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This book explores the history of peaceful nuclear cooperation, with particular emphasis on atoms for peace and how they unintentionally become atoms for war. It tackles the use of economic statecraft to achieve foreign policy objectives and the unintended consequences of tools of international influence. It considers why nuclear weapons suppliers provide peaceful nuclear assistance to other countries and whether peaceful nuclear assistance raises the likelihood of nuclear weapons proliferation. It also examines whether international institutions have influenced the nuclear marketplace and effectively separated the peaceful and military uses of the atom. The book focuses on the Pakistani-based A. Q. Khan network—which provided nuclear technology to help Iran, Libya, and North Korea build nuclear weapons—and other cases of deliberate proliferation assistance. It suggests that policymakers should rethink some of their policies on nonproliferation and peaceful nuclear cooperation.

This chapter examines how peaceful nuclear assistance to other states is used by nuclear weapons suppliers as a tool of economic statecraft to influence the behavior of their friends and adversaries. It discusses three main politico-strategic reasons why suppliers engage in peaceful nuclear cooperation: to keep their allies and alliances strong; to constrain their enemies; and to prop up democracies in the international system. It also considers three alternative explanations for peaceful nuclear assistance: countries use atomic assistance to strengthen nonproliferation norms; countries sell nuclear technology to make money; countries offer nuclear assistance to sustain their domestic nuclear industries (for example, suppliers with lower domestic demand for nuclear energy are more likely to provide nuclear assistance than states with a high domestic demand for nuclear energy).

This chapter provides an overview of definitions and patterns of peaceful nuclear cooperation. It considers some issues that are pertinent to nuclear cooperation, such as the meaning of peaceful nuclear assistance, the different types of aid that nuclear weapons suppliers can provide, how atomic assistance can be measured, and the historical trends in civilian nuclear cooperation. It also examines six operational categories of peaceful nuclear cooperation: nuclear safety, transfer of intangibles, nuclear materials, research reactors, power reactors, and fuel cycle facilities. Finally, it explains what peaceful nuclear assistance is not. The chapter includes an appendix that discusses the procedures employed to produce a dataset that identifies nuclear cooperation agreements signed between 1945 and 2000.