The article makes both a theoretical and historical intervention.
Existing explanations of nuclear proliferation, the authors argue, focus primarily on the costs of pursuing nuclear weapons, including technological constraints, financial burdens, and international pressure.
While these factors matter, they do not explain why some states facing severe security threats decide not to pursue nuclear weapons in the first place.
To address this gap, Joshi and Mukherjee introduce the concept of the “cost of restraint”: the price a state expects to pay if it chooses not to acquire nuclear weapons in response to a rival’s proliferation.
Whether a state proliferates, they argue, depends not only on the costs of acquiring the bomb but also on how costly restraint appears to decision-makers.
The article is situated within a broader debate on the so-called nuclear domino theory.
Since the beginning of the nuclear age, policymakers and scholars have repeatedly predicted that every new nuclear power would trigger a cascade of proliferation among its rivals.
Yet these predictions have consistently failed to materialise.
Kennedy famously warned that there could be as many as 25 nuclear powers by the 1970s.
More than six decades later, there are only nine.
The authors use this gap between expectation and reality to develop a new theory of “dyadic reactive proliferation”, arguing that proliferation pressures vary considerably across rivalries rather than operating uniformly.
