Nuclear Politics: The Strategic Causes of Proliferation

When do states acquire nuclear weapons? Overturning a decade of scholarship focusing on other factors, Debs and Monteiro show in Nuclear Politics that proliferation is driven by security concerns. Proliferation occurs only when a state has both the willingness and opportunity to build the bomb. A state has the willingness to nuclearize when it faces a serious security threat without the support of a reliable ally. It has the opportunity when its conventional forces or allied protection are sufficient to deter preventive attacks. This explains why so few countries have developed nuclear weapons. Unthreatened or protected states do not want them; weak and unprotected ones cannot get them. This powerful theory combined with extensive historical research on the nuclear trajectory of sixteen countries will make Nuclear Politics a standard reference in international security studies, informing scholarly and policy debates on nuclear proliferation - and US non-proliferation efforts - for decades to come.

Alexandre Debs (PhD, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2007) is Associate Professor of Political Science at Yale University, Connecticut, where he is also co-Director of the Leitner Program in International and Comparative Political Economy. His work centers on international security and applied game theory. Specifically, it investigates the causes of war, nuclear proliferation, and democratization, and has appeared in such journals as the American Political Science Review, International Organization, International Security, and the Journal of Conflict Resolution. Debs received a Rhodes scholarship in 2000 and was a Stanton Nuclear Security Junior Faculty Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), Stanford University, California in 2011–12.

Nuno P. Monteiro (PhD, University of Chicago, 2009) is Associate Professor of Political Science at Yale University, Connecticut, where he is also Director of Research of the Brady–Johnson Program in Grand Strategy. His work centers on international relations theory and security studies, specifically great-power politics, power transitions, nuclear studies, the causes of war, deterrence theory, military occupations, and the philosophy of science. He is the author of Theory of Unipolar Politics (Cambridge, 2014) as well as articles published in International Organization, International Security, International Theory, and Perspectives on Politics, among other venues.