Kunal Singh

Dissertation/Book Project

Nipping the Atom in the Bud: Strategies of Counterproliferation and How States Select Among Them

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Paper Under Review

“Varieties of Counterproliferation Strategies and How States Select Among Them.”

Abstract: When one state, a proliferant, starts a nuclear weapons program, what are the strategies available to another, the counterproliferator, to stop that program? Which strategy does the counterproliferator choose and why? The existing literature cannot explain why states choose a particular strategy against a particular proliferant. In this article, I develop a typology of counterproliferation strategies and a novel theory to explain how states select from among them. I argue that a counterproliferator chooses its strategy based on an expected decline in the relative balance of power if the proliferant successfully acquires nuclear weapons. If the expected decline is drastic, the counterproliferator begins by considering costly military strategies. If not, it selects diplomatic strategies first and resorts to military threats as a last resort. I conduct a plausibility probe on eight proliferant-counterproliferator dyads and find that my theory’s predictions are consistent with the empirical record in seven. Thereafter, I undertake a case study of one of the dyads, with Pakistan as the proliferant and India as the counterproliferator, to demonstrate the working of my theory. My case study presents fresh empirical insights generated from field interviews with top national security officials in India.

Book Chapter

“The Imperative for a Deeper India-US Strategic Partnership,” in India’s Marathon: Reshaping the Post-Pandemic World Order, ed. Pranay Kotasthane, Anirudh Kanisetti, and Nitin Pai (Bangalore, India: The Takshashila Institution, 2020).

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Papers in Progress

“Explaining North Korea’s Unlikely Success: Personalist Regimes, Weak State Capacity, and Nuclear Weapons Programs.”

Abstract: North Korea’s stunning success in building nuclear weapons has posed difficult questions for existing theories of proliferation to answer. Theories of nuclear proliferation suggest that a personalist regime ruling over a state with anemic capacity should fail at building the bomb. In this article, I present a theory that can explain North Korea’s success and the failures of other similar states like Saddam Hussein-led Iraq. In a nutshell, an internally secure personalist regime with weak state capacity has a better chance of successfully pursuing nuclear weapons than a similar regime battling internal challenges. I identify the causal mechanism that links internal security challenges, specifically coup risk and the risk of ethnic conflicts, to lower involvement of the top leader in the nuclear weapons program. Using the accounts provided by Iraqi scientists and engineers, I show this mechanism at work in Saddam’s regime. The paucity of empirical evidence from within the North Korean nuclear weapons program prevents a satisfactory test of the theory for that state; however, I do show that the Kim dynasty faced lower internal security challenges and that the top leaders paid greater attention to the nuclear weapons program.

“Nuclear Rivals and Conventional Conflicts: The Role of Precision Weaponry in India-Pakistan Crises,” with Yogesh Joshi

Abstract: Frequent India-Pakistan crises in this century have provided data points to analyze the drivers of military escalation between two nuclear-weapons states locked in an intense security competition. The similar nature of the crises, starting with violence from non-state actors with varying degrees of link with the Pakistani state, provides a basis for comparing India’s evolving response over a period of more than two decades. Over this period, India has looked for options in the realm of conventional conflict to punish Pakistan for its support of sub-conventional warfare. This search started with a variety of ground invasion plans and has culminated in the employment of precision standoff weapons. Building on Thomas Schelling’s work on limited war under the nuclear shadow, this paper argues that India’s use of precision standoff capabilities can be explained by the superior ability of such weapons to impose costs while remaining below the adversary’s nuclear threshold. The paper compares precision standoff weapons to other ground and air warfare options on this count and demonstrates India’s defense acquisition tilting towards the former. The paper also discusses the non-negligible risks of nuclear escalation that nevertheless remain and outlines the exact pathways that could lead to a catastrophe.

“Subordinating Security Competition to Economic Cooperation: Explaining Variation in China’s Proliferation Assistance.”

Abstract: This article explains the variation between China’s proliferation assistance to two of its neighbors — North Korea and Pakistan — with which it shares common rivals. Chinese assistance to the Pakistani nuclear weapons program included everything from fissile material to bomb design. Chinese scientists visited Pakistan to help with several aspects of the bomb and missile programs. On the other hand, Beijing merely helped undermine U.S. economic sanctions on North Korea and facilitated the transfer of advanced centrifuges from Pakistan. I argue that states assist potential proliferators for security reasons if they share a common rival, but that support is tempered if they expect future benefits from maintaining strong trade ties with that common rival. I make this argument in two steps. First, states distinguish between core and non-core security objectives, and are more open to sacrificing their non-core security objectives like proliferation assistance in favor of attaining economic objectives when the two are in conflict. Second, according to the Heckscher-Ohlin (H-O) model of international trade, China, as a labor-abundant country, saw greater future benefits out of trading with the capital-abundant United States and Japan (common rivals with North Korea) than with labor-abundant India (its common rival with Pakistan).

“Bastions are Safer for SSBNs: Visualizing a Future Strategic ASW Campaign in the Bay of Bengal.”

Abstract: Nuclear-powered, ballistic missile-carrying submarines (SSBNs) are deemed to be the most survivable leg of the nuclear forces. SSBNs help make nuclear weapons “the great equalizer” of international politics. However, some experts have argued that the emergence of certain anti-submarine warfare (ASW) technologies is eroding the survivability of the SSBNs, and hence tilting the nuclear balance in favor of wealthier and technologically superior powers with a strong suite of counterforce capabilities. In this paper, I argue that inferior states can utilize geographical factors and some of the same advanced ASW technologies for defensive purposes much better than superior states can use them in offensive operations. The Soviet Union did that against the United States by opting for a ‘bastion strategy’ during the later stages of the Cold War. This paper has two parts: first, a discussion of what a strategic ASW operation looks like and what its major challenges are, and second, a hypothetical future campaign analysis of undersea competition between India and China in the Indian Ocean. The campaign analysis shows how India can use its own bastion, or near-home waters of the Bay of Bengal, to build a defensible maritime area and thus protect its SSBNs.

“Cheap Thrills: Audience Costs in the Age of Social Media,” with Raymond Wang

Abstract: Audience cost literature has generated several hypotheses on when, why, and which states issue threats against others. One of them is that autocracies are more prone to issuing threats than democracies. Increasing prevalence of Twitter in the conduct of international diplomacy allows us to test this hypothesis and its mechanism. Specifically, censorship of Twitter in Iran and China strengthens the assumption of the literature — that autocratic regimes are less accountable than their democratic counterparts — by blocking the domestic audience from accessing the Twitter activity of their state officials. We use supervised and semi-supervised machine learning approaches to identify threatening tweets from close to half a million tweets by officials of 46 countries. We find that censorship has a positive and statistically significant association with the tendency to issue threats on Twitter. The effect is robust across three classification methods: keyword assisted topic models, naïve Bayes classifier, and regularized K-folds cross-validation.

“How Regimes Select the Wars They Fight: A New Explanation for Democratic Peace.”

Abstract: Democratic peace remains a puzzling outcome for scholars to explain. In this paper, I argue that democratic peace is neither the result of random chance, as realists would argue, nor can it be explained by liberal ideas and institutions. I propose a new theory that can explain why democracies do not go to war with each other. I argue that democracies and authoritarian countries select different kinds of wars. Based on the codings used in the Correlates of War datasets, I classify wars as means to achieve three types of revisionist objectives: territory, regime, and policy. The state initiating the conflict may want to revise one of these vis-à-vis its adversary. I show that democracies are less likely to go to war against another state to revise territorial boundaries. This could have both realist and normative roots. To complement this finding, I also show that democracies are less likely to be targeted by other states trying to achieve regime and policy revisionism. This is because people in a democratic regime are unlikely to tolerate foreign-imposed regimes or policies even after their state is defeated in a war. Democratic peace, therefore, is obtained because democracies do not start wars for the same objectives for which they are targeted.