Technological Collaboration and Nuclear Proliferation: A Transnational Approach

Abstract

Fifteen years ago Scott Sagan called upon scholars to enrich realism’s balance-of-power model explaining a state’s quest for survival in the cold war by opening the black box of national nuclear decision-making. This paper exhorts us to go further, and to break the walls of the national container that dominates realist models of security. Focusing on knowledge, it takes a transnational approach to the circulation of science and technology between states confronted by a common nuclear threat. In particular, it analyzes how the United States used its preponderance of scientific and technological knowledge/power after WWII as a political lever to shape the research trajectories of its Western European allies in line with its definition of the security needs of the ‘free world,’ so restricting the scope of their nuclear survival strategies.