Man-Sung Yim
I begin with an important question: Is there a re-lationship between nuclear power and nuclear prolif-eration? There are currently about 30 or 31 countries operating commissioned nuclear power plants. Six countries currently own nuclear weapons. Of the 23 countries that at one time or another explored the idea of developing nuclear weapons, only 4 of these have become nuclear weapons states: Israel, India, Paki-stan, and North Korea. What does this tell us about the pathway between civilian nuclear power and nu-clear weapons development? It’s actually rather hard to say whether it has a direct relationship or not. One way to find out is to look at the history of nuclear pro-liferation behavior. There are precedents for this type of work. Steven N. Meyer did a salient study in 1984.
Little was done for a few decades thereafter. Then suddenly in 2004, Chris Way and Sonali Singh wrote a paper on this topic. They were followed by a number of scholars including Matt Fuhrmann, Matt Kroenig, and eventually Scott Sagan, who all wrote papers on patterns of proliferation.
I have been engaged in an effort with my col-leagues to create a model that might help us predict proliferation behavior. Such a tool, we think, might prove useful for policymakers. To do this, a model must consider the kinds of factors that make a country want to proliferate and the various dynamics at work within a country’s specific situation and capabilities.
It must also be applicable to specific scenarios chosen by a country.
There are some potential pitfalls and limitations in the use of models which we are trying to overcome.
Among these is the difficulty in gathering the relevant information. For example, we want to examine the motivations, the dynamics, and requirements of nu-clear proliferation. We want to look at both the sup-ply and demand factors. To that end, we are develop-ing our own database. Some of the data comes from Sonali Singh’s work—he used the Correlates of War Database—and Doong-Joon Jo and Erick Gartzke’s work.1 We also relied on the open source data from the IAEA. We have collected five different sets of data on 1) economic development, 2) security environ-ment, 3) international status, 4) political developenviron-ment, and 5) nuclear technology capability, and the national status vis-à-vis nuclear nonproliferation norms. There is nothing sensitive about these data. We’ve tried, and we actually continue, to use only open source infor-mation for obvious reasons.
The database has 46 variables and covers about 114 countries from 1945 through 1992 or sometimes 2000.
These countries have a relatively large economy to be considered. We also include some 23 other countries which have engaged in proliferation. We have also defined different levels of proliferation, distinguish-ing between countries that have shown an “interest in exploring” from those who have “actively pursued”
and those that have acquired at least one functional nuclear weapon.
There are a number of different modeling ap-proaches that can be used, including an event-history approach and a multinomial-logit approach.2 We have drawn up a list of variables that help explain what happens when nations proliferate. These include the factors that affect the behavior and decisions of
prolif-erators at various levels outlined above. What kinds of insights can we get from the model?
Let’s start with what the model predicts about states that have an extensive investment in civil-ian nuclear power. Matt Fuhrmann, currently at the University of South Carolina,3 suggests that civilian nuclear power encourages an interest in weapons de-velopment. But our work suggests that perhaps that is not the case. It suggests that the more electricity you generate from nuclear power, the less likely you are to engage in nuclear proliferation.
If we look at countries that were part of the original Atoms for Peace program, quite a few seem to have at least thought about developing a weapons capabil-ity. But various factors hindered them—we call these
“inhibitors.” What about civilian nuclear power? Was it an “inhibitor”? What we found is that it depends on how much of a country’s electric generation flows from nuclear energy. If you pursue a civilian nuclear industry in a major way, it’s going to be a significant inhibitor. How significant will vary, depending on a variety of other factors: for example, does the country develop its own reactors, employ offsite fuel fabrica-tion capabilities, etc.; how involved is the country in the international community; and how much indus-trial production is there? One must also factor in the presence of traditional IAEA safeguards. But the more you rely on civilian power production, the more in-hibited you are. This is actually common sense. When you have invested in the creation of an infrastructure suitable for the development of a civilian nuclear in-dustry, you are going to want to go on reaping the benefit of that investment. You don’t want to become an international pariah at that point. Hence my model predicts that a nation with a lot at stake in the com-mercial nuclear sector may become more cautious.
We can also approach the issue from a different direction and ask: What are the determinants of suc-cessful nuclear power capability development? In his Introduction, Steven Miller stated that there are some 60 countries that want to be successful in this area.
What do you need for this to happen? Let’s think first about the countries that were part of the original At-oms for Peace project, the grand vision that President Eisenhower offered to the world. If you are part of the Atoms for Peace group, you get monetary assistance from IAEA. The list includes countries like Argentina, Pakistan, Chile, and Sweden.
Many of them have investigated nuclear technol-ogy and have started some work by importing tech-nology, by importing research directors, by training people, etc. Of these, many of them don’t as yet have nuclear power. Some like India, Pakistan, and Israel have nuclear weapons. Over time, more countries joined the Atoms for Peace group. But the picture doesn’t change much. Even though these states start-ed work, the majority still don’t have nuclear power.
Others have some capacity but not much. 4 India has spent a lot of money on civilian nuclear power devel-opment. But given how much has been invested, the amount of electricity it is getting is very small. We could even conclude it’s a failed program as far as commercial development is concerned. Pakistan has likewise failed—it has two reactors producing 1.9 per-cent of its electricity, a meager amount.
What were the things that helped countries devel-op nuclear power—we call them promoters—or con-versely, what were the inhibitors? Promoters included a good size gross domestic product (GDP), a consider-able industrial capacity, major power status, the ex-istence of a nuclear weapons program, a democratic
tradition, Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) ratification, and the existence of IAEA safeguards.
Having a nuclear weapons program also was a factor in helping these countries develop nuclear power.
The inhibitors of civilian nuclear development included diplomatic isolation, frequent military dis-putes, enduring rivalries, and frequent changes in economic openness. Interestingly, getting IAEA as-sistance was an inhibitor—which means that coun-tries who got IAEA assistance weren’t able to make a good return on the investment. Corruption is also important. But we are looking for the variables with information that will help us complete our data. We haven’t as yet added economic sanctions but are in the process of so doing. We also plan to include some-thing about leader psychology, the characteristics of government bureaucracy, and so on. Those are very important variables but are not included in our cur-rent database due to lack of readily available data.
We are also looking at developing countries that attempted the development of civilian nuclear power capability as newcomer states. Unlike countries with a lot of resources, these don’t have much to work with. There are 20 to 30 countries which, when they were still developing nations, initiated major civilian nuclear energy projects. States like Argentina, Brazil, India, Iran, Iraq, Mexico, Pakistan, Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, Turkey, and Yugoslavia are all in this category. They all took some steps in this direction.
Not all of them, however, got very far. For example, the Philippines and Turkey both spent a lot of money in an effort to develop civilian nuclear power. They did not succeed, however.
If we analyze what contributed to the success or failure of newcomer countries, we find that the factors
at work are not much different from those operating among the initial Atoms for Peace countries. In par-ticular, economic openness is very important along with the commitment to nuclear nonproliferation. If you want to become a successful country and if you want to become successful in developing nuclear power, you want to be open to the world economy while remaining committed to nonproliferation. But if you do something that awakens suspicion and you have a sanction imposed on you, and if you have a limited openness, that will hurt you. This is a good lesson to learn.
THE WATER-ENERGY-SECURITY NEXUS