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This chapter identifies three main types of regional power nuclear postures, arrayed across a spectrum of capabilities and deployment procedures. This theory, the Posture Optimization Theory, explains why the existing regional nuclear powers have adopted the nuclear postures and strategies they have, and generates testable predictions about what type of nuclear posture future regional nuclear powers might adopt based on a set of readily observable variables. Because of the dearth of regional states that have acquired nuclear weapons, this exercise has inherent limitations. However, by testing the framework against the existing empirical record, we can determine whether it provides a plausible framework with which to explain the choices of existing regional powers and to predict the choices that future nuclear powers might make.

This chapter examines the experiences of three US industries — chemical manufacturing, tobacco, and nuclear power — that came under political, legal, and rhetorical attack following World War II, and identifies cross-cutting patterns in the public and private interests who besieged the industries, and in how they responded. At varying times and with few notable exceptions, the conflicts progressed through five stages: industry success and optimism following the war; sustained challenges by social movements; increasing regulatory control by a ‘new social’ regulatory regime in the early 1970s; new, specialized accommodationist public relations strategies and tactics; and involvement in large-scale tort regulation. Unlike most studies of alleged and real corporate malfeasance, this chapter considers both corporate and anti-corporate interests and actions, and suggests a framework for understanding post-World-War-II political economy more broadly.

This chapter lays out the volume's main arguments in brief. Contrary to the usual focus on superpowers and Cold War nuclear competition, the chapter proposes a different dynamic. It asks what strategies and choices certain states will make about their nuclear weapons and how those decisions about nuclear strategy can affect international relations and conflict. Examining the decisions that regional nuclear powers—such as China, India, Pakistan, Israel, France, and South Africa—have made about their arsenals thus far, and their resulting behavior, helps address these questions. Regional nuclear powers, for systematic and predictable reasons, choose clearly identifiable nuclear postures and these postures matter to a regional power's ability to deter conflict. These countries' nuclear choices, therefore, provide valuable insight into the crucial challenges of contemporary nuclear proliferation and international stability.

This chapter probes questions regarding how nuclear weapons or nuclear postures affect crisis dynamics, by examining whether there is variation in states' decisions to escalate or de-escalate a crisis as a function of nuclear posture. That is, within a crisis, the chapter considers if some nuclear postures deter states from conflict escalation better than others. In answering this question, this chapter uncovers the mechanisms responsible for the relationship between regional nuclear postures and deterrence outcomes, ensuring that the correlations established in the statistical analysis are not just spurious but are real and causal. To do this, the chapter explores the findings from the large-n analysis in more fine-grained crisis settings.

Nuclear power is an example of a technology that, in the absence of military and defense-related research, development, and procurement, would not have been developed at all. The demonstration of controlled nuclear fission at the University of Chicago’s Stagg Field on December 2, 1942 initiated a chain of events that led to the development of the atomic bomb and nuclear power. The design of the first nuclear power reactor, located at Shippingport, Pennsylvania, was adapted from nuclear reactors developed to power nuclear submarines. Premature commitment to light water reactor technology appears, in retrospect, to have been a source of failure of the nuclear power industry to realize the promise it appeared to have in the 1950s. It is possible that during the first half of the 21st century, nuclear power will be able to make a significant contribution to meeting the growth in demand for electric power; by substituting for carbon-based fuels, it may also contribute to slowing the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

This chapter traces South Africa's nuclear posture—how it intended to operationalize and use its six nuclear devices—and explores the sources of that particular strategy. Since 1978, in a very explicit strategy statement outlined by Prime Minister P. W. Botha who held the reins of the South African program for its duration, South Africa clearly envisioned and operationalized a catalytic nuclear posture designed to draw in Western—particularly American—assistance in the event of an overwhelming Soviet or Cuban-backed conventional threat to South Africa through Angola, Namibia, or Mozambique. Given the risk of additional sanctions and isolation if South Africa became an open nuclear power, optimization theory predicts that South Africa would adopt a catalytic posture if it believed it could successfully compel the United States to intervene on its behalf in the face of a severe threat.

This chapter focuses on inconsistency between upholding competition over monopoly and proposing a big expansion of nuclear power. That these were incompatible within a market framework was not to become apparent until electricity privatization after the 1987 election victory.

This chapter focuses on the privatization of the nuclear industry. It looks at the 1994 nuclear review and the subsequent sale of some of the nuclear reactors, leaving only the Magnox stations with British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL) (which also took much of the nuclear contractual risk for the new British Energy, as well as having responsibility for the THORP reprocessing plant and the Sellafield site).

This is the third of four chapters focusing on America’s perceptions of China’s capabilities, and dwelling on the correspondence between those perceptions and the projected consequences. It presents an assessment of America’s perceptions of China as a nuclear power, discussing the new complexities that this brought to the Sino-American relationship and to their respective broader foreign-policy agendas. The different sections of the chapter look at the process of China’s acquisition of the atomic bomb (the first atomic device was exploded by them in October 1964), the US response to this, US and international assessments of China’s nuclear power and the impact on non-proliferation, and US assessments of China’s nuclear weapons programme.

The decline in supplies of carbon fuels (coal, petroleum, and natural gas), the increased worldwide demand for modern energy, political instability because of the geographic location of carbon fuels, the needs of the least developed parts of the world, and the contribution of carbon fuels to climate change combine to compel a change in the current world energy picture with its heavy reliance on these fuels. Nuclear power addresses some of the carbon fuel concerns. However, the dark sides of nuclear power (accidental radiation release, risk of improper diversions, high costs) make it unattractive, and to some energy planners and thinkers, unacceptable. This chapter draws on statistics and commentary from some of the significant international organisations involved with nuclear power. The United States, despite its nuclear ambivalence, remains the nation with the most nuclear power plants and one of the major players in many aspects of nuclear energy. It has also been a pioneer in many aspects of nuclear law.

This chapter discusses for-profit democracy, in which the utilitarian rule of the most people and the greatest profit defines the government's purpose. It focuses on nuclear power as an outcome of for-profit democracy. Regulators merged energy as a necessary good with its status as necessity for profit. Without the private production of energy, people could scarcely live, nor could the nation maintain its economic productivity, so the logic goes. By virtue of such thinking, nuclear dominates any counterargument about risks or property costs, as does any other privately owned energy utility keeping the lights on. The United States has the most privatized nuclear power production regime in the world; the Tennessee Valley Authority constitutes the sole federally owned and operated nuclear power generating entity.

The 1953 U.S. Atoms for Peace initiative launched the dissemination of nuclear technologies to non-weapon states. It also led to the establishment in 1957 of the International Atomic Energy Agency and to the Nonproliferation Treaty of 1970. The spread of nuclear power programs also has led to the spread of sensitive enrichment and reprocessing technologies which has given some non-weapon states the means of producing fissile material and thereby a “latent” proliferation capability, where a state could quickly produce nuclear weapons should it decide to do so. Even a small nuclear power program can provide a nuclear weapon breakout potential. The proliferation dangers associated with today’s dominant nuclear fuel cycle come from the fact that the uranium enrichment plants that produce low-enriched uranium for fuel could be rapidly converted to produce highly enriched uranium for weapons and that some countries reprocess spent fuel to recover plutonium, a weapons material, to recycle as fuel.

This chapter presents Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan's recollections about the week immediately following the Great East Japan earthquake. Topics discussed include the response team meeting at the Emergency Disaster Response Headquarters; the Act on Special Measures Concerning Nuclear Emergency Preparedness; the declaration of a nuclear emergency; whether the state has authority over TEPCO's Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant; the responsibilities of the Nuclear Safety Commission and Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency; TEPCO's inability to resolve problems on their own; the evacuation of residents with within a three-kilometer [1.9 mile] radius of the nuclear power plant; and Kan's decision to address the Japanese people a day and a half after the earthquake.

The fallout controversy with respect to nuclear power and radiation of the 1950s and early 1960s largely disappeared as a prominent public policy issue after the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963. But many questions about the consequences of fallout remained unresolved, and the debate left a legacy of ongoing scientific inquiry and latent public anxiety about the health effects of low-level radiation. The major issue was the hazards of radioactive effluents released from nuclear power plants. The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), which the 1954 Atomic Energy Act had made responsible both for encouraging the development of nuclear power and for certifying its safety, stood at the center of the new debate over radiation risks. Critics emphasized the AEC's dual and inherently conflicting mandate to promote and to regulate nuclear power technology in their indictments of the agency's performance.

The first half of this chapter addresses the passage of warships with a focus on the exercise of that right in areas over which a coastal state has sovereignty: the territorial sea, straits, and archipelagic waters. It examines the respective rights and duties of the coastal state and the flag state of the naval vessel in relation to innocent passage and transit passage. A further section considers special requirements for submarines and for nuclear-powered or equipped vessels. In the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) and on the high seas, the range of permissible military activities beyond passage increases. The second half of the chapter addresses this broader category of activities. Issues surrounding military activities in the EEZ, weapons tests on the high seas, and the peace-time use of security zones are all considered.

This chapter presents Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan's recollections about the actions he took before his resignation. In particular, he explains the circumstances behind his gradual move away from the use of nuclear power. He says that his experience of the nuclear accident that began to unfold on March 11, 2011, made him realize that a nuclear accident carried with it a risk so large that it could lead to the collapse of a country. He became convinced that what they had been calling “safe nuclear power” could only be found through independence from nuclear power. He also describes the passage of a bill to promote renewable energy and the shutdown of the Hamaoka Nuclear Power Plant.

This chapter presents contemporary International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reports, statements from scientists attempting to lay the foundation for nuclear research and development, and the interviews with senior officials from the former Libyan regime, which elucidate how the erosion of the Libyan state affected the nuclear establishment as it prepared to launch a nuclear power program. These sources show how the reactor program was stymied by the absence of planning and preparations prior to the collapse of the Soviet reactor deal in 1986. This helps to explain why the Libyan program was so vulnerable to the loss of foreign assistance, and why the decade-long research and development program focusing on centrifuges failed to launch.