After a potential proliferator agrees to a non-nuclear deal, what happens to its capacity? One might imagine that it would go down, given the opponent's desire to make it harder for the state to break the agreement later. However, bargaining theory indicates that the terms of the deal must be commensurate with the state's ability to produce nuclear weapons. Fearing that the opponent might renegotiate terms if its capacity declines, we might then expect nuclear capacity to remain relatively static after an agreement.
This lecture investigates what happened post-agreement for five countries: Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Argentina, and Brazil. On average, there is basically no difference in the immediate aftermath of the agreement. There may be some difference over the longer term, though the effect is still not statistically distinguishable from zero, and the estimated difference is not too substantial.
Read the paper here: [ Ссылка ]
Photos of the South Korean power plant and the Argentina/Brazil agreement are licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 generic: [ Ссылка ]
