Geographical Location, Strategic Choice And Self - "key To The Other" Interaction: North Korea, Libya And Iran's Nuclear Behavior Research

Why some countries sought to develop nuclear weapons? Some chose nuclear forbearance? And other countries forwent nuclear weapons? Starting from all these questions, this dissertation makes a detailed examination of all the four existential models (security model、internal politics model、sociological model and psychological model) and the historical literature on modern international relations. Based on the inspiring insights and their logical chasms from all the present models, this dissertation presented a comprehensive theoretical framework with geopolitical locality being the independent variable, the state’s strategic emphasis and the interaction between self and its key others being the intervening variables.The viewpoint of this dissertation is that the geopolitical locality of a country is the potential conditionality decisive to its nuclear behavior, it is the basic foundation that defines the will of a country to seek to achieve its security goal; and the symmetry of international security demonstrated by the self-"key other" interaction is the intervening variable, which gives rise to the phenomena from nuclear aspiration to nuclear roll-back or from nuclear forbearance to developing nuclear weapons; the strategic type that a country chose is also the intervening variable critical to its nuclear trajectory or nuclear outcome.The main hypothesis presented here is that the geopolitical locality of a country is the potential conditionality decisive to its nuclear behavior, the country that located on a competitive core region where one or many great powers in the world involved has stronger political will to make a declaration on political independence with "developing nuclear weapons" being the tool than the country located on the periphery where no or less power involved; The geo-locality is only the basic factor, meanwhile the self-"key others" interaction is the intervening variable causing a nuclear behavior variation in different periods, under the circumstances of symmetrical information, such countries tend to adopt a nuclear forbearance policy, even though it is the country lies in a geopolitically core region, otherwise countries will go nuclear; In addition, the strategic type a country chose is also the key intervening variable to its nuclear ouccome, when a country chose "putting national independence first" strategy, they are highly likely to break through the NPT limits, and to achieve the weapons success in the end, contrastingly a country adopts "taking geopolitical emotion first" strategy has to forgo its nuclear weapons program, generally with its nuclear trajectory being a parabola which first rise then roll back. Following the hypotheses the author verified the new model through three cases in the next part.This dissertation is structurally divided into four parts, i.e. the introduction, theoretical model, cases and the conclusion, specifically in the introduction this dissertation reveals the deficiency of the existential models, yet the deficiency is exactly the breach of a new model presented in this dissertation, in this sense, the new theory is the deductive result of all the existential theory and concept. In the case part, this dissertation examined the nuclear behaviors of North Korea, Libya, and Iran from the perspective of the state locality, the strategic emphasis and the self-"key others" interaction. By showing how all these variables influence the three countries’nuclear decision the hypothesis proposed in the theory part is tested rigorously.In the conclusion part, the author summarized the features of the three cases and the causal mechanism behind it in an all-around way. Concerning the geopolitical locality, North Korea and Libya have the same features, they all lies in the competitive core, but Iran being in the periphery of powers game. For the strategic choices, North Korea adhered to the "putting national independence first’" strategy. Libya adopted the "taking geopolitical emotion first" strategy, and Iran pursued a blended strategy including the national independence and the geopolitical emotion, and in the political practice Iran emphasized one of them in different periods. On the point of self-"key others" interaction, the three cases are also very different, the security information is very asymmetric in North Korea case, and in the Iran and Lybia cases, the self-"key others" interaction all experienced a variation, hence the variable only exert an invisible influence on them. With the different combination of the above-menioned three variables, the three cases showed diversified nuclear behaviors:North Korea decided to withdraw from the NPT and claimed possession of nuclear weapons on the one hand and Libya’s decision to give up its NW activities in2003on the other hand, clearly contrasted with Iran’s course, which is somewhere between the two.In the last part, the dissertation also presented some policy implications. The implicaitons provided a basic way to ease the nuclear proliferation problem facing the world. Additionally, the nuclear dynamics touched upon the strategic choices, so one of the implications in a way has much importance to reflecting on a country’s foreign policy. Overall, the viewpoint of this dissertation is realistic but not pessimistic, it gives a reasonable answer to the question:why countries with technological and financial support forgo nuclear weapons or forbear from developing them, yet the poor countries even without technology seek to develop them.