Nuclear Issues

In order to create a truly strategic relationship, the Obama administration will need to go beyond the civil nuclear cooperation, drawing on areas of common concern and interest.

Although projections of nuclear proliferation abound, they rarely are founded on empirical research or guided by theory. Even fewer studies are informed by a comparative perspective. The two books under review—The Psychology of Nuclear Proliferation: Identity, Emotions, and Foreign Policy, by Jacques Hymans, and Nuclear Logics: Alternative Paths in East Asia and the Middle East, by Etel Solingen, are welcome exceptions to this general state of affairs, and represent the cutting edge of nonproliferation research. Both works challenge conventional conceptions of the sources of nuclear weapons decisions and offer new insights into why past predictions of rapid proliferation failed to materialize and why current prognoses about rampant proliferation are similarly flawed. While sharing a number of common features, including a focus on subsystemic determinants of national behavior, the books differ in their methodology, level of analysis, receptivity to multicausal explanations, and assumptions about decisionmaker rationality and the revolutionary nature of the decision. Where one author emphasizes the importance of the individual leader’s national identity conception in determining a state’s nuclear path, the other explains nuclear decisions primarily with regard to the political-economic orientation of the ruling coalition. Notwithstanding a tendency to overinterpret evidence, the books represent the best of contemporary social science research and provide compelling interpretations of nuclear proliferation dynamics of great relevance to scholars and policymakers alike.

As the nuclear deal flounders under pressure from the Left, and with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh belatedly awakened to the cruel compulsions of coalition politics, officials in the Bush administration are venting their frustration in private. Xenia Dormandy of Harvard University is optimistic: "The only question is whether it is in early 2008 or after a new US administration in 2009," she says, adding a rider that it will require the Indian PM to use all his political equity to face down the Left parties.

As director for South Asia at the US National Security Council, Xenia Dormandy played a key role coordinating the July 2005 visit of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to Washington. The trip resulted in the historic civilian nuclear agreement which today, under attack from the United Progressive Alliance’s Left partners, appears to be floundering. In an interview, Ms Dormandy expressed confidence that the nuclear deal would go through. It’s only a matter of when, she said.

Dr. Ashton B. Carter and Jennifer C. Bulkeley offer recommendations for America's strategic response to China's military modernization.

A new international regime could stop nations before they enter the proliferation “red zone.”