with Solingen that, as applied at least to nuclear proliferation decisions, these theories do indeed suffer from significant weaknesses. In Solingen’s analysis, these difficulties are both theoretical and practical, insofar as both different outcomes among seemingly similarly situated countries in her case studies and logical weaknesses internal to some of the theories examined together strongly suggest the need to give more attention to domestic political models of behavior. When multiple pathways could plausibly be defended as the “obvious” response to strategic dilemmas (the problem of neorealist “equifinality”), for instance, or further explanation is...