Bilateral Nuclear Cooperation in the Post-Cold War Era and Its Implication for Nuclear Nonproliferation

As a part of the academic endeavour in analysing the proliferation risks of nuclear power, bilateral civilian nuclear cooperation has been studied through both qualitative and quantitative analysis in order to establish the implications of such cooperation on nuclear proliferation. In this paper, a dataset of bilateral nuclear cooperation in the post-Cold War era, from 1990 to 2011, is presented to examine the correlation between civil nuclear cooperation between countries and their political and economics similarity as well as the level of general bilateral cooperation between them. This period is selected based on the observation that the geo-political landscape, as well as the conditions for civilian nuclear cooperation, have changed drastically after the end of the Cold War. Using linear regression, the analysis of this dataset indicates that economic factors, including the amount of foreign trade investment and the bilateral trade, positively increase the possibility for civil nuclear cooperation whereas factors related to political similarity are not statistically significant in this linear regression model. These observations can be considered complementary to the traditional view of civilian nuclear cooperation, in which political factors are often the main driving force for cooperation. Based on such findings, as well as the growing diversification of nuclear partnerships, the paper reviews the implication of bilateral nuclear cooperation on the global nonproliferation regime, including the traditional export control mechanisms like the Nuclear Supplier Groups, as well as provides some suggestions for its improvement.