Margaret Peters 0:03

Hi everybody. Thank you all so much for joining us today for this webinar. Today, we have Matt Fuhrmann, who is the Colin McFadden Professor of Political Science at Texas A&M. He has been a visiting professor at wonderful places like Yale and Stanford. He was the Stanton nuclear security fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He's been a research fellow at Harvard. He was named an Andrew Carnegie fellow in 2016 so very impressive resume just to begin. But his work is really focused here on nuclear weapons diplomacy, bargaining, and today we are very excited to learn about his new book, Influence Without Arms : The New Logic of Nuclear Deterrence. Just a reminder that if you have questions, please put them in the Q, use the Q A function, and I'm going to let Matt take it away.

Matt Fuhrmann 1:01

Thanks, Maggie, for that kind introduction and also for the invitation to be here today. I'm excited to tell you all about my new book called Influence without arms, the new logic of nuclear deterrence. There has been a lot of thinking in the social sciences about nuclear weapons. Almost all of the existing work focuses on countries that are armed with pretty large nuclear arsenals, like the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and tries to understand the political implications of those arsenals for international peace and stability. But there's a group of nuclear countries that I think are quite important, but have been largely overlooked in scholarship to date, and that's the countries that have the technological capacity to make nuclear weapons, if they so desired, but have not yet done so. These states are said to have nuclear latency, and I'm going to refer to these countries as latent nuclear powers, because they have the technological capacity to build nuclear weapons if they wanted to, but so far, at least, they have decided to remain non nuclear. A good example of a latent nuclear power in the world today is Japan. Japan has a large nuclear energy infrastructure that includes many nuclear power plants as well as other facilities related to the nuclear fuel cycle. And because of Japan's large nuclear energy program, it also has the potential foundation for a bomb program, and that's because nuclear technology is dual use in nature. So if you have nuclear facilities geared towards nuclear energy and electricity production, those also could potentially be used to make nuclear weapons. This is why journalists and other commentators sometimes say that Japan is a screwdrivers turn away from a bomb. That's a bit of an exaggeration, but it gives you a sense of the closeness that a country like Japan is to being able to make a nuclear weapon. Japan is hardly alone in terms of being a country that's non nuclear but has the technology necessary to make nuclear weapons. For the book, I collected new data on the global spread of sensitive nuclear technology and discovered that, going back to the 1940s 33 different countries have developed the most sensitive nuclear technology that could be useful for making nuclear weapons. And what you can see in this graph here is that during just about every year of the Nuclear Age, the number of states that have the technological capacity to make nuclear weapons far exceeds the number of states that have actually done so. So what I'm trying to do in this book is to take a deep dive on the subject of nuclear latency, and hopefully advance scholarly understanding of this issue. I'm going to develop a concept that I call latent nuclear deterrence, which is generally using a non weaponized nuclear program to try and obtain greater political influence. This influence could take the form of trying to deter war or other military disputes against you, but it also could include attempts to gain broader diplomatic or political benefits as well. Although this concept is under appreciated by both policymakers and scholars, there's growing recognition that it could be potentially significant. For example, I'm showing you here a quote from Mohamed ElBaradei, the former Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who said that quote, if you're really smart, you don't need to develop a weapon, you just develop that capability, and that is the best deterrence. So the goal here is to understand how the technological capacity relevant to nuclear weapons influences peace and stability and influence even if you don't go on and make nuclear weapons. There's a number of key conclusions and findings that come out of the book. In the talk today, I'm going to focus on five main takeaways. First, I'm going to show you evidence that leaders throughout history and today have tried to use non weaponized nuclear programs to gain greater influence. Then I'll show you evidence from some leaders around the world indicating that they believe that this is a good idea to employ in order to influence the behavior of their allies and adversaries. In other words, they think latent nuclear deterrence works. Third, I'll unpack a little bit of the theory of latent nuclear deterrence that I develop in the book to help you better understand how it's possible to gain leverage from a nuclear program, even if you don't have any assembled weapons. Fourth, I'll show you some evidence from a statistical analysis that I carry out indicating that latent nuclear deterrence does work at least some of the time. And then I'm going to conclude by talking about some of the implications that I think come out of this research. So let me start by telling you a few stories that illustrate how leaders try and use nuclear latency to gain political leverage. First, let's talk about the case of Japan. I told you at the outset that Japan is a country that has the means, technologically speaking, to make nuclear weapons because of its underlying nuclear energy capacity. Here's a quote from a unnamed official in the Ministry of Defense, showing you how Japan has tried to exploit this possible this means, this capability to influence its adversaries. This official said, quote, If a North Korean missile, even one with no nuclear component, hits Japanese soil, I think the process of building nuclear weapons will begin. So what this official is saying is that if North Korea threatens Japan, Japan would retaliate by building nuclear weapons and potentially using them at some point in the future, Iran is another case where we see this strategy employed. To give you one illustration of this, here's a statement from former president Rafsanjani, who said, quote, once we have mastery of the fuel cycle, all our neighbor neighbors will draw the proper conclusion today to attack Iran would be foolhardy. So what he's saying here is that Iran, like Japan, has the means to make nuclear weapons because of its underlying technological capacity, although it has not yet done so, as far as we know, and Roxanne John is using the potential to make nuclear weapons to try and influence countries like the United States that might be contemplating military attacks. The third and final example I'll tell you about comes from North Korea in the early 2000s before North Korea conducted its first nuclear test, a group of Americans were invited to the country to tour North Korea's nuclear facilities. Among the Americans in that group was Siegfried Hecker, who was the former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where the first nuclear bombs were assembled in the United States during World War Two. Hecker and his colleagues were given a tour of North Korea's plutonium production facilities, and at one point, Hecker even was presented with a jar, a glass jar, that contained plutonium in metal form. After being shown these capabilities, a North Korean officials, officials said to the visiting Americans, now you have seen our deterrent, but the visiting Americans hadn't actually seen any weapons. All they saw was that North Korea knew how to make plutonium. But what this shows is that the North Koreans thought that just being able to make plutonium, which is a critical ingredient for making nuclear weapons, could signal something to the United States and potentially gain leverage over Washington. So these are just three stories that give you a flavor of how this strategy has been employed. Let me tell you now about some cases where leaders are talking about what they think about the viability of this strategy. In the book, I look at 10 cases to try and see what leaders think about the efficacy of this strategy, and I'm going to tell you about three of them today, and the goal here is not to take a fully comprehensive look at the evidence, but just in the interest of time, to give you a flavor of some of the evidence that I present in the book. So I'll tell you a little bit about Brazil and Japan and Spain. These are three countries that, at one point at least, had sensitive nuclear technology that could be used potentially to make nuclear weapons, but none of these countries actually did so. We now have access to lots of formerly secret documents in the case of Brazil that help us better understand its motivations in the nuclear space and when we look at these documents, we see indications that several Brazilian officials believed that just having the means to make nuclear weapons could give the country political leverage, even if it didn't go on and actually assemble weapons. So for example, here's a statement from 1978 formally secret National Security Council document where the Brazilians are saying that nuclear latency, quote, increases the political, economic bargaining power of the country. And when, again, when we look at other documents from Brazil, we find evidence that has this same flavor. In the case of Japan, here we're looking at statements from two former defense ministers indicating belief in latent deterrence. One said that Japan's nuclear latency has, quote, very great defensive deterrent functions, and another said that it provides a tacit nuclear deterrent.Spain is a less known case and a less studied case in the Nuclear Security literature, but I think it's a really interesting one, because when we when we look at information that's come out in recent years from Spain, we find similar evidence to what I've shown you in the case of Brazil and and Japan, in the sense that officials in Spain, as they were expanding their nuclear program, believe that the mere existence of facilities in the country that could be used to build nuclear weapons gave them a deterrent. And here you're looking at a quote from a well sourced story in the Spanish newspaper El Pais from 1987 indicating that Spanish official officials believe that their latent capacity to make nuclear weapons constituted a powerful deterrent against countries in North Africa, which, at the time Spain was worried about potential military conflict with. So again, in the book, there's 10 cases where I go into greater depth, but right here, I just want to give you a sense of some of the evidence that exists, to show you that there's a initial plausibility probe that's passed here, in the sense that we have enough evidence from looking at the cases to suggest that lots of leaders believe latent nuclear nuclear deterrence works. Now, what we want to do is take a little bit more of a systematic look to see if these views are actually correct. But before we do that, I want to tell you a little bit more about how it's actually possible to gain leverage from nuclear latency. And to do this, I'm going to briefly summarize for you the theory of latent nuclear deterrence that I introduced in the book. The first thing I want to say is that there are three distinct but related ways or mechanisms through which latency can confer political leverage, and I call these deterrence by proliferation, delayed attack and doubt. In deterrence by proliferation, a country threatens to build nuclear weapons if there's some challenge to the status quo that it doesn't like, but it's not necessarily threatening to use those weapons in a military attack, just simply to possess them in deterrence by delayed attack. Countries are actually threatening to use weapons, but because they don't have them at the at the outset of a challenge, they would have to take some time to assemble one or more weapons before they could be used. So deterrence by delayed attack works just like traditional nuclear deterrence, with the main difference being that there's a time delay in between when a country would make a threat and when that threat could be implemented, and that threat could be or that time delay could be a matter of hours, days, weeks or months, depending on how close to a bomb a country is. And finally, deterrence by doubt happens when a country is so close to a bomb, potentially that you might not know for sure whether it's still non nuclear, and if you worry that it could already be in possession of one or more nuclear weapons, this could have a deterrent effect. So in the book, I flesh out these three distinct mechanisms, and I'm trying to understand when they're likely to be effective. To build the theory, I start by thinking about the major problems that countries face when they try to use nuclear latency to gain political leverage. And then after that, I think about whether there's potential solutions to those problems, and in doing this, I'm able to identify the conditions that are necessary in order for latent nuclear deterrence to have a chance at being successful. So let me start by telling you about three major problems that countries face when they try this strategy. The first is what I already alluded to that punishment is delayed, and this can be a big problem in deterrence, because a delay in punishment gives the Challenger a potential opportunity to believe that they can escape retaliation, and if they think they can escape retaliation, they're unlikely to be deterred. So the fact that there's a time gap from when a threat. Made and when it can actually be carried out, could undermine latent deterrence. Second, carrying out this strategy is costly for the latent nuclear power. That's because actually building nuclear weapons carries certain political and economic costs. And to be sure, going on to use a nuclear weapon in an attack would be costly, obviously, for the country that suffered the attack, but also for the country that used nuclear weapons. So because of these costs, threats of this nature might sometimes be seen as not believable or not credible. A third problem is that even attempting this strategy can incite international instability. So if there's two rivals, for example, and one is trying to engage in latent deterrence, the other might worry that it's going to go on to build nuclear weapons, and this could create incentives for it, potentially, to try and launch preventive strikes against the latent nuclear power. So in trying this strategy, latent state might actually invite conflict rather than deter it. So let's think now about how these three problems can be potentially addressed. I argue that to have any hope at success in latent deterrence, countries must possess the most sensitive kinds of nuclear technology, and here I'm talking about specifically uranium enrichment capabilities or plutonium reprocessing facilities. These facilities, which I refer to as ENR plants, are critical because they provide countries with the means to make fissile material. There's three main steps to make a nuclear bomb. First, you have to obtain the fissile material. Second, you have to weaponize the fissile material, and third, you have to make the weapon to a delivery system, like a missile. Now there's widespread recognition that of these three steps, the first one is by far the most difficult. So if you have the means to make plutonium or weapons grade, highly enriched uranium, you're well on your way to being able to make a nuclear weapon. This is important because the time gap, I argue, has to be pretty short in order for this to be a viable strategy. And because of that, I argue that it's only likely to work if states have an operational enrichment or reprocessing capability. Second, there needs to be high stakes in an interaction, and this is necessary in order to make the threat credible, whether it's a threat to proliferate, or whether it's a threat to actually carry out a nuclear attack. And finally, to avoid inciting instability, the latent power must work to convince others that it's not bent on building nuclear weapons. That is that there's flexibility in its nuclear policy, and it's not racing towards a bomb like the US was during the Manhattan Project, for example, but rather that it is content to remain non nuclear and just develop the capability. If countries are able to successfully do this, that can mitigate the problem of inciting instability to some degree. So from this, we get a number of predictions, which in the book, I look at in a variety of different foreign policy contexts. In the interest of time, today, I'm going to focus primarily on one of those contexts and show you some quantitative evidence about foreign policy alignment. But before I do that, let me say that the book draws on a new database that I collected with some research assistants, and this involves collaboration also with nuclear engineers Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Texas A and M, where, over many years, we sought to identify all enrichment and reprocessing plants built global globally ranging from laboratory scale capabilities all the way up to commercial scale. And we identified about 250 sites doing in Richmond and reprocessing work in 33 different countries. As I said, drawing on this database, I do a bunch of different empirical analyzes, both quantitative and qualitative. I'm going to tell you about one test in particular that I conduct here, which looks at the alignment of foreign policy preferences among rivals. So to do this, I construct a data set that contains pairs of rivals over the period from 1946 to 2010, the outcome that I'm looking at here is how similar the foreign policy preferences are between the two rivals. And to do this, I'm going to use a measure that's standard in international relations, based on voting patterns at the United Nations. The key explanatory variables for this analysis are, firstly, does one of the rivals have an ENR capability? That is, can they make weapons grade HEU or plutonium? And then the effect of this is going to be conditional on their political aims. Specifically. Whether or not they're racing to build nuclear weapons. So I'm going to code the political aims of the program, whether it's a program that's optimized to build nuclear weapons as quickly as possible, or whether it's one that's characterized by what we call hedging, meaning that a country might be thinking about nuclear weapons, but it's certainly not bent on building and then I'm going to use a variety of different statistical techniques, specifically some matching and weighting methods here with difference in differences estimation, to try and generate the effect of nuclear latency on the foreign policy alignment among rivals. What I'm going to do is I'm going to look at what happens when you have two rivals and one of them gets nuclear latency in subsequent years. How do their foreign policy preferences change? Here we can see a summary of the results which are broadly consistent with the theory. So if you look on the left hand side, what you're seeing is that when a country gets enrichment or reprocessing capabilities and has a restrained nuclear program, meaning it's not racing to build nuclear weapons, we see an improvement in the foreign policy preference similarity among two rivals by between eight and 12% at least For the first six years after the state becomes latent. By contrast, though, the same capability when a state's intentions are geared towards building nuclear weapons has the opposite effect. On the right hand side, you're looking at the effect of enrichment and reprocessing capabilities when a state has an unrestrained program, meaning that it's racing towards nuclear weapons. In this case, we see a 10 to 32% worsening of foreign policy alignment between the two rivals. So the effect of getting sensitive nuclear technology is very much conditional on the political aims of the latent nuclear power. There's some qualitative evidence that I unpack on in the book looking at this idea as well. Just to give you a flavor of some of that evidence, Henry Kissinger wrote several years ago that he thought nuclear latency would cause other countries to, quote, Reorient, reorient their political alignment towards Tehran. So he's talking about Iran, and suggesting that, because Iran now has nuclear latency, this is going to cause other countries to reorient their foreign policies in a way that's beneficial to towards Iran, and that's consistent with what we see in the quantitative evidence. At least when the nuclear program's aims are restrained, we don't have time to go into great detail about some of the other findings, but I just wanted to quickly summarize what we learn from some other foreign policy context from the book, if countries have an enrichment and reprocessing capability and they have nuclear restraint, we see other foreign policy benefits that are obtained, including A reduction in the number of international crises that a country experiences. If that country is a US ally, we see that after a short time delay, they eventually get a greater number of US troops on their soil. And we also see that latent powers in this circumstance are able to deter their rivals from building nuclear weapons. However, if we see an enrichment and reprocessing program without restraint, the picture isn't as rosy. In this case, we see far less reliable deterrence of conflict and crises. We see a significant risk of preventive military attacks, and we see arms racing. So again, a key, a key takeaway here is that the effects of latency depend on the political aims of the latent nuclear power. Let me turn now to thinking about some of the implications that come out of the book. But first, let me just summarize for you what I think we've learned today, I've introduced for you the concept of latent nuclear deterrence, and I've shown you some evidence that leaders try to use this strategy to gain leverage, and also some evidence that many world leaders believe that it's it's successful, that it's something that works. I've also shown you some quantitative evidence that if you combine an enrichment and reprocessing program with nuclear restraint, you're often able to get foreign policy benefits. However, this is by no means a foolproof strategy. There's a lot of risks associated with it, and if another country sees you as being bent on getting nuclear weapons, it can undermine the foreign policy benefits that you might otherwise obtain. One of the implications of the book is that I think it suggests we should rethink what it means to be a nuclear power. Typically, when we talk about what a nuclear power is, we're talking about the nine countries in the world today that have assembled nuclear weapons. But I actually think we should broaden that conception to include not just the nine countries with nuclear weapons, but also countries that have the technological capacity to get nuclear weapons quickly if they've if they so desire. What I've shown you today, and what I unpack in greater detail in the book, is lots of evidence that these countries carry a wide variety of implications for international peace and stability, and I think we need to devote more attention, both in scholarship and in the policy space, to thinking about this capacity. This idea goes back to something that Thomas Schelling wrote in the 1970s suggesting that we should think not in black and white terms and in the sense of whether a country is is nuclear, but in terms of how long it would take them to get a bomb if they decided to go for it. And so the book is consistent with this idea that we should take a broad conception of what it means to be a nuclear power I also think that the the book can shed light on what I see as a big puzzle about nuclear weapons, which is that only 10 countries have ever built them, and only nine have them today, despite the fact that many more have the technological capacity to proliferate if they so desired. So why is that? I think the book helps us better understand this issue in the sense that there's a middle ground strategy where countries can build up their capacity to build nuclear weapons so that they're prepared in the event of a crisis, and once they get to that spot, they can reap some political benefits while also skirting some of the costs associated with a full blown nuclear arsenal. So one of the reasons more countries haven't gone on to build nuclear weapons is that they can obtain some of the benefits of having an arsenal by maintaining nuclear latency and dodging some of the costs that that are associated with going all the way to a bomb. And finally, I think that the book carries some implications for thinking about the issue of nuclear disarmament and what the world could potentially look like in a world without any assembled nuclear weapons. So imagine that the nine countries like the United States that have nuclear weapons today decided to eliminate their nuclear arsenals. In that case, what we'd be dealing with is a world with a bunch of latent nuclear powers, because the knowledge about how to make a nuclear weapon wouldn't go away. Any one of those countries could reconstitute their nuclear weapons in relatively short order. So by looking at the issue of nuclear latency historically, I think we can gain some traction into what the world might look like hypothetically if the existing nuclear weapons states were to disarm, and although this issue is very complicated and nuanced, I think that the findings from the book suggests that there's some reason to believe that in a hypothetical disarmed world in the future, latent nuclear powers would be able to still practice nuclear deterrence In ways similar to what they've done with assembled nuclear warheads. So with that, I will conclude and look forward to questions.

Margaret Peters 28:07

Thank you so much for the presentation. One question I wanted to start with, which is something that you know you did a short presentation, so you can't present everything. But I think people would find interesting is, how do you know that you got all the cases of nuclear latency? Could you talk a little bit about how you guys actually collected the data, especially given that in earlier stages, it seems like states might have incentives to either hide it or to misrepresent that they have more of a capability than they actually have for deterrence purposes. So how did you actually go about doing this?

Matt Fuhrmann 28:50

Yeah, it's a great question, and this is there were a number of major challenges associated with this book, and this was absolutely one of them to be fully transparent. I don't, you know. I can't say with 100% certainty that we have, in fact, identified all the cases, but we did take a variety of strategies and measures to try and ensure that our data were as comprehensive as possible. So because this arose from collaboration with people at one of the National Laboratories, we were obviously, it was all unclassified, but we were able to get their data in the unclassified space and their perspective. We shared our list with all sorts of experts in the field to try and tell us if we missed anything we, you know, spent this was done over, you know, a period of several years, so I went through many iterations, and, you know, my hope is that we've, because of those processes, increased our confidence that we've identified. Provide things as comprehensively as possible. But to be sure, it's challenging, and especially if we're talking about very recent developments, there could be things that we missed. I'm more confident as we go back in time, because there we have more declassified documents. So for example, I found a document from the CIA that had been declassified from the 70s that basically laid out all reprocessing and enrichment capabilities that existed in the world at that time. So that was very helpful for triangulating our data set and making sure we we hadn't missed anything

Margaret Peters 30:41

great. Yeah, I can imagine the challenge that is. Another question I had for you is that perception of whether the nuclear program is restrained or not seems to be very important. So I wanted you to talk a little bit more just about how countries could show that they're restrained or not restrained, and how much, like you know, if you think back to the the classic gay game theory, game beer quiche, where you know one, one person you know really wants the quiche, but orders a beer to see manly, as is the old way it goes. Can How easy is it for states to do you think, to misrepresent that they're doing this peacefully or not, or to be on that flip side, to be told you can't possibly be doing this just for peaceful, you know, nuclear power generation, it must be for the military.

Matt Fuhrmann 31:41

Well, Maggie, you're doing a terrific job honing in right away on on all the two two of the biggest challenges that I faced in working on this project, and this was another big one when I started. The idea was that this would mostly be a project with lots of quantitative evidence supplemented with a few case studies, and in the end, it was actually flipped. And there's a whole lot of qualitative evidence, and the quantitative evidence is there, but it's, I think, in my view, kind of secondary, because of what you're talking about, we're dealing with a variable that's about perception, and what I've coded quantitatively is what the latent power was doing. But what we see in practice is that countries vary a lot in how they perceive the same thing, and actually, it's even worse than that, because within the same country, people have different perceptions about another country's nuclear intentions. So if you think about how Netanyahu, for example, perceives Iran's intentions, there are some Israeli officials who see it differently. And so we really, I think, have to supplement the quantitative tests with lots of qualitative work, which I did for the book as well, because ultimately it's going to come down to the perceptions for understanding whether whether deterrence is going to be successful or not.

Margaret Peters 33:19

Yeah. And I think the qualitative pieces of the book are really excellent. And just like, add so much to the book. And you know, for any grad students who are interested in this topic, or undergrads, like, definitely go read the cases. I like, I did not know Spain had nuclear Burkle. Like, I learned so much. It was great. I love, I love this ability to read these books and learn these these deep sort of things I didn't know and like, see all the evidence you've been able to gather. I thought that was really, really helpful. And, yeah, measuring perceptions in some sort of quantitative way is just so hard that it can be tough. All right, before I open up to audience questions, I have one more for you, and then I'll open up. So when I think about nuclear weapons, I think a little bit about what I learned in graduate school from the book The Sagan waltz debate. I think that's what the book is called. Maybe that's an actual title. But for those who are not, who do not have that same education. So the debate is waltz famously argued that, you know, because of the deterrent effect of nuclear weapons, that is in part, what made the Cold War period relatively safe for IE, we didn't have a great power of war. Whereas Scott Sagan has argued that, you know anybody, anytime more powers get nuclear weapons, it's going to be more and more dangerous, because there's more of a possibility of some sort of accident happening, or somebody using it on purpose, but in a way that they didn't really plan to use. Yes. So I was thinking, you know, does the nuclear latency? Does it add to this debate? Like, do we see, or can we, like, think a little bit more about the debate? Do you think that latency can help lead to more peace, like, maybe volts would think like, you know, if you can deter or or, do you think Sagan would be right that, like, we don't even want countries getting to nuclear latency, because they could quickly get a bomb and, you know, have bad things happen.

Matt Fuhrmann 35:33

Yeah. So, you know, the way I think about a lot of great debates, including the debate between Sagan and waltz about nuclear weapons is that oftentimes I find it fruitful to think not whether one side or the other is correct, but instead about like the conditions under which one side might be more correct than the other, and that's how I think about it in A latency context. So one of sagan's arguments about why the spread of nuclear weapons is destabilizing is that it creates incentives for preventive war, because before you can get to the point where you have a reliable second strike, other countries would be motivated to try and launch a preventive attack against you. And you know, my book is absolutely consistent with that, with that notion. But it comes down to, again, the the conditions under which we get on that path. There is a more peaceful path you can get on, but that involves lots of reassurance and lots of convincing other states that your intentions are peaceful in nature, and when we're dealing with two rivals that can be very difficult to do. So there are certainly ways in which latency can be destabilizing, but there's also ways in which I think it can be stabilizing, and one of the reasons people first started thinking about this is that they thought that moving towards latency could be an arms control proposal in the sense that deterrence could still operate, but now you wouldn't have what weapons that were locked and loaded ready to fire. And one thing Sagan was really worried about, and I think rightly so, is the possibility of an accident or the possibility of unintended use or miscalculation in a crisis. And all those things are magnified if you have weapons on hair trigger alert ready to fire. So if you move to a more recess capacity where there are no assembled bombs, you eliminate that possibility. And if at the same time, you can also get some deterrent value. It's kind of the best of both worlds. So again, it's very complicated and nuanced, but the book does provide some evidence to support that line of thinking.

Margaret Peters 37:53

Great. All right, we have a question from an audience member. I'm going to start with one that I think directly adds to what we just been talking about. Do you see any implications for the Non Proliferation regime if latency expands and is utilized more and more for deterrence, could strategic stability be affected by more latent deterrence being wielded, especially if the Non Proliferation regime can't keep up with monitoring the spread of nuclear materials and technologies. And one thing I'll add to this question is, as much as we want to keep nuclear to stop nuclear weapons because of their dangerous their possibilities of, you know, killing millions of millions of people, it does seem like a lot of people want to actually spread nuclear power these days in the ability to stop climate change. So because nuclear power is a step on the road to nuclear latency, how do you like, where do you see that the Non Proliferation regime should go?

Matt Fuhrmann 39:02

Yeah, these are, these are really important issues. The way I see it is that nuclear latency, on balance, is good for the Non Proliferation regime, because it provides countries with some of the benefits that they might get from going all the way to a bomb without actually having to do so. So you create an option for countries that are facing security threats that allows them to maybe put the brakes on their nuclear program. I think if latency has no political value whatsoever, we would see more countries going on and actually building nuclear weapons, which I think would be way worse for the Non Proliferation regime, and also for global peace and stability. So I think latency gives countries kind of a halfway option that can be, you know, very attractive for some countries, depending on the nature of their of their security threats. So you. On the question of nuclear energy expanding, I certainly agree that that it can, and in my personal view, needs to be part of the global solution to climate change. So you're absolutely right. As you're as you're expanding nuclear energy around the world, you're potentially providing the foundation for weapons program. What I would just point out is, I think that there's a big difference between just having a nuclear reactor that's generating electric generating electricity, and having these more sensitive fuel cycle facilities, which are at the heart of of the book. So if a country just has nuclear power plants, I'm far less worried about that from from a Non Proliferation standpoint, but they're also going to be more hard pressed to reap a lot of political benefits from that. It's really the the more sensitive uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing activities that are both more sensitive from a Non Proliferation standpoint, but also the ones that are going to give countries leverage. So I think the security challenges are easier to manage if you're not spreading those more sensitive fuel cycle facilities.

Margaret Peters 41:17

Yeah, great. One more question along this line, and then I'll pick up some ones. And you talk a little bit about this in the book. So maybe this is just a way for those who haven't read the book to sort of get a little bit more about that. So you could, we could imagine a world in which everybody just stepped back to nuclear latency. Would that be as stable as a world like we have now, where we have some countries with nuclear weapons and some with not or would it be safer? Would that world be safer than a world where we never discovered nuclear weapons, which is, you know, we can't put that back in the box, but, but thinking a little bit about what your as you talked a little bit about the book with the prescription be, everybody should just go back to nuclear latency just to prevent accidental usage. Or, do you think it's that's never going to happen?

Matt Fuhrmann 42:19

Yeah, this is, you know, this is the million dollar policy question, you know, would the world be safer or less safe without nuclear weapons? And, you know, I think it's, we can't answer that question only on the basis of the work I did in the book. My answer would be that it would really depend on the nature of the security threats that we're worried about. So you know that there is, there's a lot of evidence, including from some of my own work, that nuclear weapons have played a key role for promoting in promoting peace through deterrence. So if we're going to eliminate nuclear weapons, we need to have some kind of substitute for the deterrence benefits that they have provided. And I should also say that nuclear weapons are most useful as a form of invasion insurance. So if you're if you are worried about something like what the United States did in Iraq in 2003 for example, latency is only going to be useful to you if you are very, very close to a bomb, you know, probably a matter within a matter of days, because otherwise, a country like the US is going to be able to overthrow your regime before you have a chance to assemble a bomb. So if we're worried, if we're in a in a world where we're worried about these blitzkrieg style invasions, where you could be defeated really quickly, then I think latency is probably going to be insufficient. But the reality is that a lot of the security challenges that countries are worried about today are not necessarily those really extreme things. So a lot of countries might be content with mere latent forces, but if they're really worried about being invaded, and if they think that an invasion, if it occurs, would topple their regime very quickly. In that kind of situation, it's going to be hard to find something that's as effective as a deterrent as nuclear weapons are.

Margaret Peters 44:35

Now moving on to a couple other questions. So one question we have is many cases of latency or US allies. So what role did the search for latency play? And when I started, like, the beginning of the book, I was also sort of puzzling, a case of like, Well, why didn't our nuclear umbrella just work? Like, why does Japan or Germany have this capability? So. So maybe you can talk to just a little bit more about what were our allies doing?

Matt Fuhrmann 45:05

Yeah, so there's a lot of interesting dynamics here. The first one is that I think us alliances have played a really critical role in limiting the spread of nuclear weapons. So a big reason countries like West Germany in the Cold War and Japan today, South Korea today, have not built nuclear weapons. Is because of the US alliance system, not the only reason, but I think that that's a major factor. At the same time, all these countries know that the US does not want to see them build nuclear weapons, and they therefore can exploit this possibility to gain leverage there. There's another really great, recent book that came out by Tristan Volpe that looks at this dynamic more more of a compelling perspective on the question of latency, how weaker states can extract concessions from the United States by threatening to build nuclear weapons. And you know, a lot of his findings in that book are consistent with what I find as well in terms of US allies, as they, as their latent capabilities mature, you start to see a huge uptick in the strength of the US Defense commitment, including the number of troops that the US is deploying on the territory of those allies. And so the way I interpret that is, as these countries move closer to a bomb, the US worries more and more that they're going to potentially build nuclear weapons, and so it feels the need to ramp up its reassurance, and part of that reassurance is putting more troops on their soil. So there's a lot of bargaining that happens among allies. A lot of what I was focusing on in the talk was more geared towards adversaries, but the the intro Alliance bargaining happens as well, and that's an interesting piece of this too.

Margaret Peters 47:07

Yeah, um, sort of a similar to the question is also thinking about, you know, a lot of countries that became latent were on the path to getting a bomb and then backed off. So how does in the if you can describe a little bit more, how you discuss that in the book?

Matt Fuhrmann 47:28

Yeah. So just to make sure I understand, the question, are you asking if you're on a path towards getting a bomb, but then you stop? What explains that reversal?

Margaret Peters 47:39

Yeah. So thinking about, or, yeah, why do you stop or, you know, kind of, what are the if you thought originally you wanted to go to nuclear deterrence, what did you learn that made you say, like, oh, we can stick with latent deterrence.

Matt Fuhrmann 47:56

Yeah. It's a great question. I think I would say that historically, it's relatively, relatively rare for a country to have decided, you know, we are going for a bomb, we're all in on going for a bomb, and then to not make it. So in other words, like, think about the Manhattan Project in the United States. That's a classic case where the US is all in. It's working on developing the nuclear weapon as quickly as it can. As long as World War Two is still ongoing, there's no chance that that program is going to stop once countries get to that point. Historically, at least it's it's pretty rare to reverse. A lot of the reversals that we see. When you look at them really closely, they're more like countries are hedging in the first place. So, so they're, they're really kind of keeping their options open. They're not saying we're all in on getting a bomb, but they're making some movement in that direction, and then they change course. But it's, it's not, it's not a total about face, because there was flexibility in their posture the entire time. The cases that come that you know, a big case that comes to mind where you do see that that stop is a case like Iraq, where you know at least from 1981 to 1991 Iraq, no doubt about it, was trying very hard to build a nuclear weapon. What stopped that, of course, was the Persian Gulf War and the subsequent very intrusive inspections regime that was put in place so there can be external actions taken by other countries that stop or slow down a country's program. And Iraq, I think, is an example of that. Iran is one as well, in the sense that in the late 80s and 90s, you know, there's strong evidence that Iran had a nuclear weapons program after 2003 Three, there's more debate about what Iran's intentions became, but before that, there's, there's lots of evidence that Iran was going for nuclear weapons. What explains that case? It's, it's not, it's, it's controversial. We don't have clear answers, but some people think the Iraq war in 2003 played a role after President Bush put Iran in the axis of evil, along with Iraq and North Korea, others think that over time, Iran realized it could use nuclear latency to get leverage without going all the way to a bomb. That debate is now, I think, very much ongoing within the country, and it'll be interesting to see how that plays out in the coming weeks and months.

Margaret Peters 50:49

Great, because we're getting to the end. I'm going to end with this question. So the question is, how do you see emerging technologies like AI? But I'll also add in maybe not so emerging technologies like cyber warfare, which is no longer, I think, emerging, and is now just fully part reshaping the dynamics of deterrent strategy, either without traditional reliance on arms, or thinking about the difficulty in knowing kind of where the attack is coming from, and so the like lower concern of a second strike and how that might affect decisions over nuclear latency or not?

Matt Fuhrmann 51:33

Yeah, these are really important issues, and when we're dealing with emerging technology, it's a little bit difficult, because we don't have a lot of data, and the technology is constantly evolving. So with the caveat that it's difficult to answer that question definitively, definitively, I would say that any technology, whether it's AI or anything else, that reduces one's confidence that it has a reliable second strike capability is probably going to be destabilizing. So you know, if a country is worried about its networks being hacked in a way that would cause it to lose control of its own nuclear weapons, for example, that would be seen as undermining its second strike capability, and there's a lot of theory and evidence, too that that's a destabilizing situation to potentially be in. So this is something that that nuclear security scholars are watching very closely, because as as the technology evolves, it can change some of the earlier conceptions we had about deterrence. You know, another thing that people are worried about is if you can, you know, reliably locate and destroy facilities or weapons in a way that you couldn't do before, because of precision strike or because of AI or other capabilities, you know, that's going to have implications for deterrence as well. So you know, if there's any graduate students out there or anyone thinking about potential interesting topics, I think this is a really important one, thinking about how emerging technologies map onto our traditional understanding of deterrence is really important, and we need more people thinking about this and working on it.

Margaret Peters 53:28

Yeah, I agree. And you know, it is. It's always hard with this because, you know, emerging technologies are really hard because we don't have a lot of information, we don't have a lot of data. But I would say, suggest that even though it's emerging technology, there might be historical examples or other things. You can go back and look at where we've had new emerging technologies. And you know what I like so much about Matt's book is, like, the sort of historical knowledge and these historical cases too, that help us inform a lot of like, what's going on today. So don't just think because something is new, you can't study it, I guess.

Matt Fuhrmann 54:05

Yeah, absolutely great. Well, this

Margaret Peters 54:08

is really lovely. Thank you so much again for coming and joining us today. And I really enjoyed the book. And for those of you who are interested in the book, we've put a link to purchase it for those of you who are on the UCLA campus. It is also another one of these books that our library has already put purchased a you know, copies of and also has electronic copies of it. They spent the big bucks on the book and bought the E copy for you, and as always say, we get basically nothing from our books, and so we really want people to read them. And so take a look at the book. It's really interesting, and it's got all this really great data and just really interesting information. So for people who are interested in this topic, I think it's a really great read. And thank you again, Matt, so much for coming. And this is our last book webinar for the quarter, and we'll be back in late January with some more amazing authors. So thank you. Thank you again, so much for coming.

Matt Fuhrmann 55:15

Thanks a lot. Maggie, I really enjoyed it.

Margaret Peters 55:18

I appreciate it. Thanks, everybody.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai