"Winner of the 2008 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award, American Political Science Association" "Etel Solingen - Winner of the 2018 William and Katherine Estes Award, National Academy of Sciences" "Co-Winner of the 2008 Robert Jervis and Paul Schroeder Award for the Best Book on International History and Politics, International History and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association" Etel Solingen is Distinguished Professor and Thomas T. and Elizabeth C. Tierney Chair in Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of California, Irvine, and the recipient of the National Academy of Sciences 2018 William and Katherine Estes Award.
Nuclear Logics examines why some states seek nuclear weapons while others renounce them. Looking closely at nine cases in East Asia and the Middle East, Etel Solingen finds two distinct regional patterns. In East Asia, the norm since the late 1960s has been to forswear nuclear weapons, and North Korea, which makes no secret of its nuclear ambitions, is the anomaly. In the Middle East the opposite is the case, with Iran, Iraq, Israel, and Libya suspected of pursuing nuclear-weapons capabilities, with Egypt as the anomaly in recent decades.
Identifying the domestic conditions underlying these divergent paths, Solingen argues that there are clear differences between states whose leaders advocate integration in the global economy and those that reject it. Among the former are countries like South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan, whose leaders have had stronger incentives to avoid the political, economic, and other costs of acquiring nuclear weapons. The latter, as in most cases in the Middle East, have had stronger incentives to exploit nuclear weapons as tools in nationalist platforms geared to helping their leaders survive in power. Solingen complements her bold argument with other logics explaining nuclear behavior, including security dilemmas, international norms and institutions, and the role of democracy and authoritarianism. Her account charts the most important frontier in understanding nuclear proliferation: grasping the relationship between internal and external political survival. Nuclear Logics is a pioneering book that is certain to provide an invaluable resource for researchers, teachers, and practitioners while reframing the policy debate surrounding nonproliferation. "Nuclear Logics is a ground-breaking work demonstrating how theory-oriented studies in political science should be conducted. Nuclear Logics is an admirable undertaking which makes an indispensable contribution to IR theory development."---Shih-Yu Chou, Political Studies Review "The most comprehensive, theoretical, and systematic challenge [to system-level imperatives] in years. . . . This is an impressive work . . . of primary value to experts and graduate students." "Solingen's argument is cogent and well researched . . . convincing and intuitive . . . demolishes the structural realist account. . . . It deserves a wide readership." "A serious, scholarly piece of work . . . reinvigorating the already rich theoretical debate on this issue. . . . Her methodological tools could prove useful in determining which Middle Eastern countries are more likely to go nuclear in reaction to Iran's programme." "Proliferation theory steps outside the ivory tower in Etel Solingen's recent book, Nuclear Logics." "The cutting edge of nonproliferation research . . . should be of great interest to both policy practitioners and scholars. [This book] display(s) a combination of theoretical sophistication, methodological rigor, focused comparative analysis involving original field research, and attention to hypothesis testing rarely found in the nonproliferation literature." "Nuclear Logics is a timely study with important theoretical and practical implications. At the theoretical level, it encourages us to set aside monocausal explanations in favour of a more sophisticated but still transportable approach. At the practical level, the
