Tag Archives: Political Science

Some Ukrainian officials are warning that recent Russian transgressions might force Ukraine to revisit its nuclear weapons program. From a historical perspective, this is understandable. Ukraine signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in the mid-1990s in exchange for subsidies and territorial guarantees from the United States and Russia. Russia, seeing a target of opportunity in Crimea, subsequently violated the terms.

Yet these hawkish proclamations are just that: hawkish. They overlook nuclear realities. Ukraine did not pursue nuclear technology following its independence because such a program would have been prohibitively expensive. (And, despite what seems to be conventional wisdom on the subject, Ukraine did not really inherit nuclear weapons.) While Ukraine appears to be in a stronger economic position today, the country is going through so much domestic turmoil at the moment that Kiev’s marginal dollar is probably not best spent embarking on an atomic mission.

But does that mean nuclear weapons are irrelevant to the crisis? Absolutely not. Make no mistake: Ukraine could develop a nuclear weapon given enough time, effort, and angry declarations from the United States and Russia. If Russia made further encroachments on Ukrainian turf–beyond the Crimean target of opportunity–nuclear weapons would stop looking ridiculous and start looking desirable.

However, Putin knows this. He also knows that inducing Ukraine to proliferate is ultimately not in Russia’s best security interests. And he knows that Ukraine would also like to avoid proliferating because of the enormous costs.

These preferences and constraints are common, and I study them formally in my book project on bargaining over proliferation. In such a scenario, states negotiate settlements and avoid nuclear development. Potential nuclear powers do not want to build because they are already receiving a desirable share of the settlement. Rivals do not want to drive a harder bargain because doing so would trigger proliferation; settlement, on the other hand, means they can extract the surplus created by the potential nuclear power avoiding atomic development. Both sides win.

I suspect the Ukraine/Russia crisis will end like this. Russia will not push Ukraine much further.* Ukraine will not develop nuclear weapons, but the threat to do so will give them a better share of the deal.

Interestingly, the potential for nuclear weapons is almost as useful as the nuclear weapons themselves.

*At least until another target of opportunity arises, anyway.

There are way, way too many articles, blogs, and commentaries about Ukraine right now, and a lot of them like to talk about how things would be different had Ukraine kept its nuclear weapons twenty-some years ago. I wrote about this last week, but here is a firmer response: Ukraine never had command control over nuclear weapons.

You wouldn’t know that by reading most of these articles, of course. There seems to be a large amount of historical illiteracy here, and editors aren’t doing sufficient fact checking. But to call Ukraine a former nuclear power would be like saying Nebraska is a nuclear power today or would be a nuclear power if it declared independence tomorrow. Yes, Nebraska would have a lot of nuclear weapons on their sovereign soil. But they wouldn’t have command control over the missiles. All told, they would really only have large chunks of metal holding radioactive materials. That is not the same thing as being a nuclear power, which would seem to imply the ability to…I don’t know…nuke someone.

So, media of the world, please stop saying how Ukraine made a mistake in giving up nuclear weapons. They were never theirs to give up–they just let Russian officials safely dismantle them and ship them back to Russia…which is pretty much what you would expect a country to do if it suddenly found large chunks of metal with radioactive material inside.

In a word, no.

First, a brief background. The main theoretical chapter of my dissertation shows that nonproliferation agreements are fairly easy to establish. Even if a potential rising state proliferates, it will ultimately only be able to receive some amount of concessions from a rival. As such, to deter proliferation, the rival only needs to offer most of the concessions the rising state would receive if it did proliferate. Nuclear investment is no longer profitable, as most of the concessions that proliferation would yield have already been given up. The rising state is happy to maintain the status quo because it is already getting most what it wants. (Building would yield slightly more concessions, but it would not be worth paying the investment cost.) The rival is happy because it can keep a small amount of the concessions to itself, as the rising state is willing to accept slightly reduced offers due to the aforementioned cost savings.

The only obstacle is if the costs of proliferation are very small. Here, the rival cannot scale back very much on the deal, so the value of a nonproliferation agreement is smaller for that rival. In turn, the rival may prefer impatiently hording as much of the bargaining good as possible for as long as possible, forcing the rising state to proliferate. At that point, the rival makes great concessions.

Note that the key comparative static determining whether proliferation occurs is the cost of weapons. If the cost is high, proliferation agreements work. If not, proliferation occurs. Fortunately, nuclear weapons (and their necessary delivery systems) are incredibly expensive. Consequently, nonproliferation prevails most of the time.

However, nuclear “prestige” seems like a hindrance to the nonproliferation regime. Advocates of this theory claim that nuclear weapons bestow international prestige on their possessors, separating the owners from everyone else above and beyond the power nuclear weapons provide. There are many reasons to doubt whether such prestige actually exists–I can’t remember the last time one country was excited to hear that another one was proliferating–but let’s go with it for a moment. It then seems like prestige might sabotage those nonproliferation agreements, as it reduces the perceived investment cost for the rising state.

This has been in the back of my mind for a year or two now, and I have wondered what it meant for the robustness of my dissertation’s nonproliferation argument. Luckily, I had a mental breakthrough a couple of nights ago. The prestige argument is mostly harmless.

The key here is that prestige is zero sum. If nuclear weapons are prestigious, then no country is prestigious if all countries have them. As a result, it is incorrect to think of prestige as affecting a rising state’s perception of the cost of proliferation. Rather, prestige matters for determining the amount of goodies the rising state will receive in the future. Additional prestige means the rising state will receive more, whereas the relatively less prestigious countries (compared to today’s status quo) will receive less.

But this is just a complicated way of saying that nuclear weapons give their possessors additional concessions. Consequently, those who would have to give up the concessions should proliferation occur have incentive to reach nonproliferation agreements for the reasons outlined above. In turn, prestige has little affect on the viability nonproliferation agreements.

Nevertheless, this logic explains the competing beliefs about the existence of prestige. Rising states claim that prestige exists–because, if it does, rivals will have to give them more to reach nonproliferation settlements. Their rivals claim that prestige does not exist–because, if it does not, the cost of reaching a nonproliferation agreement will be lower for them.

If you’d like to see the argument in action, take a look at the chapter. The prestige argument is the first robustness check I run.