Stopping the bomb

“The question behind my doctoral research is simple,” says Kunal Singh, an MIT political science graduate student in his final year of studies. “When one country learns that another country is trying to make a nuclear weapon, what options does it have to stop the other country from achieving that goal?” While the query may be straightforward, answers are anything but, especially at a moment when some nations appear increasingly tempted by the nuclear option.

From the Middle East to India and Pakistan, and from the Korean peninsula to Taiwan, Singh has been developing a typology of counterproliferation strategies based on historical cases and to some degree on emergent events. His aim is to clarify what states can do “to stop the bomb before it is made.” Singh’s interviews with top security officials and military personnel involved in designing and executing these strategies have illuminated tense episodes in the past 75 years or so when states have jockeyed to enter the elite atomic club. His insights might upend some of the binary thinking that dominates the field of nuclear security.

“Ultimately, I’d like my work to help decision-makers predict counterproliferation strategy, and draw lessons from it on how to shield their own citizens and economies from the impact of these strategies,” he says.

Types of nonproliferation tactics

On Oct. 7, 2023, Singh awoke to air raid sirens in Jerusalem, where he was conducting interviews, and discovered Israel was under attack. He was airlifted to safety back to the United States, having borne witness to the start of a regional war that “now has become relevant to my research,” he says.

Before his hasty departure, Singh was investigating two singular episodes where military force was deployed to advance nonproliferation goals: Israel’s airstrikes against nuclear reactors in 1981 in Iraq, and in 2007 in Syria. To date, these have been the only major attacks on nuclear facilities outside of an active war.

“I spoke with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who ordered the strike in Syria, and with the commander of the Israeli Air Force who planned the Iraq airstrike, as well as with other members of the security bureaucracy,” says Singh. “Israel feels a large degree of threat because it is a very small country surrounded by hostile powers, so it takes a military route to stop another state from acquiring nuclear weapons,” says Singh. But, he notes, “most of the states which are not in this predicament generally resort to diplomatic methods first, and threaten violence only as a last resort.”

Singh defines the military response by Israel as “kinetic reversion,” one of five types of counterproliferation strategies he has identified. Another is “military coercion,” where a state threatens the use of military force or uses moderate force to demonstrate its commitment to preventing the pursuit of the bomb. States can also use diplomatic and economic leverage over the proliferant to persuade it to drop its nuclear program, what Singh calls “diplomatic inhibition.” 

One form this strategy takes is when one country agrees to give up its program in return for the other doing the same. Another form involves “placing sanctions on a country and excluding them from the world economy, until the country rolls back its program — a strategy the U.S. has employed against Iran, North Korea, Libya, and Pakistan,” says Singh.

India was rumored to have embraced military tactics. “I had always read about the claim that India was ready to attack the Pakistani uranium enrichment plant in Kahuta, and that planes were called off at the last minute,” Singh says. “But in interview after interview I found this was not the case, and I discovered that many written accounts of this episode had been completely blown up.”

In another strategy, “pooled prevention,” nations can band together to apply economic, diplomatic, and military pressure on a potential proliferator.

Singh notes that diplomatic inhibition, pooled prevention, and military coercion have succeeded, historically. “In 2003, Libya gave up its nuclear weapons program completely after the U.S. and U.K. placed sanctions on it, and many states do not even start a nuclear weapons program because they anticipate an attack or a sanction.”

The final strategy Singh defines is “accommodation,” where one or more states decide not to take action against nuclear weapon development. The United States arrived at this strategy when China began its nuclear program — after first considering and rejecting military attacks.

Singh hopes that his five kinds of strategies challenge a “binary trap” that most academics in the field fall into. “They think of counterproliferation either as military attack or no military attack, economic sanctions or no sanctions, and so they miss out on the spectrum of behaviors, and how fluid they can be.”

From journalism to security studies

Singh grew up in Varanasi, a Hindu holy city in the state of Uttar Pradesh. Frequent terrorist attacks throughout India, and some inside his city’s temples, made a deep impression on him during his childhood, he says. A math and science talent, he attended the Indian Institute of Technology, majoring in metallurgical and materials engineering. After a brief stint with a management consulting firm, after college, he landed a job at a think tank, the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi.

“When I moved to New Delhi, I suddenly saw a world which I didn’t know existed,” Singh recalls. “I began meeting people for an evening round of discussions and began reading voraciously: books, editorial and opinion pages in newspapers, and looking for a greater sense of purpose and meaning in my work.”

His widening interests led to a job as staff writer, first at Mint, a business newspaper, and then to the Hindustan Times, working on both papers’ editorial pages. “This was where most of my intellectual development happened,” says Singh. “I made social connections, and many of them grew more towards the academics in the security field.”

Writing about a nuclear security question one day, Singh reached out to an expert in the United States: Vipin Narang, the Frank Stanton Professor of Nuclear Security and Political Science at MIT. Over time, Narang helped Singh realize that the kind of questions Singh hoped to answer “lay more in the academic than in the journalistic domain,” recounts Singh.

In 2019, he headed to MIT and began a doctoral program focused on security studies and international relations. In his dissertation, “Nipping the Atom in the Bud: Strategies of Counterproliferation and How States Choose Among Them,” Singh hopes to move beyond a classic, academic debate: that nuclear weapons are either very destabilizing, or very stabilizing.

“Some argue that there is stability in the world because two states armed with nuclear weapons will avoid nuclear war, because they understand nobody will win a nuclear war,” explains Singh. “If this view is true, then we shouldn’t be alarmed by the proliferation of these weapons.” But “the counterargument is that there will always be an off chance someone will use these weapons, and so states should “try to use all their military and economic might to prevent another state from gaining nuclear weapons.”

As it turns out, neither extreme view governs in the real world. “The main takeaway from my research is that states are obviously concerned when some other country tries to make nuclear weapons, but they are not so concerned that in order to prevent a future destabilizing event, they are ready to destabilize the world as of now.”

In the final throes of writing his thesis and preparing for life as an academic, Singh remains alert to the parlous state of affairs in the Middle East and elsewhere. “I keep following events, knowing that something may prove relevant to my research,” he says.

Given the tense times and the often dark implications of his subject matter, Singh has found an optimal mode of blowing off steam: a daily badminton match. He and his wife also “binge watch either a spy thrill or a murder mystery every Saturday,” he says.

In a world both increasingly interconnected and increasingly threatened by regional conflicts, Singh believes, “there is still much to be discovered about how the world thinks about nuclear weapons, including what the impacts of nuclear weapons use might be,” he says. “I’d like to help shine a light on those new things, and broaden our understanding of nuclear weapons and the politics of nuclear security.”