Do nonproliferation agreements constrain?

Date01 November 2021
AuthorBradley C Smith,William Spaniel
Published date01 November 2021
DOI10.1177/0022343320971355
Subject MatterRegular Articles
Articles
Do nonproliferation agreements constrain?
Bradley C Smith
Department of Political Science, Vanderbilt University
William Spaniel
Department of Political Science, University of Pittsburgh
Abstract
One way nuclear agreements might keep signatories from proliferating is by constraining nuclear capacity. Theore-
tical work on nonproliferation often points to such constraints as an important driver of nonproliferation success.
Some have argued that, absent sufficient constraint, states with the desire and capability to proliferate will do so.
Faced with more costly routes to a weapon, states subject to technological constraint may abide by the terms of the
deal. This perspective poses an important empirical question: do nonproliferation agreements result in significant
technological constraint in practice? This article evaluates the empirical prevalence of constraints arising from
nonproliferation deals. Doing so requires (1) providing an appropriate measure of nuclear proficiency and (2)
developing an estimate of the counterfactual, no-agreement capacity of states that received such agreements. This
study addresses both of these points. First, new data are gathered to estimate proficiency, improving upon existing
measures in the literature. Second, the generalized synthetic control method is applied to estimate counterfactual
proficiency levels for the recipients of agreements. With this approach, the constraining effects of deals the United
States implemented with Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan and the Declaration of Iguaçu between Brazil and
Argentina are evaluated. The findings indicate that the constraining effect of these nonproliferation agreements is
minimal.
Keywords
measurement, nonproliferation, nuclear weapons, synthetic control
Introduction
In 1969, US President Richard Nixon announced the
Guam Doctrine, indicating that allies were responsible
for their own security. South Korea responded by accel-
erating its nuclear program. Washington began worrying
that another state would soon join the nuclear club. As
with most other nonproliferation negotiations, the
United States engaged with South Korea on many
dimensions (Drezner, 1999; Solingen, 2007). One path-
way was to help develop the Kori-2 power plant, with the
expectation that Seoul would halt objectionable nuclear
activities.
Provisions like this within nonproliferation agree-
ments – deals designed to make a party less likely to
develop nuclear weapons – have a similar goal. Washing-
ton sought to constrain South Korea’s capacity to
produce nuclear weapons. With less research done in
nuclear science, racing to the bomb became harder. Such
constraint has been cited as important for
nonproliferation generally, and researchers identify con-
straints as an important nonproliferation mechanism
(Reiss, 1995; Mehta, 2020).
Nevertheless, researchers have yet to rigorously eval-
uate whether states actually constrain in a meaningful
way. Doing so requires operationalizing capacity in a
fine-grained manner and identifying a proper counter-
factual, neither of which is straightforward. In this arti-
cle, we overcome these problems by expanding a dataset
to estimate nuclear capacity and creating synthetic
Corresponding author:
bradley.carl.smith@gmail.com
Journal of Peace Research
2021, Vol. 58(6) 1163–1177
ªThe Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0022343320971355
journals.sagepub.com/home/jpr

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