Winning with the Bomb

The question of what effects nuclear weapons have on an actor’s success in coercive diplomacy is in part a function of how nuclear weapons change the perceived costs of conflict. We argue that states will be able to prevail in improving their allotment of a good or in convincing an opponent to back down, and have shorter crises, if their opponents have greater expected costs of crisis. Noting, however, that nuclear weapons increase the costs of full-escalation scenarios but decrease the probabilities of such scenarios, it is not clear what impact, if any, nuclear weapons should have on expected costs of conflict. Taking up this empirical question, we assess the record of crisis outcomes from 1945 to 2000 using the International Crisis Behavior dataset. The evidence confirms that nuclear actors are more likely to prevail when facing a non-nuclear state. The expected duration of crisis in such asymmetric directed dyads is also substantially smaller than the duration of crisis for actors in non-nuclear dyads. Nuclear actors in asymmetric dyads are also more likely to prevail than states in symmetric nuclear dyads.