Nuclear Decisions begins with the premise that nuclear weapons programs are too often conceived as a mad dash to nuclear weapons acquisition. Once the political decision to initiate a nuclear weapons program is made, so it goes, states will throw everything they have at the project to acquire nuclear weapons as quickly as possible and will either succeed or fail in that mission. Koch argues that nuclear weapons programs are more productively considered a dynamic process regulated by a series of “decisions to accelerate or reverse progress toward a nuclear weapons capability” (p3). Rather than simply trying to get nuclear weapons as quickly as possible, she argues that national leaders overseeing a nuclear weapons program will, over time, make multiple decisions to accelerate or reverse nuclear weapons development based on various practical considerations, for example resource constraints or changing security conditions. These decisions determine the “trajectory” of a nuclear weapons program in terms of how quickly and how far it progresses, including whether it reaches or stops short of a functional nuclear weapons capability.
Within this framework, Koch advances a novel theory of nuclear weapons decision-making. She argues that these decisions that leaders make to either accelerate or reverse nuclear weapons development are influenced by two factors. The first is the “information environment” in which the leader operates and which is influenced by domestic agencies such as the military and nuclear scientific establishment. According to the theory, these domestic agencies will manipulate the flow of information to national leaders regarding the costs and benefits of nuclear weapons development in a way that biases nuclear decision-making in favour of their own organisational interests, i.e. toward either acceleration or reversal. Thus, nuclear decisions are influenced by both the interests of these organisations and their relative ability to manipulate the flow of information to national leaders. The second is the permissiveness of the international environment to nuclear weapons development. Here, she identifies three eras of increasingly onerous “political, organizational, legal, and normative constraints” (p55) on nuclear weapons development (1941–1964, 1965–1974, and 1975 to the present) and argues that these further influence the nuclear decisions of national leaders by affecting the perceived costs and benefits of nuclear acceleration and reversal.
Koch’s use of nuclear decision-making as the dependent variable of her study – as opposed to the outcomes of nuclear weapons programs, i.e. acquisition or reversal – is a novel and productive shift in the nuclear security literature. It challenges the tendency to view the acquisition of nuclear weapons as a fixed objective resulting from a single decision, i.e. that to initiate a nuclear weapons program. Koch’s concept of nuclear weapons programs as an iterative process of reflection and decision-making provides a framework for examining how leaders’ assessments of the strategic value of nuclear weapons may change over time and how these changes stand to affect the nature and outcomes of nuclear weapons programs. This opens up new and interesting lines of enquiry in the study of nuclear weapons programs. For example, a focus on nuclear weapons program decisions rather than program outcomes provides a basis for crafting counterproliferation policies that influence decisions rather than outcomes. This means a shift in the overarching goal of counterproliferation policy from bringing down nuclear weapons programs holus-bolus to achieving piecemeal nuclear reversals that are likely more achievable in the short term but that still offer a long-term path to nuclear elimination. Moreover, a nuclear weapons program has only one outcome but multiple decisions mean that studying the latter offers more data points with which to generate and test theories. Thus, studying decisions over outcomes offers one way out of the “small-N problem” that besets the study of nuclear weapons acquisition/reversal.
While strong in this regard, the book struggles in other areas, principally in its empirical analysis. The study of nuclear weapons programs is complicated by a lack of reliable data at the best of times. Testing a theory of nuclear weapons programs that hinges on the beliefs, preferences, and backroom negotiations of individual policy elites is undoubtedly prone to issues of data availability and at times the analysis appears to labour under this challenge. For example, in coding a Soviet nuclear acceleration decision in 1942 Koch makes four factual claims: (1) Science Commissioner Sergey Kaftanov “selected the policy options” regarding nuclear weapons development; (2) Kaftanov suppressed options for the non-development of nuclear weapons; (3) Kaftanov urged Stalin to fund work on nuclear weapons development; and (4) Stalin “kept ignorant of dissenting opinion”. The totality of the evidence marshalled to support these claims is just two references to secondary sources, neither of which, upon reading, offer unequivocal support. Such instances of a lack of supporting evidence make it difficult, at times, to accept key claims in the text. Importantly, this issue affects some cases more than others, leaving one wondering whether case selection could have been more strategic for example, by choosing better documented cases (e.g. US, UK) over the more challenging ones (e.g. Israel, Soviet Union) or by reducing the number of cases (from a plenteous nine) to facilitate more in-depth examinations of those chosen.
Notwithstanding this issue, Nuclear Decisions remains a valuable addition to the nuclear security literature and required reading for those that study the nature or domestic politics of nuclear weapons programs.
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Christopher J. Watterson
Christopher J. Watterson is a Research Fellow at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. His research focuses on North Korean nuclear and ballistic missile development, the implementation and evasion of economic sanctions in East Asia, and the regulation of strategic trade. He has published widely on these topics in multiple, internationally recognized outlets, including Armed Forces & Society, Marine Policy, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, The National Interest, Council on Foreign Relations, and The Diplomat. He holds a PhD in international relations from the University of Sydney.