Mark S. Bell

Questioning the Effect of Nuclear Weapons on Conflict

We examine the effect of nuclear weapons on interstate conflict. Using more appropriate methodologies than have previously been used, we find that dyads in which both states possess nuclear weapons are not significantly less likely to fight wars, nor are they significantly more or less belligerent at low levels of conflict. This stands in contrast to previous work, which suggests nuclear dyads are some 2.7 million times less likely to fight wars. We additionally find that dyads in which one state possesses nuclear weapons are more prone to low-level conflict (but not more prone to war). This appears to be because nuclear-armed states expand their interests after nuclear acquisition rather than because nuclear weapons provide a shield behind which states can aggress against more powerful conventional-armed states. This calls into question conventional wisdom on the impact of nuclear weapons and has policy implications for the impact of nuclear proliferation.

Can Britain Defend the Falklands

Thirty years after the 1982 Falklands war, Britain’s capacity to defend the Falkland Islands from Argentina has been repeatedly challenged by former military leaders and analysts. Concern has been driven by three factors: significant British defence cuts, the discovery of substantial hydrocarbon reserves in the waters around the Falklands, and increasingly bellicose Argentine rhetoric and actions. This paper uses campaign analysis tools to evaluate Argentina’s capacity to successfully attack the Falklands and the British capacity to defend against such an attack. In contrast to recent analyses, I argue that Argentina’s ability to successfully attack the Falklands is limited. I first lay out the debate over Britain’s capacity to defend the Falklands. Second, I lay out a series of assumptions, and the three requirements that any Argentine attack would need to meet to be successful: neutralising British air superiority; getting troops onto the islands; and getting enough troops onto the islands to threaten the Mount Pleasant airfield. I then assess Argentina’s ability to meet these requirements. Although there are inevitably uncertainties involved in assessing complex military contingencies, it is hard to make a persuasive case that Argentina could meet any of the requirements, let alone all three. This paper focuses only on the military element of the threat posed by Argentina to the Falklands. It does not, therefore, consider the many important political, economic and societal factors that play into both Argentine and British strategy. Thus, the conclusion of the paper lays out the implications of my analysis for broader considerations of British or Argentine strategy with respect to the Falklands. Although the current British military posture is appropriate, concern over whether Britain can defend the islands militarily has distracted attention from the need for a comprehensive and flexible political strategy for the Falklands. In particular, a political strategy is needed to counter a possible

Authoritarian Public Opinion and the Democratic Peace

The “democratic peace†—the regularity that democracies rarely (if ever) fight with other democracies but do fight with nondemocracies—is one of the most famous findings in international relations scholarship. There is little agreement, however, about the mechanism that underpins the democratic peace. Recently, scholars have shown that mass publics in liberal democracies are less supportive of using military force against other democracies. This finding has been taken to support the idea that the content of public opinion may provide one mechanism that underpins the democratic peace. Using a large-scale survey experiment, we show that mass publics in an authoritarian regime—China—show the same reluctance to use force against democracies as is found in western democracies. Our findings expand the empirical scope of the claim that mass publics are reluctant to use force against democracies, but force us to rethink how public opinion operates as a causal mechanism underpinning the democratic peace.

Correspondence: The Effects of Acquiring Nuclear Weapons

In “Beyond Emboldenment,” Mark Bell develops a typology of six foreign policies— aggression, expansion, independence, bolstering, steadfastness, and compromise—that nuclear weapons might induce and speciaes observable implications for each.1 Bell’s article is an important contribution but suffers from two problems. First, these policies are not conceptually distinct and are very hard to empirically disentangle from aggression, the traditional focus of the nuclear emboldenment debate. Second, while the documentation of British bolstering is important, the evidence Bell presents in his case study suggests that aggression—at least of limited aims and over the short term—is precisely what nuclear weapons caused Britain to authorize. Bell’s theory and evidence make a weak case for looking beyond emboldenment deaned as aggression in assessing the effects of nuclear weapons on foreign policy. In his theory section, Bell differentiates expansion—deaned as the development of new declared interests, alliances with states or nonstate groups, power projection capabilities, and dispute participants—from aggression—deaned as new or greater coercion, conventional forces, tactics, doctrines, and risk-taking behavior in an existing dispute (pp. 94–95). Bell needs to explain whether “new” adversaries are those not previously fought by a leader, political party, or state in the last decade, century, or millennium. Expansion would be distinct from aggression only if it is not designed to support preexisting objectives with a long-time adversary. Bell needs to specify the extent to which the new interests must be unrelated to prior ones for them to be coded as expansion. He also needs to deane expansion in a way that is distinct from the use of new tactics, forces, and military doctrines, because he deaned such activity as aggression (ibid.). The only example of expansion that Bell offers is U.S. strategy after 1945, but the United States adopted this policy to deal with its arguably extant adversary the Soviet Union. The concept of expansion as currently speciaed does not add much to the debate about nuclear proliferation and foreign policy. Bolstering is deaned by Bell as one state’s offer of armer defense commitments, forces/weapons systems, and resources to another (p. 98). Much of this, however, looks