Nuclear Deterrence in the Developing World: A Game-Theoretic Treatment

There has been an increasing debate over the consequences of proliferation and the viability of deterrence in the newly-nuclear states, with the scholarly community generally splitting into two opposed and mutually exclusive groups. One set of scholars believes in the efficacy of deterrence and thus tends to favor proliferation, while another loose grouping of research efforts questions the viability of deterrence in the developing countries. The former group has generally pitched its arguments at an abstract level (primarily through non-formal research), while the latter group has based its critiques on specific countries or on subtopics within the theory of deterrence (such as the fragility of command and control systems). This article is an attempt to synthesize and formalize the key questions and concepts of this debate through both a literature review and a game model of complete and perfect information that allows for crisis escalation at the conventional and nuclear levels of conflict. After noting several logical inconsistencies in the extant pro-proliferation and pro-deterrence research, the article resolves many of the key issues through a formal study of the interactions between threat credibility, threat capability, and the dynamics of escalation. The results show some severe weaknesses in the pro-proliferation school: nuclear blackmail is still a possibility in dyads that experience asymmetric proliferation or in dyads where threat credibility at the nuclear level favors one side; nuclear weapons generally fail to bridge the gap left by incapable conventional forces; and status quo stability is intimately tied to variations in preference orderings, even when both sides possess capable nuclear threats. Contrary to the findings of the pro-proliferation school, deterrence between developing countries is neither simple nor preordained.