Peter Liberman

Trading with the Enemy: Security and Relative Economic Gains

I w h e n do security concerns lead states to restrict economic cooperation? Attention to this subject has turned recently from the security effects of resource dependence to those of relative gain. Since wealth is the main source of military capability and other means of influence, cooperation that creates and distributes wealth affects security as well as welfare. Rational states will thus weigh the security implications of cooperation alongside its benefits in making foreign economic policy. The recent debate has been over whether, and under what conditions, states will limit mutually beneficial exchange with rivals who are obtaining disproportionate gains.’ Understanding the connection between security and economic cooperation is essential for anticipating the future of both. Pessimists on this issue, assuming that states are highly sensitive to unequal gains, predict a spiral of insecurity, sundered trade ties, and possibly war in the post-Cold War era. John Mearsheimer, for example, has argued that as Soviet and US. power recedes from Europe, ”Western European states will begin viewing each other with greater fear and suspicion. . . . Consequently they will worry about the imbalances in gains as well as the loss of autonomy that results from cooperation. . . .

The Rise and Fall of the South African Bomb

South Africa built six nuclear weapons in the 1970s and 1980s and then scrapped them in 1990–91. As one of the few states to produce nuclear weapons and the only one to dismantle an indigenous arsenal, the South African case presents a rare opportunity to study the causes of nuclear acquisition and disarmament. This article examines the political history of the South African bomb and the light it sheds on three general sources of nuclear weapons policy: security incentives, organizational politics, and international pressure along with state sensitivity to such pressure. It is based on published research as well as dozens of interviews with South African nuclear policymakers. Ofacial South African accounts and some scholarly studies stress the changing security threat to South Africa as the mainspring behind the nuclear weapons program’s development and ultimate demise. Although the militarization and dismantlement of the program did coincide with the vicissitudes of threats The Rise and Fall of the South African Bomb Peter Liberman

The Spoils of Conquest

An elongated, cylindrical case has an intermediate partition dividing it into a canister and a housing. A parachute is attached into the housing with deployment means releasable by a timer. After a predetermined time has elapsed, the timer withdraws radial pawls to release an end cap from the housing, allowing the parachute to be deployed. The canister is equipped with a special end cap capable of hermetically sealing the canister so that it may convey any of a variety of cargo via airdrop. This end cap is essentially a cylinder, recessed at both ends. A disk is held adjacent the inner end of the cylinder by a center post that passes through central holes in the cylinder by the disk and is pivoted to a plurality of radial pawls that may be extended or withdrawn by rotation of the center post, so that they may engage a shoulder in the end of the canister. The center post is equipped with means for locking it in one position so that the end cap cannot be removed by accident from the canister.

Retributive Support for International Punishment and Torture

This article tests the hypothesis that ordinary people favor punishing badly behaved foreign actors to make them “pay” for their crimes rather than purely to protect national security interests. In an undergraduate sample, people’s endorsement of the principle of retributive punishment was related to their support for punishing transgressor states and their support for torturing detainees, controlling for partisanship, ideology, humanitarian and security values, and beliefs about the efficacy of force. The interstate transgression scenarios included a state sponsoring terror attacks against a rival, a nuclear proliferator, and a small, unnamed aggressor. Retributive dispositions were also strongly related to support for the death penalty, which helps explain prior findings that American death penalty supporters are unusually bellicose toward foreign wrongdoers.

Correspondence: South Africa's Nuclear Decisions

In his article “The Rise and Fall of the South African Bomb,” Peter Liberman uses organizational politics theory to explain South Africa’s latent development of a nuclear weapons program before 1977.1 He cites post-1976 security threats (from the Soviet Union and Cuba) as triggers for the militarization of the nuclear program and the building of six bombs. Although Liberman is less clear about the motivations for disarmament, he does suggest three contributing factors: the end of security threats, the change in South Africa to a more outward-looking leadership in 1989, and the unacceptable expense of the nuclear weapons program. Liberman produces new insights on both the South African case and contending theories that can be used to explain it. In seeking parsimony, however, he weighs the explanatory value of only three theories and overlooks other relevant factors2—most notably, political psychology.3 This omission leads to a portrait of South Africa as a seemingly ordinary state, rather than the minority-ruled, security-obsessed regime that darkened the international stage for four decades and that developed a secret, sophisticated chemical and biological warfare (CBW) program in the 1980s.4 Correspondence

Punitiveness and U.S. Elite Support for the 1991 Persian Gulf War

There is a substantial moralistic streak in U.S. elite attitudes about war against states perceived as evil. Among opinion leaders, death penalty supporters were substantially more likely than opponents to support the 1991 Gulf War, condone the Iraqi death toll, and favor escalating the war to topple Saddam Hussein. These relationships persist after controlling for ideology, nationalism, and instrumental beliefs about force and thus probably result from individual differences in retributiveness and humanitarianism, moral values known to underlie death penalty attitudes. Foreign policy expertise moderated this effect only on the regime change issue, and then only moderately, suggesting that “moral punitiveness” might also influence the thinking of decision makers. President George H. W. Bush evidently felt real moral outrage during the crisis about Iraq’s aggression, but he refrained from escalating the war to punish Saddam more severely for it.

Unveiling South Africa's nuclear past

Research into South African apartheid-era nuclear weapons history has been severely hampered by longstanding secrecy laws, not to mention the destruction of most policy records. The recent declassification and release of a 1975 Defence Force memorandum recommending the acquisition of nuclear weapons, however, shows that important documents have survived. This document sheds new light on military attitudes about nuclear acquisition, and about the extent of the South African-Israeli alliance. It confirms that Israel had offered South Africa missiles, and may have offered nuclear warheads as well. While the release of the 1975 document is promising, the Promotion of Access to Information Act, 2000 and the convening of an interdepartmental Classification and Declassification Review Committee in 2002 do not thus far represent a decisive shift toward greater openness on apartheid-era history. The states incentives for disclosure, controlled to avoid nuclear technology leakage, include the benefits of the lessons of the past to the global non-proliferation regime, contributing to South Africas prestige and foreign policy agenda, and enhancing the countrys democratic transparency.

Does Conquest Pay? The Exploitation of Occupied Industrial Societies

List of Figures and Tables Ch. 2 When Does Conquest Pay? Ch. 3 Nazi-Occupied Western Europe, 1940-1944 Ch. 4 Belgium and Luxembourg, 1914-1918 Ch. 5 The Ruhr-Rhineland, 1923-1924 Ch. 6 The Japanese Empire, 1910-1945 Ch. 7 The Soviet Empire, 1945-1989 Ch. 8 The Spoils of Conquest Notes Works Cited Index