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[This is a post-publication review symposium] What drives governments to develop nuclear weapons? For those concerned in slowing, halting, or reversing the spread of nuclear weapons, the answer to this questions matter immensely. It helps identify what policies are most likely to convince states to abandon the quest for nuclear weapons, to not pursue them in the first place, or even to give up their existing stockpiles. But international-studies analysis provides a host of different, and sometimes contradictory answers. The same is true for the growing body of statistical literature on nuclear weapons. As Mark Bell argues in his International Studies Quarterly article, it even “offers many more distinctive explanations for proliferation than there are cases of proliferation in the historical record.” Bell conducts a series tests using “extreme bounds analysis, cross-validation, and random forests to evaluate 31 variables identified as significant determinants of proliferation.” He finds that, “While some variables—particularly, the pursuit and possession of other weapons of mass destruction, receipt of sensitive nuclear assistance, and some measures of threat—perform better than others, the overall results should give us pause. The majority of variables identified as significant determinants of proliferation fail to provide robust explanations for existing patterns of proliferation. They also offer little predictive ability beyond what we can achieve with an extremely simple model. The quantitative literature on proliferation has, for now, produced more tentative findings than scholars typically understand.”[...]
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ICAR Research Data Repository for Knowledge Management