Emerging Pressures: Risks of Inadvertent Escalation with Emerging Nuclear Powers

Abstract

Despite the supposed risks new and aspiring members to the so-called ‘nuclear club’ present for inadvertent nuclear escalation, scholarly attention to this is a relatively new endeavour. As we should not take for granted that established assumptions from deterrence theories developed based on Cold War superpower competition automatically apply to emerging nuclear powers, this asks the following question: Why might escalatory pressure and subsequently the risk of inadvertent escalation be more intense for emerging nuclear weapons states? To answer this, Posen’s (1991) seminal contribution on drivers of escalatory pressures is applied to the case of North Korea and its adversarial relationship to the United States-South Korea alliance. This has a two-fold purpose; to test to what extent this theoretical framework is appropriate for the study of new nuclear powers, and to investigate how his proposed mechanisms may manifest differently or more acutely for such states. Through a case study on North Korea, I find that these escalatory pressures indeed are present for emerging nuclear weapons states and may make adversary constellations including such states more prone to inadvertent escalation than their more established counterparts.