Michael Cohen responds to Mark Bell's summer 2015 article, "Beyond Emboldenment: How Acquiring Nuclear Weapons Can Change Foreign Policy."

This article examines whether the quantitative literature on the causes of nuclear proliferation successfully identifies variables that explain existing patterns of proliferation or improve our ability to predict proliferation.

Mark S. Bell's summer 2015 International Security article, "Beyond Emboldenment: How Acquiring Nuclear Weapons Can Change Foreign Policy," is one of two co-winners of the 2016 Patricia Weitsman Award for Outstanding International Security Studies Section Graduate Paper. The paper proffers a new a typology that innovatively delineates the ways in which the acquisition of nuclear weapons can alter the foreign policy behavior of current and future nuclear states.

Mark Bell discusses how acquiring nuclear weapons affects states' foreign policy.

How does the acquisition of nuclear weapons affect states' foreign policy? A new typology of six potential post-acquisition state behaviors—aggression, expansion, independence, bolstering, steadfastness, and compromise—offers a more nuanced answer to this question than previous studies have provided. The United Kingdom's foreign policy after it developed the bomb reveals how nuclear weapons can make a country more assertive.

The authors examine the effect of nuclear weapons on interstate conflict. Using more appropriate methodologies than have previously been used, they find that dyads in which both states possess nuclear weapons are not significantly less likely to fight wars, nor are they significantly more or less belligerent at low levels of conflict.