Two Visions of Nuclear Weapons in Asia

[ 135 ] book review roundtable • nuclear logics & the long shadow Two Visions of Nuclear Weapons in Asia Jacques E.C. Hymans In 1945 the United States dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan, killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians: the most barbaric atrocity of a barbarous war. Ever since that time, there has been no more important challenge for scholars of international relations than to understand the political dynamics that are engendered by the potential for mass killing at the flick of a switch. In recent years, as the world has turned topsy-turvy, the importance of this challenge has re-emerged with new urgency. Muthiah Alagappa’s The Long Shadow and Etel Solingen’s Nuclear Logics take up the challenge with particular reference to the continent of Asia.1 As both of these authors are powerful voices in the field of international relations, their works command our attention. Pairing them together for review and discussion is a splendid exercise, for Alagappa and Solingen offer very different visions of the past, present, and likely future of nuclear weapons in Asia. The two works do not disagree on every point, but the contrast between them is pronounced and very much worth exploring. This essay will highlight some of the core differences in order to encourage the authors to clarify their arguments, explain how they reached their conclusions, and discuss areas for improvement. Descriptive inferences u The most basic difference between the two works lies in how they respectively describe the level of attraction of Asian states to nuclear weapons. For Alagappa, “The interest in nuclear weapons in Asia and the Middle East was not diminished by the termination of the Cold War. The new strategic environment, with a dominating United States and a rapidly rising China, provided additional or new impetus for the acquisition and development of a nuclear weapons capability” (p. 6). Alagappa is convinced that no significant state in the region today can fail to have at least some kind of ready nuclear option, whether that option is an indigenous capability, a credible extended deterrence commitment from the United States, or a mix of the two. He concludes, “Nuclear weapons are becoming a crucial component 1 Although The Long Shadow is an edited volume, Alagappa himself contributes nearly a book’s worth of material—approximately 175 pages. While acknowledging the hard work of the volume’s many contributors, the present essay focuses on Alagappa’s perspective. jacques e.c. hymans is Assistant Professor in the Department of International Relations at the University of Southern California and, for the 2008–09 academic year, an Abe Fellow in residence at Keio University, Tokyo. He can be reached at . [ 136 ] asia policy of national security policies and postures of states in the Asian security region” (p. 484). By contrast, Solingen offers her book as a “systematic effort to explain divergent nuclear behavior in the two regions” of East Asia and the Middle East (p. 11). These divergent paths are described in the titles she gives to parts 2 and 3 of her book—“East Asia: Denuclearization as the Norm, Nuclearization as the Anomaly” and “The Middle East: Nuclearization as the Norm, Denuclearization as the Anomaly.”2 Thus, Solingen may agree with Alagappa’s observation of an Asian nuclearizing trend when it comes to the Middle East but not when it comes to East Asia. In Solingen’s view, most East Asian regimes have chosen denuclearization not because of a misplaced idealism but rather because their ruling groups have perceived overwhelming “incentives to avoid the political, economic, reputational, and opportunity costs of acquiring nuclear weapons” (p. 5). She argues that these ruling groups would likely still perceive the costs of nuclearization as very high even in the absence of a credible U.S. security guarantee. It is perhaps relevant to note here the apparent impact on Alagappa’s and Solingen’s descriptive inferences of their respective ontological choices on the fundamental question of what is a region—a topic that each author has considered at length elsewhere. Since Alagappa “treats Asia defined broadly as a single security region” (p. 28), he not surprisingly finds great similarities between the nuclear paths of states from Tokyo to...