All this talk about a possible US and/or Israeli preventive war against Iran got me wondering about the historical record concerning the conflict behavior of states after they acquired nuclear weapons. Does the rate at which states are involved in serious international disputes tend to go up, down, or see no change after they get the bomb?
Advocates of preventive war on Iran like Matthew Kroenig expect Iran to become much more aggressive if it gets nukes. “Proliferation optimists” like Ken Waltz, by contrast, argue that we have repeatedly expected terrible things from nuclear-armed adversaries but repeatedly found, if anything, the opposite to be the case. For example, both the Soviets and the US contemplated preventive strikes to prevent Mao from getting the bomb, as they considered him, not without some evidence, to be aggressive, dangerous, and fanatical. But the Chinese bomb was arguably followed by a more status quo oriented Chinese foreign policy.
Especially in the last 5 years, a number of IR scholars have started to look for patterns concerning nuclear weapons and international disputes in the available quantitative data (see in particular work by Erik Gartzke and Dong-Joon Jo, Robert Rauchhaus, and Michael Horowitz). Various interesting findings, but looking around I didn’t see exactly what I wanted: Just a simple country-level examination of dispute involvement before and after nuclear acquisition.
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