Description
Under what conditions do political leaders develop a demand for nuclear weapons programs? Hymans has shown that political leaders’ “oppositional nationalist” identity conceptions tend to cause states to strive for nuclear weapons, but the sources of such beliefs remain unclear. Horowitz and Fuhrmann (2015) have shown that leaders who have participated in an armed rebellion against the state are more likely to strive for nuclear weapons. But it is not clear if involvement in other forms of armed conflict can cause leaders to develop such nuclear preferences and the causal mechanisms are unspecified. This paper contributes by applying/modifying extant theory to new archival data on three Australian leaders’ nuclear preferences between 1969 and 1974. The paper develops the hypothesis that combat experience can, under some conditions, make future leaders more likely to develop preferences about alliances and/or nuclear weapons that make them favor a nuclear weapons program when in office. Building on literature that people tend to overlearn from personal experiences and underlearn from the historical record, the paper develops the hypotheses that people whose combat experience involves abandonment by or defeat despite an alliance will be more likely to develop nuclear weapons when in office.
