Rich Nukes, Poor Nukes

Accuracy in Academia ^ | July 28, 2010 | Bethany Stotts

[AccuracyAcademia]

Rich Nukes, Poor Nukes

Bethany Stotts, July 28, 2010

Last month, in a Cato Institute lecture, Georgetown professor Matthew Kroenig outlined what he sees as the strategic reasons why nuclear nations help spread these weapons to other countries.

The author of Exporting the Bomb: Technology Transfer and the Spread of Nuclear Weapons, Professor Kroenig argued that nuclear transfers are “driven by a strategic logic.”

“My argument, in short, is that the spread of nuclear weapons threatens powerful states more than it threatens weak states and that this leads to three strategic conditions under which countries are most likely to export sensitive nuclear materials and technology,” he said.

In the book he focused on “state-sponsored transfers” because, Kroenig argues, “…all the most important cases have been state sponsored, including the [Abdul Qadeer Khan] transfers to Iran, Libya and North Korea…” He also looked at “transfers to nonnuclear states.”

Less powerful states aren’t as threatened by nuclear proliferation as powerful states are because the former, less influential group has less to lose militarily or diplomatically than a superpower does, he argued. Prof. Kroenig said he performed a systematic statistical analysis of states which either provided nuclear assistance or should have but chose not to. (The latter is undoubtedly a subjective measure.) This included case studies on...