Identities, emotions, and the nuclear choice

The previous four chapters on France, Australia, Argentina, and India have demonstrated the explanatory utility of the theoretical framework developed in Chapter 2. In spite of the vast differences in the geographical, temporal, and political contexts of the four country cases, the theory's key variable – leaders' national identity conceptions (NICs) – did in fact systematically differentiate those who felt the need to decide for nuclear weapons from those who did not. Specifically, leaders with oppositional nationalist NICs experienced feelings of fear and pride when confronting their key comparison other, and those feelings in turn sparked strong desires to acquire the bomb. By contrast, leaders without oppositional nationalist NICs did not follow this pattern. Moreover, the desire for the bomb created a strong probability of a political decision for it; and once a political decision to acquire the bomb was in fact made, actual nuclear weapons arsenals ended up coming into existence.

Chapter 3 presented the results of the rigorous measurement strategy for leaders' NICs. Of the dozens of leaders covered in this book, it found only five who unambiguously qualified as holding oppositional nationalist NICs vis-à-vis some external other. Two of these, Pierre Mendès France of France and Atal Behari Vajpayee of India made the crucial decisions to endow their states with a nuclear arsenal. Another, John Gorton of Australia, tried mightily to overcome the resistance of his Cabinet and do the same, but his efforts fell short.