Do nuclear States turn more macho?

January 30, 2012 16:04

What happens to nation-States that acquire nuclear weapons, do they start walking with a swagger? Do they become more aggressive? Do their neighbours turn envious and therefore aggressive?

James Fearon's study in the themonkeycage.org offers insights into these questions.

'Using Zeev Maoz's version of the Correlates of War's militarized interstate dispute data,' Fearon has prepared a graph which shows, 'for each of the nine states that acquired nuclear capability at some time between 1945 and 2001, their yearly rate of militarized disputes in years when they didn't have nukes, and the rate for years when they did.

'Fearon says China, France, India, Israel, Pakistan, and the UK 'all saw declines in their total militarized dispute involvement in the years after they got nuclear weapons.'

Read his full article here.

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