Proliferation has alt causes – modern nuclear proliferation stems from the fear of new countries gaining nukes, not INF and fears about Russia and China

As politics and competition remain at the forefront of the international stage, nuclear nonproliferation strategies need to be examined—not only by the great power states, but by all states—to prevent a future breakout of nuclear weapon acquisition. The three great power states, the US, Russia, and China, arguably would not wish to see their relative power diminished across their regional spheres of influence by a spread of nuclear weapons. Additionally, nonnuclear states would not want to see rival neighbors acquire nuclear arms and potentially gain a method of coercion over them. Despite this common inclination to prefer nonproliferation, concerns about a future breakout remain at the forefront of government activity and academic thought. In an Institute for Defense Analysis report, researchers cataloged 52 countries with some level of nuclear technical capability and categorized them by level of nuclear latency from nil to serial weapons production potential.1 Why have certain countries remained under the threshold? What caused other states to cross the threshold? Knowing those key factors, how can the international community prevent future nuclear proliferation? In this paper, I look at three primary theoretical models of nuclear proliferation—Security Concerns, Domestic Politics, and Norms—and argue that these models inform why states seek nuclear weapons more accurately when applied together as distinct pressures on a state instead of as separate instances of reasoning. This theoretical combination of models is then applied to India’s proliferation case to show how each model provided positive or negative pressure toward its decision to seek nuclear weapons or abstain.