In February 2010, during the thirty-second anniversary celebration of the Islamic Revolution, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared that Iran had become a “nuclear state” after Iranian scientists developed the ability to enrich uranium to 20 percent.Footnote ¹ Uranium enriched to this level and beyond is called “highly enriched uranium” (HEU), and its fabrication may ultimately lead to the development of a nuclear weapon, though Ahmadinejad was quick to underscore Iran’s peaceful intentions. The declaration was largely interpreted as yet another threat from a volatile leader and regime in the ongoing diplomatic and strategic struggle between Iran, the United States, and the broader international community.

Tensions were particularly high since 2002, when an Iranian dissident group revealed that the revolutionary government was developing a clandestine nuclear weapons program and, as such, reneging on commitments to international transparency, particularly with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). As a “nuclear watchdog,” the IAEA enters into Safeguards Agreements with states that have advanced nuclear programs to confirm the peaceful purposes of the programs. These agreements give the IAEA the right to ensure that safeguards are applied to all sensitive nuclear materials in the country and also give the IAEA routine access to inspect nuclear facilities. Despite diplomatic efforts on the part of the IAEA, EU3 (United Kingdom, France, and Germany), and Iranian reformists, negotiations had failed and unraveled further since hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became President in 2005. In 2006, the UN started imposing crippling sanctions targeted toward Iran’s nuclear program but with broad effects for the entire Iranian economy. And in June 2009, a joint US–Israeli covert cyberattack, dubbed “Stuxnet,” wreaked havoc at the Natanz uranium enrichment plant in Iran. Deteriorating regional relations along with the United States’ unwillingness to engage in diplomatic negotiations with Iran and mutual demonization on both sides set the backdrop for Ahmadinejad’s peculiar declaration of nuclear statehood.

Despite the attention and fanfare surrounding the 2010 declaration, it was not the first time that Ahmadinejad had unilaterally declared Iran’s nuclear statehood and neither was he the only Iranian leader who made such assertions. In 2006, when Iran first developed the ability to enrich any uranium, even at low levels, Ahmadinejad had made the same declaration – “no matter whether they [the U.S.] accept it or not, Iran is now an established nuclear state and it is in their interest to live alongside the Iranian nation.”Footnote ² It was not simply Ahmadinejad’s hardline tendencies that motivated this declaration. In 2004, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, former Iranian President generally characterized as a reformer, asserted that Iran “expects to join the club of nuclear states,” while also reassuring the world that it is “not looking to acquire nuclear weapons.”Footnote ³ Rafsanjani’s declaration came during a period when the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) had actually suspended its enrichment activities.

Even more, Iran is not the only state that has made a similar declaration of nuclear statehood. In February 2005, the North Korean foreign minister declared that North Korea had become a nuclear state because it had “manufactured nukes for self-defense.”Footnote ⁴ Notably, this declaration came a year and a half before North Korea tested a nuclear weapon. The Iranians do not currently possess nuclear weapons, whereas the North Koreans do. But both declarations present a disconnect between a declared status and what the respective states have the capability to do. What, then, can we make of these declarations of nuclear statehood? And what does it mean to be a nuclear state?

One potential approach to these questions is to test the truth or falsity of these claims. Is Iran technically a “nuclear state”? But from a technical perspective, one runs into difficulties quickly – is a nuclear state one that possesses nuclear weapons? Does it have a fully fabricated weapon with a warhead and delivery system? Were these weapons tested? Are they actively deployed? Or is it a state that has some advanced nuclear technology like uranium enrichment? And what does it even mean to “possess” nuclear weapons or technology in a world characterized by states that are protected under a nuclear weapons “umbrella” of another state? Thus, the truth and falsity of these claims hinge on the significance allotted to these technical markers. Even if these questions were clear from a technical perspective, these declarations cannot be reduced to statements of truth or falsity. Indeed, language itself does more than simply “record or impart straightforward information about the facts.”Footnote ⁵ Technical ambiguity or not, the political salience of Iran or North Korea’s statements only becomes clear when one asks what these declarations are doing. As philosopher J. L. Austin noted in theorizing the performativity of speech, “the truth or falsity of a statement depends not merely on the meanings of words but on what act you were performing in what circumstances.”Footnote ⁶ So, what explains the specific invocation of nuclear statehood?

In a global context, the meaning of these declarations is linked to the contested nature of nuclear status – being seen or recognized as a nuclear state.

The particular meaning of these statements cannot be grasped without reference to the foundation of the global nuclear regime – the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). The NPT divides states into either “nuclear weapon states” (NWS) and “non-nuclear weapon states” (NNWS) and defines NWS as states that have “exploded a nuclear device prior to January 1, 1967.”Footnote ⁷ Both NWS and NNWS have different rights and obligations under the treaty, and the NPT stands out as one of the few treaties of international law that does not treat all signatories as juridically equal. As such, rather than functioning only as a straightforward technical or material distinction, this separation created a politics of its own. By this definition, only the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, and China count as NWS and, as a result, are lawfully entitled to keep their nuclear weapons.And though “nuclear state” is broader than “nuclear weapon state,” there is no clear technical differentiation between the two, and they are often used interchangeably. India, Pakistan, and North Korea all tested a nuclear weapon after 1967, and Israel’s alleged September 1979 test is not officially recognized as a test. The NPT, then, leaves these states in a kind of material–legal limbo, as none of them are, as of this writing, signatories to the treaty. The legal separation between NWS and NNWS also marks unequal relations between the legally legitimate NWS and the ones that came after the NPT’s cutoff – the NWS are allowed to keep their weapons, and all subsequent nuclear weapons possessors are not. Objections to this legal inequality perpetuated a set of grievances that continue to plague the achievement of both global nonproliferation and disarmament. As such, to declare nuclear statehood is to say something about a state’s place in this legal structure.

Later, in a 2013 interview, Ahmadinejad again clarified that the world must now “treat Iran like a nuclear country” and touted Iran’s scientific achievement beyond nuclear technology – “they assume we’ll give in to pressure; such thoughts are misguided. We’re already an industrial and nuclear country, a country that has conquered space.”Footnote ⁸ Ahmadinejad’s need to assert that Iran is a nuclear state and should be “treated” as such signals both a desire to be recognized as a particular kind of international actor and the rejection of that recognition by the international community. To address the affront of misrecognition, Ahmadinejad challenges basic ontological and legal assumptions perpetuated in the global nuclear regime – namely, that a nuclear state is defined through the testing of nuclear weapons and is also linked to the legal structure of the NPT. Analyzing these declarations solely from a technical or material perspective then obscures the politics of social recognition and contestation that are central to nuclear status. Being seen as a nuclear state is not simply a function of material achievement but entails a social process of recognition.

This book argues that the distinction between nuclear and non-nuclear states is constructed and not given. Throughout the nuclear age, state actors have produced numerous different ways of defining a nuclear state through both law and discourse. These definitions have changed over time in relation to changing domestic politics within states, geopolitical realignment, and normative developments. This book traces these changes through material, legal, and normative contexts. It links the material ambiguities inherent in conceptualizing the nuclear state to broader legal and normative discourses. Through analysis of diplomatic transcripts, declassified documents, media, memoirs, and public speeches, this book reveals that being “nuclear” or “non-nuclear” does not speak for itself but is constructed through law and discourse. States contest the separation between nuclear and non-nuclear states, and this contestation shapes the kinds of political conflicts we see in the nuclear nonproliferation regime. These contestations are, at times, grounded in normative debates surrounding global equality and hierarchy but are also deployed strategically by states to change the way that the international community frames their nuclear programs. For instance, despite widespread knowledge that Israel possesses nuclear weapons, its policy of “nuclear opacity”Footnote ⁹ is sustained by a non-nuclear status.

Both Iran’s overt declarations of nuclear statehood without a clear capability and Israel’s lack of public acknowledgment with well-documented capability highlight the unique social recognition practices surrounding nuclear and non-nuclear status. In tracing the changing definitions of nuclear statehood, this book also offers a conceptual innovation – distinguishing nuclear status from nuclear capability. The existing literature on nuclear strategy largely conflates nuclear status with capability and thereby misses out on the unique processes of recognition that underpin the historical and contemporary global nuclear regime. By nuclear status, I refer to the politics of identifying and being recognized as a nuclear or non-nuclear state. Capability, however, refers to the material possession of nuclear technologies, ranging from uranium enrichment to the construction of a nuclear weapon.

Treating the pursuit of nuclear capability and the pursuit of nuclear status as two distinct, though related, phenomena is more than a mere esoteric, analytical exercise. For instance, failing to see Ahmadinejad’s declarations of nuclear statehood as evidence of the struggle for status and recognition forecloses diplomatic options for Iranian interlocutors such as the United States and Israel. Military options such as preventative strikes and cyberattacks are deemed necessary to prevent Iranian capability but do nothing to address the underlying tensions surrounding Iran’s nuclear status. The primary conceptual innovation of this book is not only consequential for how we think of the nuclear world but also has more practical applications to ongoing nuclear crises. The nuclear pursuits of regimes like Iran and North Korea are misunderstood in US and European strategic circles primarily because they fail to understand the pursuit of nuclear status.

In order to illustrate the relationship between nuclear status and capability, this book chronicles key historical junctures from the nuclear programs of four states that developed nuclear technologies in the wake of the NPT’s codified separation between NWS and NNWS. I argue that all four states represent the liminal space between nuclear and non-nuclear. That is, they are all “nuclear” in some ways and “non-nuclear” in others. Israel is known to possess nuclear weapons and even conducted a clandestine test in 1979. But for over four decades, Israel has not officially declared its nuclear status, either through policy or through a widely recognized nuclear test. India conducted nuclear tests in 1974 and then again in 1998 and has an acknowledged nuclear weapons arsenal. But India is not legally recognized as a “nuclear weapon state” by the NPT, and in order to address this legal gap, Indian officials have sought recognition as a “responsible” actor in the global nuclear regime. Iran does not possess nuclear weapons and has not conducted a nuclear weapon test as of this writing but has an extensive nuclear program including, as noted earlier, the ability to enrich uranium. Despite limited or nascent capability, Iranian leaders have long constructed Iranian state identity through its nuclear program and thereby require the recognition of its “nuclear rights.” Finally, North Korea has conducted numerous nuclear tests and is known to possess a small yet growing arsenal of weapons. And yet, many states are hesitant to recognize its capability. North Korea’s legal status as a former NPT signatory and NNWS is also a matter of legal and political debate. These liminal cases help illuminate what is lost, both from an analytical and political perspective, when nuclear status is conflated with capability.

This book focuses on how states use both nuclear and non-nuclear status to represent themselves and others in the international system. I argue that this process is social and political rather than simply material. The politics of this distinction is evident in debates over nuclear testing, in the treaty negotiation and interpretation surrounding the NPT, and in normative assertions of nuclear rights and responsibility. The distinction between nuclear and non-nuclear states forms an important part of the interpretive foundation of global nuclear politics – how states make sense of nuclear technology and, more broadly, how states make sense of material capability in different contexts. Interpretive struggles turn nuclear status into a negotiation, and this negotiation has consequences for the way states understand their place in the global nuclear regime.Footnote ¹⁰ Despite a conflation in the nuclear security literature between status and capability, this book reveals that state leaders contest the terms of their own nuclear status – that is, whether they want their capabilities to be recognized as nuclear or non-nuclear. Contesting nuclear status also constitutes an attempt to change what is considered legitimate and illegitimate when it comes to nuclear capability. Ahmadinejad’s declarations are provocative not simply because they signal Iran’s nuclear capabilities but because they ask both domestic and international audiences to rethink what it means to be a nuclear state and perhaps to bring into existence a new kind of nuclear state – one with advanced technologies but no nuclear weapons.

The foundational effect of the distinction between nuclear and non-nuclear states on nuclear politics has hitherto been ignored or largely misunderstood. This book corrects this oversight by theorizing the social recognition of nuclear status and how it has shaped nuclear politics as we know it, in particular, the politics of the oft-lauded NPT. The NPT’s legal codification of the NWS and NNWS distinction legitimized the possession of nuclear weapons by the NWS and foreclosed legal legitimacy to all subsequent challengers, thereby entrenching a hierarchical separation between nuclear and non-nuclear states. Thus, this book questions the conventional view that sees the NPT regime as a success story. I argue that though it may have been successful in limiting capability, it also introduced a new politics of nuclear status that led to inexorable divisions. This critique constitutes more than a reiteration of the postcolonial view that the nuclear regime is unjust. Rather, the NPT’s legal ordering shaped how states talk about injustice in the global nuclear regime. As I discuss throughout the book, postcolonial states themselves played a role in using the treaty negotiations of the NPT to institutionalize a shared non-nuclear identity. As such, this distinction served the political purposes of both great powers and the postcolonial world. In doing so, the treaty led to entrenched identities and interests that make it difficult for states to contend with the shared menace of nuclear annihilation. The most recent Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), which was signed in 2017 and outlaws the manufacture and possession of nuclear weapons, constitutes another example of the lasting effect of divisions related to NPT categories, as no NWS has signed on to that treaty, as of this writing. Before delving into the unique politics of nuclear status, a discussion of the complex material terrain of nuclear technology is needed to understand why the distinction between nuclear and non-nuclear states cannot simply be respecified through material terms alone.

Testing, Possession, Latency, and the Technical Ambiguities of Nuclear Status

The creation of any international order necessitates a concurrent process of classifying and categorizing states – a process that shapes the discourse and bounds of legitimacy within that order. The post-World War II liberal international order, in particular, is characterized by categorizations that take the form of binaries – civilized/uncivilized,Footnote ¹¹ rational/rogue,Footnote ¹² and developed/undeveloped,Footnote ¹³ to name a few. These binaries “establish a relation of power such that one element in the binary is privileged.”Footnote ¹⁴ The politics of the distinction between nuclear and non-nuclear states is similar to these oft-referenced binaries in that it privileges the nuclear states’ ability to govern the global nuclear regime. But the distinction is different in its link to presumed technical differences between nuclear and non-nuclear states. As such, this distinction is not typically seen as constructed in the same way one might problematize the invocation of civilizational discourse that casts the non-Western world as inherently backward and barbaric. But even from a strictly technical perspective, there are numerous ways to conceptualize nuclear statehood.

The nuclear weapons test is the primary technical marker of nuclear status – this is one of the reasons why the NPT focuses on the explosion of a nuclear weapon or device in order to define a NWS. Recognition of nuclear status is often linked to a publicized nuclear test. But many states currently possess or have possessed the necessary technology for uranium enrichment and/or the reprocessing of nuclear fuel to extract plutonium, two possible pathways to the bomb. Should we think of nuclear states as states that have exploded a nuclear weapon? Or should states that could quickly build a bomb but have not taken the steps to do so count as nuclear states too? And is one test enough to be recognized as a nuclear state?

The nuclear test offers an unsatisfactory marker of nuclear status for two primary reasons. First, the technical significance of a nuclear test is not always clear – what if the state in question explodes the one bomb it has constructed? As Itty Abraham notes, “it is not unreasonable to think of a country’s first nuclear test explosion as very much an experiment” and that for the test to translate into a full-fledged nuclear program “a political decision to proceed has to be made.”Footnote ¹⁵ Second, and beyond technical significance, the sociopolitical implications and interpretations of testing are not pre-given. The nuclear test itself has had varying social constructions throughout the nuclear age. In Chapter 4, I discuss the phenomenon of “peaceful nuclear explosions” (PNEs), which were nuclear explosions conducted for purported peaceful purposes like large-scale construction projects. But, as Shampa Biswas notes, “it is not clear that there is anything technologically distinctive about a nuclear explosion that makes it peaceful … it is clear that the line between the two categories [peaceful and non-peaceful explosions] is tenuous, even though the categories as distinct and different have been institutionalized in the nuclear nonproliferation regime.”Footnote ¹⁶ While PNEs are a thing of the past, the problems they illuminate for signification and interpretation continue to haunt the question of nuclear statehood. The nuclear test quite literally cannot speak for itself, and insofar as discursive signification is a necessary component, states can at times magnify and at times diminish the meaning of their nuclear tests. North Korea serves as an important example of the former and Israel of the latter.

India’s first nuclear test in 1974, dubbed the “Smiling Buddha,” serves as an important example of the tenuous relationship between the nuclear test and nuclear status. The 1974 test yielded more questions than answers in terms of India’s newfound nuclear status. Itty Abraham asks: “Once India had tested, based on the experience of every other country that had conducted a nuclear test since 1945, it could be considered a nuclear power. But was it?”Footnote ¹⁷ India’s designation of the test as a PNE complicated a clear-cut recognition of India’s nuclear status. In fact, Abraham does not use a nuclear test at all for marking Indian nuclear capability. Instead, he argues that India became a nuclear power around 1986 when India was capable of using nuclear weapons strategically during wartime.Footnote ¹⁸ While this argument is plausible from the perspective of material capability, it ignores the role of external recognition of nuclear status, which, I argue, is distinct from marking nuclear capability. In collapsing status and capability, the existing literature treats these debates as being about nuclear capability to the detriment of understanding the unique social recognition politics of nuclear status. If nuclear status is conceptualized as a function of social recognition, then India’s nuclear status became less fraught as a result of the 2008 US–India Civil Nuclear Agreement (CNA). The Agreement constituted a shift in the way the international community saw India’s place in the global nuclear regime.

Beyond the nuclear test, nuclear weapons possession may also constitute a way to conceptualize nuclear status from a technical perspective. But again, there are issues with what is meant by possession. Even among countries that have built independent nuclear weapons of their own, there are variations in nuclear postures. Some states actively deploy nuclear weapons, whereas others have nuclear weapons stockpiles that could readily be constructed for use but are nonetheless not deployed and ready to go. For instance, India and Pakistan, two recognized nuclear weapon states, “are believed to store their nuclear warheads separately from their delivery systems.”Footnote ¹⁹ Moreover, security guarantees and nuclear umbrellas, a common part of great power foreign policy after World War II, complicate any straightforward understanding of what is meant by “possession.” Indeed, it is not simply the threat of US nuclear weapons but South Korea’s protection under the US nuclear umbrella that motivated North Korea’s own pursuit of nuclear weapons. The idea of possession or ownership of nuclear weapons was further complicated by the historical legacies of Soviet dissolution. Ukraine, in particular, found itself as an inheritor of Soviet nuclear weapons. Though Ukrainian authorities eventually gave up this inheritance to join the NPT as an NNWS, they nonetheless debated the meaning of nuclear weapons “rightful” ownership – demonstrating that even possession and ownership require interpretation and political justification.Footnote ²⁰ Being recognized as either nuclear or non-nuclear then becomes central to how states approach both strategic and normative questions related to their nuclear programs. For Ukraine, embracing a “non-nuclear” status was key to removing Ukrainian capability. Questions of nuclear or non-nuclear status can even be central to sovereign statehood and independence. As a Ukrainian Minister of Defense remarked, “the non-nuclear status was the price of our independence.”Footnote ²¹

Technical entanglements between nuclear energy and nuclear weapons production also make it difficult to justify a binary between nuclear and non-nuclear states based strictly on material differences. Nuclear materials and facilities can be diverted toward use in nuclear energy plants or to the manufacture of weapons. Many states possess different parts of the nuclear fuel cycle – some states have a vast nuclear energy industry but do not enrich their own uranium. Others attempt a fully “indigenous”Footnote ²² nuclear cycle from the enrichment of uranium to its use for energy and/or weapons.The technical process of building nuclear technology is complex and entails the governance of both raw materials and facilities that process the materials. Raw uranium is first mined and turned into a material called “yellowcake,” which is then fed into a conversion process for further fuel fabrication. Uranium exists in many different forms (or isotopes), and most atoms in mined, natural uranium, are U-238, which has less of a chance of undergoing fission and creating a chain reaction for energy or weaponization. However, U-235 isotopes will undergo fission almost every time, and as such, the ability to harness U-235 is the key for both energy and weapons purposes. The process of separating out U-235 from non-fissile uranium (U-238) is the process of enrichment and is conducted in centrifuges.Footnote ²³ Low-enriched uranium (LEU) comprises 3–5 percent enriched uranium, which is often used for nuclear power, and HEU comprises 70–90 percent, which is needed for weaponization.Footnote ²⁴ Generally speaking, about 15 kg of HEU (100 percent solid U-235 core) is needed to achieve critical mass for a bomb.Footnote ²⁵ These amounts do vary as the IAEA estimates that if uranium is enriched above 20 percent, about 25 kg is needed to achieve critical mass.Footnote ²⁶ Additionally, the IAEA estimates that it can take anywhere from 3 to 12 months to convert LEU into HEU, which is quite the range.Footnote ²⁷ All of these stages are governed by the IAEA in various ways (though, the early stages of mining less soFootnote ²⁸). But at no point in the process is the political threat completely self-evident or clearly linked to a material distinction between nuclear and non-nuclear states. The IAEA’s 2022 annual report “lists 156 significant quantities of HEU under comprehensive safeguards in non-nuclear weapon states. Without knowing the exact enrichment levels, that means these states hold at least 3.9 tonnes of HEU.”Footnote ²⁹ But even the development of HEU is not a smoking gun because HEU can be used for other purposes – particularly for medical isotopes.

Thus, the binary between nuclear and non-nuclear states is complicated by the many ways in which states engage in the global production of nuclear materials. In order to address the technical reality of nuclear material production, the recent turn to “nuclear latency” offers yet another technical marker of nuclear status – the accumulation of significant quantities of nuclear materials. Latency is defined as “the possession of many or all of the technologies, facilities, materials, expertise (including tacit knowledge), resources, and other capabilities necessary for the development of nuclear weapons, without full operational weaponization.”Footnote ³⁰ Nuclear security scholars, such as Matthew Fuhrmann, Rupal Mehta, and Tristan Volpe, among others, have linked the widespread diffusion of nuclear technology and technical processes like enrichment to the strategic value of “hedging” – retaining the ability to build nuclear weapons through a civilian nuclear program without actually doing so.Footnote ³¹

The nuclear test and latency represent two potential indicators of nuclear status but on different ends of the capability spectrum. The nuclear test is a stricter measure with a small subset of countries being members of the nuclear test club. Latency, on the other hand, captures the global diffusion of nuclear materials and the many technical processes involved. Jacques Hymans weighs the nuclear test standard against the stockpiling of significant quantities of nuclear materials as potential thresholds for the definition of a “nuclear weapon state.”Footnote ³² Hymans discusses some potential problems with the nuclear test standard – states can forgo testing and yet still build nuclear weapons or states may possess the ability to quickly build nuclear weapons during times of war.Footnote ³³ But the significant quantities, or latency standard, has issues of its own because it introduces further technical ambiguities – “the application of the SQ/no-SQ [significant quantity] indicator requires a great deal of guesswork, even if the state’s nuclear facilities are known and easily observable via satellite.”Footnote ³⁴ So, despite problems with the nuclear test, Hymans ultimately rejects the significant quantity standard as a measure of “nuclear weapon state-ness.” Hymans urges a more “theoretically grounded” approach to understanding a state’s nuclear status with a focus on the causes of nuclear proliferation. In expanding on Hymans’s intuition, I argue that such a shift requires going beyond measuring nuclear capability to understanding and theorizing the many ways in which states contest and construct their nuclear status.

In the debate between adherents of latency and those who focus on the nuclear test standard, the typical analytical goal is technical accuracy. The existing literature is invested in coming up with a better definition of when we might consider a state to have “gone nuclear.” But neither the nuclear test standard nor the significant quantity standard addresses the contested nature of technical practices. Material achievement is not the same as social recognition of this achievement. And thus, these technical discussions misconstrue what is at stake when states pursue nuclear status.

Ahmadinejad’s declaration of nuclear status could be viewed through the lens of latency as a form of hedging – a bargaining tactic where states with some latent nuclear capabilities use these capabilities to extract material benefits. Though hedging may capture some aspects of the strategic environment in which Ahmadinejad is declaring Iran’s nuclear statehood, it misconstrues the broader status anxiety that underpins the declaration and thereby misses an opportunity to understand Iranian motivations in a more dynamic manner. Moreover, the latency framework fails to capture the relationship between status and capability. The successful ability to “leverage latency,” to use Tristan Volpe’s phrasing, is dependent on how a state’s nuclear program is recognized by its negotiating partners. Indeed, the success of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), or Iran nuclear deal, is premised not only on limiting Iran’s nuclear capabilities but also on the deal’s implications for recognizing Iran’s nuclear status by affirming its “nuclear rights.” Exploring the politics of these tensions cannot occur if the focus is on conceptualizing the distinction between nuclear and non-nuclear states as an objective description of material reality.

Both latency and the nuclear test offer little in understanding how states create meaning around nuclear capabilities. As Alexander Wendt observed, “500 British nuclear weapons are less threatening to the United States than 5 North Korean nuclear weapons.”Footnote ³⁵ Scholars of nuclear latency do offer insights into the bargaining advantages of possessing an advanced nuclear program. But in taking an exclusively material view, these approaches ignore the broader legal and normative implications of debates over nuclear status. Even the term “breakout capacity,” which is used widely by both scholars and policymakers to indicate how close a country is to building a nuclear weapon, is contested among technical experts who disagree on what “breakout” means, particularly given that possessing one nuclear weapon does not amount to much of a technical superiority from non-nuclear states.Footnote ³⁶

Despite these underlying material ambiguities, the division between nuclear and non-nuclear states continues to order the global nuclear regime. As I show in Chapter 3, during NPT negotiations, states were very much aware of the material limitations of the NWS and NNWS distinction. But ordering the nuclear regime along these lines also provided political expediencies – fulfilling both the great power needs of the five recognized NWS, along with providing a shared sense of identity for the postcolonial, non-nuclear world. Although the NPT largely misrepresents the material terrain of nuclear technology, it is nonetheless used to filter changes in material reality, which generates sociopolitical contestation around these categories. For example, India’s recognition as a nuclear weapon state is limited by the NPT’s legal definitions, leading Indian leadership to search for new ways to have their status needs met.

Ultimately, the goal of this book is not simply to complicate the nuclear/non-nuclear binary by discussing the complicated material terrain of nuclear technology. Rather, my goal is to understand why and how states contest their nuclear status. States navigate the politics of being seen as nuclear or non-nuclear, and this process has implications for how a state’s nuclear capabilities are treated. Theorizing nuclear status has implications for understanding the relationship between the material and the social in the global nuclear regime. Israel’s non-nuclear status means that its material capabilities are not seen as a threat, particularly by the United States. North Korea’s material development of nuclear weapons does not necessarily grant the country social recognition. This is why, though it may seem obvious from the perspective of nuclear capability, observers have had to argue that North Korea should, in fact, be seen as a “nuclear power”Footnote ³⁷ and others have characterized North Korea’s nuclearization as a matter of “acceptance.”Footnote ³⁸

Exploring the dynamics of social recognition that underpin nuclear status does not undermine the material force of nuclear technology. Rather, the politics of nuclear status exemplifies one of the primary observations of constructivist thought in IR – namely that material capability requires an interpretive framework by which it becomes meaningful to states in different contexts. Even deterrence theory, which underpinned the strategic revolution brought on by the introduction of nuclear weapons, is ultimately a theoretical and interpretive idea that gives meaning to nuclear weapons. Deterrence, rather than being a strategic inevitability brought on by the material power of nuclear weapons, is a powerful ideology that shapes the way state leaders think about themselves and the state that they represent and defend.Footnote ³⁹ This is, in part, why we observe Iran and North Korea declaring nuclear statehood in advance of clearly possessing a deterrent weapon.

Tying together the literature on status, recognition, and nuclear politics provides a new way to think about both global politics broadly and the study of nuclear weapons and technology specifically. The literature on nuclear strategy, in particular, has an inordinate focus on the material consequences and shifts brought on by the advent of nuclear technology to the detriment of understanding social, normative, and discursive phenomena that play out in nuclear politics. To be sure, scholars of critical security studies do indeed broaden the focus of conventional approaches to nuclear politics, diplomacy, and history.Footnote ⁴⁰ But material approaches are so prioritized in the field that the distinction between nuclear and non-nuclear states has largely been taken for granted and is embedded in the lexicon of those that study and make policy surrounding nuclear technology and weaponry. Despite its “taken-for-granted” quality, there are key policy-driven reasons to understand the place of nuclear status in the global nuclear regime. Negotiations surrounding the nuclear programs of countries like Iran or North Korea could benefit from understanding the status-seeking behavior of these states. If negotiating around nuclear capability is found to be untenable, then negotiating around issues of status and recognition may be a more fruitful avenue for diplomacy. Finding ways in which to engage in the politics of recognition requires a step away from conceptualizing nuclear politics as being essentially about material processes and technologies.

Contesting Nuclear and Non-nuclear Status: Legality, Instrumentality, and Identity

Why do states contest their nuclear status? This question overlaps with another perennial question debated in the study of nuclear politics: Why do states build nuclear weapons?Footnote ⁴¹ To be sure, there are material incentives (particularly the strategic benefits of deterrence) that motivate states vying to be seen as nuclear. Even Iran, which does not currently possess a nuclear weapons arsenal, may seek out the strategic advantages of deterrence through latent nuclear capabilities.Footnote ⁴² But recognition of nuclear status hinges on motivations that go beyond material capability, and so, this book shifts the question from “why do states build nuclear weapons?” to “why do states want to be seen as either nuclear or non-nuclear?” This book explores motivations for either rejecting or seeking nuclear status and finds that the answer to this question is linked to issues of legality, instrumentality, and identity – states contest their nuclear status when they are challenging the terms of the NPT, when they are attempting to accrue material and geopolitical benefits, and when there are tensions between a state’s own self-understanding and how the international community views the state. In mapping out this motivational structure, the book also connects the “why” question with a “how” question – how do states contest their nuclear status? And what are the broader consequences for how the state’s nuclear program is treated in the international community?

For Israel, Iran, India, and North Korea, nuclear status is necessarily contested. Similar dynamics may present to some extent in the nuclear histories of other countries in the atomic age, but these four developed nuclear weapons capability in a post-NPT world where the complex material reality of nuclear capability was reduced to the legal categories of “nuclear weapon states” and “non-nuclear weapon states.”Footnote ⁴³ All four of these states have a long and varied history of challenging and conceptually-stretching the NPT’s binary division of nuclear and non-nuclear state. The binary itself is much more likely to be contested in a post-NPT world where this categorization comes with the force of the rule of law. All four also have their own unique relationship to the NPT. The Israeli and Indian nuclear programs exist outside the confines of the NPT’s legal terms but have both found ways to legitimize their programs extralegally. North Korea is a former NPT NNWS and signatory. North Korean officials withdrew in 2003, but this withdrawal itself requires some legal recognition by the NPT states parties. And finally, Iran signed the NPT as an NNWS but uses the legal terms of the treaty to legitimize its pursuit of advanced nuclear technologies.

In addition to the ordering effects of the NPT’s legal categories, states also contest their nuclear status due to strategic and geopolitical factors. The Israeli and Indian cases are particularly relevant in this regard. India’s early nuclear history was marked by anxieties about India’s place as a newly independent, postcolonial state, along with a rejection of Cold War hierarchies. In recent years, Indian diplomats have taken a different tack, seeking accommodation within the existing nuclear order through the 2006 US–India Civil Nuclear Agreement, which allowed India and the United States to engage in lawful transfers of nuclear materials. The deal also opened up the possibility of India’s membership in the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG). The NSG is a group of forty-eight countries, which govern nuclear material transfers throughout the world and maintain a “trigger list” of sensitive nuclear materials that are subject to export restrictions. As such, recognition yielded material benefits for India. For Israel, the “opaque” nature of its nuclear program is maintained through Israeli alignment with the United States and a long-held agreement between the United States and Israel that Israel would not be the first to “introduce” nuclear weapons to the Middle East. These cases highlight the continued importance of US-alliance dynamics in the global nuclear regime – not only for alignment reasons but also as evidence of the effect that great powers have on the legitimacy of other states.

The complicated material reality of nuclear weapons capability (fabrication vs. testing, extended deterrence, etc.) and the dual-use nature of nuclear technology also allow states to manipulate nuclear status to their own material benefit. But securing recognition (or not) from the United States in the context of the post-World War II liberal international order changes the underlying dynamics of the pursuit of nuclear status. States are more likely to contest the meaning of nuclear statehood when faced with a conflictual foreign policy orientation with the United States. In other words, an alliance with the most powerful norm-setter in the liberal international order can dampen the need for contestation. Even Israel, which has a long history of alignment with the United States, first contested the meaning of a nuclear state in the context of its alignment with France, not the United States, in the early period of its nuclear technological development.Footnote ⁴⁴ Eventually, it was the United States’ decision not to recognize Israel’s nuclear status that solidified Israel’s unique practice of nuclear opacity, ossifying its non-nuclear status.

And finally, there are several different identity-based factors that motivate states to contest their nuclear status. For some states, nuclear status recognition is a matter of securing domestic legitimacy, particularly when status-seeking can help states create a sense of domestic unity or is key to sustaining a particular national identity narrative. For example, Iranian leadership has a long history of linking Iran’s national identity to its nuclear program, and yet, these pursuits are denounced by the international community. Domestic identity-building requires external recognition to manage the tension between a strong internal identification with nuclear technology and the rejection of that identity on a global stage. As Michelle Murray notes, “states depend on each other to create their identities through their external relations; states cannot establish meaningful identities on their own.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Regime legitimacy itself often hinges on obtaining this kind of recognition where failure to obtain recognition “leaves the leader vulnerable to charges of having failed to secure the state’s rightful place in the international system.”Footnote ⁴⁶ North Korean leadership too ties domestic legitimacy and national identity to its nuclear program, leading to a similar dynamic.

But beyond concerns of domestic legitimacy and national identity, status can also be pursued in order to change the terms of the underlying hierarchy. The desire for status is not always about being accommodated into an existing order but can also be an attempt to challenge that order. This interaction between accommodation and overthrow is also reflected in the recognition of nuclear or non-nuclear status. India’s early nuclear history is rife with attempts to rewrite the terms of nuclear hierarchy that developed in the context of Cold War great power conflict. India rejected the legal hierarchy generated by the NPT and helped create the discourse of rights that is central to Iran’s claims to nuclear status. India’s early use of the term “nuclear apartheid” later became embedded among other Global South states that decried the unequal nature of nuclear politics and focused on the sovereign right of states vis-à-vis nuclear technology. Iran’s pursuit of nuclear status is tied to a desire for recognition by the international community of its right to nuclear technology – rights that purportedly emanate from the NPT but that also, Iran claims, constitute the core of its sovereign statehood.

These legal, strategic, and identity factors work to create the conditions under which nuclear status is contested and constructed by states. In a broad sense, all four case studies exhibit aspects of all three factors, but there are historical junctures in which some factors are more relevant than others. Exploring variation in these four programs also helps illuminate different kinds of strategies states use to navigate the politics of status recognition. Israeli strategy is marked by courting the favor of a great power, the United States, and by contesting the epistemic criteria for nuclear statehood. This strategy has largely been successful. Indian contestation around nuclear status started out with a postcolonial critique of the legal structure of the NPT. But India’s recent willingness to be recognized (and accommodated) by the United States as a “responsible state with advanced nuclear technology” demonstrates how, despite its material capabilities, a state’s nuclear status can be successfully transformed through the conferral of recognition. Israel and India then are two cases of states that have successfully managed the recognition of their nuclear programs. On the other hand, Iranian and North Korean attempts at gaining recognition demonstrate the underlying tensions between self and other that animate the pursuit of nuclear status. Whereas Indian and Israeli officials have negotiated unique ways of being accommodated into an existing hierarchy, Iran and North Korea’s recognition struggles are premised on a threat to upend an existing global nuclear order. Iran and North Korea’s nuclear pursuits have triggered a kind of status anxiety where nuclear status is asserted by both actors but also rejected by the international community. These dynamics mean that Israel and India occupy distinct places from Iran and North Korea in the contemporary global nuclear regime.

Conflicts over the meaning of nuclear tests and technical processes like uranium enrichment, along with normative ideas about the “right” to pursue nuclear technology and nuclear responsibility, all set the backdrop for the social construction of nuclear status. As Historian Gabrielle Hecht notes, “the boundary between nuclear and the non-nuclear has been frequently contested.”Footnote ⁴⁷ In a post-NPT world, states make use of technical and material indeterminacies, along with ambiguities around the legal and normative right to develop nuclear technology. As such, deconstructing nuclear status also provides revealing insights into the relationship between geopolitical strategy and identity politics. Though strategic interests and social factors like identity are typically differentiated in conventional accounts of global politics, this book provides insights into how these factors interact. Nuclear and non-nuclear status is not a given material fact of the nuclear age but rather a consequence of social recognition processes. The impact of this process is that India, Israel, Iran, and North Korea’s sense of self becomes reliant on powerful actors in the global nuclear regime, forever tying decisions about their own capability with the questions of status and recognition. Thus, nuclear status, as opposed to nuclear capability, highlights the relational nature of global politics.

Studying Nuclear Status

The politics of nuclear status provides insights into the power of social recognition and the many practices that go into ordering, categorizing, and differentiating in global politics. Classifying states is a kind of “sense-making” that is particularly relevant in the wake of any major technological change – the introduction of nuclear weapons and technology necessitated a new way to think about global politics. Differentiating between nuclear and non-nuclear states underscores a basic political drive to make this change intelligible through the help of categories and classification. As Bowker and Starr note, “to classify is human.”Footnote ⁴⁸ But studying the consequences of political categories is often a missing intellectual endeavor, both broadly in political science and more specifically in nuclear politics.

Operationalization or specification of variables is a mainstay of contemporary political science research, in both its quantitative and qualitative variants. This task can be difficult, and there are many debates about “essentially contested”Footnote ⁴⁹ concepts, such as democracy, power, or sovereignty. But is being a nuclear or non-nuclear state an essentially contested concept like these foundational political science concepts? Though the categories of nuclear and non-nuclear state appear to be simple technical distinctions in comparison to the concept of, say, democracy, the politics of this distinction continues to affect the most conflictual aspects of nuclear politics. For example, as I discuss throughout the book, the distinction between nuclear and non-nuclear states is often evoked in discussions of justice and fairness.

When political scientists make the specification of categories their main analytical task, they miss out on how practitioners are themselves asserting certain realities through identification and categorization. As Charlotte Epstein notes, “studying discourses is a means to taking a critical step out of what the discourses actually say, in order to observe what they do.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Analyzing how states talk about nuclear status means moving away from a definitional methodology. If being a nuclear state is subject to meaningful contestation, then a purely definitional view would miss the politics underlying that contestation – “a definition condenses meaning into a statement. In a definition one attempts to sketch the general essence of a category….”Footnote ⁵¹ A purely definitional approach to conceptualizing nuclear status would simply examine different technical or material indicators, in an attempt to discern the essence of a nuclear state. But as discussed earlier, material indicators ultimately fail to address the contestation of nuclear status. In the process of debating different material indicators, scholars have largely overlooked how meanings around nuclear and non-nuclear status have changed over time and how being seen as nuclear or non-nuclear is itself at stake for states in the global nuclear regime.

Defining concepts and variables is different from identifying what those concepts and variables signify in language. Iver Neumann notes that “people sort and combine sensory impressions of the world through categories (or models or principles). Language, as a social system with its own relational logic, produces reality for humans by mediating these sense data.”Footnote ⁵² The categories of nuclear and non-nuclear states constitute a language by which to mediate the reality of nuclear technology in global society. Material or technical markers are necessarily mediated by their meaning in broader discourse. As Itty Abraham notes about India’s 1998 nuclear tests, “crossing the test threshold was symbolically significant as it sought to signal identity with dominant international norms of nuclear meaning.”Footnote ⁵³ In going from its 1974 “peaceful nuclear explosion” to the more explicitly labeled 1998 nuclear weapons tests, India was not only signaling its material capability but also helping to perpetuate a dominant understanding of a nuclear state – one that has conducted a nuclear test.

Material practices are very much real, but for this book, the “question is not whether material objects exist but how they become meaningful for us.”Footnote ⁵⁴ When states acquire certain material capabilities, these newfound capabilities still have to be “brought into a system of meaningful relations”Footnote ⁵⁵ – that is, what is the meaning of North Korea’s nuclear tests? The nuclear test then functions less as an objective marker of nuclear status rather than a global practice that represents membership in a particular category of states. The physical performance of a nuclear test, for example, also has an important linguistic component. The meaning of these practices is determined primarily through discourse and language. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein focused specifically on “meaning in use,” in which “rather than ‘applying’ theory, the analyst, more like an anthropologist, sets out to uncover that which is so directly before our eyes that we cannot see it, that is, the rules that govern language and thus our social world.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Yet another way to think of the method of discourse analysis comes from philosopher Michel Foucault, who advocates “making visible those things that are already visible.”Footnote ⁵⁷ The political salience of the distinction between nuclear and non-nuclear states is very much “directly before our eyes” – it’s the central foundation of the NPT, and as such, its categories often go unquestioned in inquiry surrounding nuclear politics.

How can we know that states construct and contest nuclear status? Nuclear status cannot simply be discerned by counting centrifuges or weapons. Rather than operationalizing the categories of nuclear and non-nuclear state, I turn the analytical gaze back onto the concepts and categories that are often taken for granted. We know that states contest nuclear status precisely through an examination of the way they navigate, frame, and legitimize their nuclear pursuits in language. The way states are defined and the language that is used to refer to their “being” in the world often become sites through which politics plays out – the distinction between nuclear and non-nuclear states constitutes only one such example. As such, the book has methodological implications that go beyond a narrow relevance for nuclear politics. Combining discourse and historical analysis to uncover the operation of nuclear status undermines the misconception that interpretive methods in political science, in comparison to their quantitative or qualitative counterparts, are less empirically inclined. Indeed, this book conducts a careful analysis of key historical junctures and grounds its theoretical foundation in the evidence provided by the case studies.

In examining discourse surrounding nuclear status, “the first research task is to show the affinities and differences between representations in order to demonstrate whether they belong to the same discourse.”Footnote ⁵⁸ This book links discourses that may be seen as disparate in the study of nuclear strategy and politics. For instance, rather than conceptualizing Israel’s practice of opacity as distinct in nuclear politics, I read it through the broader legal, technical, and normative separation between nuclear and non-nuclear states. Israel’s “opacity” cannot be understood without the foundational impact of the NPT. And, for that matter, even Ahmadinejad’s declaration of Iran’s nuclear status cannot be understood without Israel’s own contestations around its nuclear status.

One of the primary tasks in discourse analysis has to do with choosing texts for analysis. Because theorizing the way that state actors construct and contest nuclear status is the primary analytical goal of this book, the focus is mostly on official discourse exemplified in speeches, meeting minutes, declassified government documents, intelligence estimates, etc. But importantly, the book also relies on firsthand accounts of diplomats, typically enumerated in memoirs. Memoirs can be problematic if seen as official recordings of objective fact as they often rely on the flawed memories of individuals who are not always self-reflective. Nowhere is this problem more prominent than in the recollections of Secretary of War Henry Lewis Stimson on the decision to use nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.Footnote ⁵⁹ Stimson may not be lying or purposefully deceptive, but certainly is rationalizing the decision more than recalling the historical facts of the time. I quote memoirs in all four case studies in this book. But I rely on these memoirs not as encapsulations of an unvarnished truth but as representations themselves – as evidence of the contested nature of nuclear status. Memoirs are also important empirical sources when studying status-seeking behavior because status recognition or misrecognition is an affective feeling. In this sense, the subjective evaluations of diplomats are actually very important for establishing the credibility of the yet uninvestigated phenomena of nuclear status.

This book also does not make use of conventional case selection strategies in political science research. As noted previously, these four cases all exemplify the liminal space between nuclear and non-nuclear statehood – they all exist “betwixt and between socially recognised positions.”Footnote ⁶⁰ All four cases represent the interplay between capabilities and the recognition of status that is central to debates in nuclear politics. The idea of liminality comes from cultural anthropology.Footnote ⁶¹ Liminality “refers to something very simple and universal: the experience of finding oneself at a boundary or in an in-between position, either spatially or temporally.”Footnote ⁶² Israel, India, Iran, and North Korea find themselves in an in-between position in that their nuclear status is not a settled matter. Liminality “disrupts, by definition, essentializations and foundational claims” and “defies set-in categories.”Footnote ⁶³ The unique politics of nuclear status underscore both the normative and practical need for deploying liminality. At its core, “liminality involves the experience of in-betweenness itself, as well as how exactly that experience is shaped and structured anew as subjects and collectivities move through the in-between, try to overcome it, and leave it behind – with a difference.”Footnote ⁶⁴

Leaders in all four case studies attempt to manage their own in-betweenness. Unmooring the binary of nuclear and non-nuclear states reveals that there is little material basis for assuming this binary and that the binary form itself is limited in capturing state practice. Analyzing the meaning-making practices associated with nuclear and non-nuclear status furthers the project of liminality because it underscores “the importance of studying contestations over material things in order to get at the logic of the liminal.”Footnote ⁶⁵ But perhaps the most analytically useful purpose of liminality in the current study is the way it privileges a state of becoming over the settled nature of being. Becoming nuclear is an ongoing social process rather than being settled in time and place. Indeed, the book demonstrates that Israel, India, Iran, and North Korea’s nuclear status shifts in a way that is distinct from their capabilities. In the end, liminality is more than a case selection strategy for the project. It also represents an epistemological commitment toward turning the analytical gaze onto the categories that order social life. The current nuclear order is premised on the idea that some states have nuclear weapons or technology, and others do not and that this is the basis on which their nuclear status is determined. Complicating this narrative and exploring the way that states use law, normative discourses, and geopolitics to construct and contest their nuclear status is the task of the rest of the book.

Organization of the Book

In exploring the practices of social recognition and contestation inherent in the politics of nuclear status, this book relies primarily on historical and archival materials, including meeting transcripts, official declassified documents, speeches, and personal memoir accounts along with authoritative histories such as Avner Cohen’s singular account of the Israeli nuclear program and George Perkovich’s sweeping history of India’s nuclear program. These materials help set the backdrop of key historical junctures in the Israeli, Indian, Iranian, and North Korean nuclear programs. Each case study is embedded within the context of a substantive chapter and explores the legal, instrumental, and identity factors that motivate and drive the state’s contestations of nuclear or non-nuclear status.

Chapter 2 situates the book in a broader literature on the social construction of nuclear technology. Existing examinations of technical contexts such as missile accuracy or nuclear war risk assessment reveal that sociopolitical meaning-making processes shape technical decision-making when it comes to nuclear technology. Moreover, the dual-use nature of nuclear technology requires even actors with technical authority, like the IAEA, to delve into the realm of the political. This chapter also applies the broader international relations literature on status and recognition to the context of nuclear politics. The existing literature on misrecognition and accommodation is particularly useful for understanding why states contest their nuclear status and the relational importance of recognition in making capability socially and politically meaningful. The chapter ends by developing a theory of nuclear status to guide the rest of the book. I expand on the three aforementioned drivers of status-seeking: legality, instrumentality, and identity. All four case studies display unique trends in terms of these factors, but some factors are more salient than others in each of the case studies.

Chapter 3 investigates the history and legal structure of the NPT, particularly the negotiations leading up to the codification of the treaty. I analyze the meeting transcripts of the Eighteen Nation Disarmament Committee (ENDC), which met from 1962 to 1969 to investigate how states landed on the particular treaty structure of the NPT. In contrast to conventional great power politics accounts, I find that states used these meetings as a forum to bring meaning to a burgeoning nonaligned and postcolonial identity through the legal category of NNWS. Thus, the distinction between NWS and NNWS was perpetuated by both the great powers and emerging powers in the non-Western world. I show that rather than settling the issue of nuclear and non-nuclear statehood, the NPT’s formulation led to legal contestations of nuclear status. This examination of ENDC documents also complicates the way IR scholars understand the role of international law. The NPT functions not simply as a limit on state power, as IR institutionalists would predict, or as a pure instrument of state power, as IR realists might predict. Instead, the NPT orders the way states think about the global nuclear regime and their place in it.

The discussion of the ENDC and the NPT lays the groundwork for understanding India’s evolving nuclear status. India was the first to coin the term “nuclear apartheid” in the midst of these negotiations to undermine the very act of dividing the world into nuclear and non-nuclear states. For much of India’s early nuclear history, the dominant strategy of Indian officials was to use the legal hierarchy set forth by the NPT to contest its own nuclear status. But India’s 1998 nuclear tests and the 2005 US–India Civil Nuclear Agreement, which recognized India as a “responsible state with advanced nuclear technology,” signaled a change in strategy. Though India does not have legal recognition through the NPT, it went from being a kind of “pariah” in the global nuclear regime to being accommodated through US diplomatic overtures as a legitimate nuclear weapon state.

Chapter 4 provides a further examination of the typical marker of nuclear status – the nuclear test. As existing scholarship has shown, states bargain around nuclear tests, thereby demonstrating instrumental motivations around the contestation of nuclear status.Footnote ⁶⁶ But the success of this instrumentalization is premised on existing technical ambiguities in the nuclear test and what it means to be a nuclear state. Throughout the Cold War, the meaning of nuclear tests was complicated by the entanglement of civilian and military uses of nuclear technology. The language of “peaceful nuclear explosions” (PNE) made it difficult to distinguish between nuclear and non-nuclear status because it was unclear what a PNE meant for nuclear status. India’s 1974 PNE is a prime example of this material ambiguity.

But even beyond the PNE, there are a number of different technical ambiguities that facilitate the contestation of nuclear status. These ambiguities are particularly important for the Israeli nuclear program and the emergence of the Israeli focus on “non-introduction.” This chapter provides a history of Israeli attempts to contest its nuclear status through the 1960s and into the 1970s and the subsequent settling of Israel’s nuclear status through an agreement with the United States that Israel is not a “nuclear state.” I also examine the events of that 1979 “Vela test,” a purported test conducted by Israel with the assistance of South Africa, to again demonstrate the social processes of meaning-making that complicate clear technical standards.

The legal structure of the NPT and debates over the meaning and significance of nuclear tests form the basis of subsequent normative contestation centered around issues of identity. Chapter 5 explores the prominent discourses of responsibility and rights throughout nuclear history. I trace how ideas around responsibility and nuclear weapons possession have changed over time. Early proliferators like the United States and UK tied their possession of nuclear weapons to responsibility for global stability. As more countries developed nuclear technologies, the notion of responsibility tied to possession became contested. Indeed, seeking out nuclear weapons even became a mark of irresponsibility, as subsequent challengers sought out the same justificatory framework that linked responsibility with nuclear weapons possession. The evolving discourse of responsibility then continues to affect why and how states are granted recognition of nuclear status. In contesting their nuclear status, states also make use of the normative discourse of rights. The NPT granted NNWS the “inalienable right” to develop nuclear technology. This legal right is grounded in the assumption that being an NNWS does not necessarily mean the absence of nuclear technology. Over time, this narrow legal right evolved into a broader right related to state sovereignty and independence.

Both cases of Iran and North Korea demonstrate when and how states turn to these normative discourses to contest their nuclear status. I argue that a disjuncture between Self- and Other- understandings leads certain states to use normative discourses to contest their nuclear status. This chapter features two cases. I first trace Iran’s nuclear status-seeking behavior through the history of Iran’s diplomatic engagement with the international community, from the reign of the Shah of Iran to the rise and fall of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). I then turn to North Korea’s nuclear history from the 1994 Agreed Framework to the Six-Party talks of the early 2000s to track how North Korean leadership contested North Korea’s nuclear status over time. I identify a shift from a more instrumental logic that North Korean leadership exhibited throughout the 1980s and 1990s to an increasingly confrontational approach to nuclear status.

I conclude the book with a discussion of how the investigation of nuclear status contributes to policy and the future of nuclear politics. I offer thoughts on how the 2017 TPNW represents a promising, though limited, attempt at moving beyond the NPT’s legal categories by challenging the state-centrism of the global nuclear regime. From a policy perspective, I argue that when diplomats and policymakers focus entirely on nuclear capability, they miss opportunities to engage with and address a state’s status anxiety. Negotiating with Iran and North Korea requires understanding not only their material pursuits but also the status anxieties that motivate those pursuits. And finally, I discuss how the theoretical framework of nuclear status presented in this book could be applied to understanding burgeoning technological advances in artificial intelligence.