Persuasion, social conformity, and identification: Constructivist explanations for non-nuclear states in a nuclear world

Why have so few states acquired nuclear weapons? Understanding why states that could have "gone nuclear," but chose not to, could yield policy insights to help us persuade today's potential proliferators. While the number of studies on the topic has increased, most analyses examine security rationales or economic motivations. However, I argue that understanding how the international social environment---created by the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT)---is key to understanding these states' past nuclear decision-making, as well as influencing it in the future.; First, I argue that we need to differentiate between different types of nuclear forbearance. Because different states have refrained from nuclear weapons acquisition does not mean they have all done so for the same reasons. Based on social psychology research, I argue that nuclear forbearance can be categorized in three main ways: persuasion (behavior resulting from genuine transformation of preferences), social conformity (behavior resulting from the desire to maximize social benefits and/or minimize social costs, without a change in underlying preferences), and identification (behavior resulting from the desire or habit of following the actions of an important other).; Second, I argue that the NPT has created an international social environment that exerts strong influence on state nuclear decision-making, through a number of mechanisms: creating a "list" effect in which those in non-compliance are obviously in a small minority, linking nuclear nonproliferation to other strongly held values, establishing a public record of state commitment which makes it hard for a state to withdraw, etc.; I examine the question of nuclear forbearance by investigating two case studies of states that could have "gone nuclear" but did not: Egypt and Japan. In both cases, I find that while security factors did play roles in these countries' nuclear forbearance, ultimately the most critical factor was that governmental elites experienced a genuine transformation of what "security" and "success" mean for modern states. By nurturing an international social environment in which nuclear weapons acquisition became delegitimized, the nuclear nonproliferation regime helped ensure that this redefinition of security and success included forgoing, rather than developing, a nuclear weapons program.