Bombs and Dollars

Two professors who study nuclear proliferation — Nick Miller at Dartmouth and Vipin Narang at MIT — have a neat little piece in Politico Magazine about which poli-sci theories predicted North Korea’s bomb and which didn’t. Long story short: most didn’t. Etel Solingen’s Nuclear Logics (2007) holds up well. It was, of course, published four years after North Korea’s withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and the year after its first nuclear test. Still, case studies aside, her earlier work presented the same essential set of ideas. So, bravo!

There are many competing ideas in the field, but the widest divide is between those who privilege capabilities and those who privilege intentions. Or, if you prefer the lingo of microeconomics, there’s a “supply” school and a “demand” school. If you’re paying attention at all to my occasional scribblings, like this recent feature with Catherine Dill, you’ll know that I’m on the demand/intentions side. That’s not to say that some very basic level of resources and especially managerial capacity isn’t needed. (Over to you, Malfrid Braut-Hegghammer.) But most states of interest have what it takes.

I bring this up because reading the Miller-Narang piece reminded me of a data table I pulled together a few years ago while working on a project that’s still on a back burner. The idea was to compare states’ resource levels when they “went nuclear” and see what the pattern looks like. In particular, where does impoverished North Korea fall in the list?

First, I went through the list of countries that have conducted nuclear explosions, or are believed by scholars to have built devices for that purpose. There are ten of them. In each case, I identified the year of the first such test (or my sense of the consensus of the earliest time when such a first test could have happened). Then I looked up each country’s gross domestic product for that year, indexed for inflation.

All this is based on the view that GDP–or some other, comparable measure of economic output–is the single best proxy for “resources.” We often make the mistake of thinking of countries as “rich” or “poor” as a whole based on their GDP per capita. While that’s a good measure for level of development, it doesn’t tell you what sort of pool of resources the state potentially has at its command. For that question, just plain old GDP is the way to go.

Here’s what I found:

Ital. = no confirmed nuclear tests.

Yep, that’s right! North Korea, as poor as it is, isn’t at the bottom of the list.

Israel in 1967 was, as a whole, poorer than North Korea in 2006, as a whole. For perspective, Israel had fewer than 3 million people then; North Korea had about 25 million in 2006.

Also surprising: India and China are near the top of the list. But the same sort of observation applies: they were (and are) hugely populous, much moreso than the European countries just below China in the list.

The “GDP per capita” version of the list (not shown here) is much more intuitive: the bottom three countries are North Korea (2006), India (1974), and China (1964), China being the poorest per capita. But, as I’ve argued above, that’s not relevant to a centralized national project like making the Bomb. Our intuitions about wealth and poverty mislead us on this score.

The two ends of the list of bomb-builders are separated by a couple orders of magnitude’s worth of GDP. A country with less than $17 billion in annual output (in 1990 US dollars, like all the other figures above) managed to pull it off, according to Avner Cohen among others. That’s just somewhat more than half of the output that North Korea is estimated to have had at the time of its first nuclear test.

The bottom line: resource levels–as approximated by GDP–are not the key.

(Caveats: The figures come from Angus Maddison’s historical statistics project. The issue of opaque nuclear proliferation means that Pakistan’s correct year arguably should be sometime in the 1980s. Those with different analytical preferences are free to build their own versions of the table, although I doubt it would end up being drastically different.)