Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016. x, 277 pp. (Illustrations.) US$85.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-4422-4699-7.
The debate over nuclear power in the East, South, and Southeast Asian regions encompasses a wide range of associations. The topics range from the triple disaster (earthquake, tsunami, and reactor explosion) at Fukushima in March 2011, to a rich, earlier history, involving various post-colonial efforts to harness atomic power for a combination of symbolic, industrial, and military purposes. The eclectic nature of these distinct efforts might seem to mitigate against any general account for the region, but the ambitions of the volume under review lie precisely in this direction, seeking to bring coherence to a cluster of national and regional stories. More specifically, Nuclear Debates in Asia: The Role of Geopolitics and Domestic Processes, edited by Mike Mochizuki and Deepa Ollapally of George Washington University, aims to place domestic and international tensions in conversation with each other, seeking to model and better understand the complex processes by which states make difficult choices about their energy and security concerns.
In her introduction, Ollapally positions these tensions at the project’s centre, outlining the shared concerns of the authors. The project originated at a workshop that took place in 2014 at Vietnam National University in Hanoi. This bears mentioning here as the volume derives its aims from an explicitly political science framework, with an emphasis on security studies, and equally, seeks to do so by adopting a consciously “Asian” standpoint, considering the diverse motivations and strategies influencing the behaviour of a cluster of actors, ranging from the major investors (China, India, Japan) with a larger stake in nuclear power, to relatively new participants, here meaning aspirants such as South Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam. Uniting these diverse actors is a set of questions tied to the significance of external factors for studying the choices made by a state, as opposed to the corresponding attention paid to a set of internal or domestic concerns. On this point, Ollapolly emphasizes that the role of external factors no longer proves sufficient as an explanation in itself, and with this gesture, the volume begins by adopting a skeptical approach to “the international lens,” the traditional framing mechanism for addressing these types of security concerns.
The literature review framing this central issue notes the prominent role of China within the larger region, and draws from this an assumption about China’s possible effects upon its neighbours, especially in terms of raising new security problems for East and Southeast Asia. Specifically, the volume brings up China’s increasing claims to portions of the South China Sea, along with a more general willingness to assert itself corresponding to its perceived rise in economic and political status. In contrast to this suggestive narrative of conflict, however, Ollapally argues that domestic debates for China’s neighbours are not driven exclusively by a need to respond to this aggressive style of behaviour, and here she critiques the neorealist position, along with power transition theory. In prioritizing a much larger role for domestic factors, Ollapally offers a means of disaggregating the state, appealing to analyses of its constituent actors at a much more fine-grained level, even while acknowledging the significant role of state elites within policy making.
For the domestic programs, the perceived link between the acquisition of nuclear power, at least in some capacity, and the turn to a military option, therefore appears as an open question. This is an important starting point, as it allows for a much wider range of possible explanations for a nation’s interest in the nuclear, bringing in not only state considerations, but also energy needs, civil society actors, and air pollution, and the relationships between these factors. If historians have long pointed to the lack of a necessary link between a nuclear energy program per se and issues of proliferation or military use, it is useful to find this claim mobilized explicitly within a security framework; and in fact, Ollapally underscores the thematic, noting that “the limited research on potential versus actual nuclear proliferation shows there is no automatic link” (9). In turn, this issue relates to the volume’s project of classifying its case studies according to three clusters or approaches, comprising a spectrum—realist, nationalist, and globalist—with these categories standing as descriptors for attitudes towards adopting certain technologies, and determining how to use them appropriately.
With this set-up, the volume proceeds through its cases, organized according to the oldest and more significant actors (China, India, and Japan, covering chapters 2–4), before turning to those with a moderate investment (South Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam, chapters 5–7), and finally, to the most recent examples, here including ASEAN nations (Thailand, chapter 8) and Pakistan (chapter 9). The spectrum mentioned previously allows for a high degree of play between its three categories, meaning that the classification scheme is not rigidly imposed, and rather, seeks to encourage some degree of blurring or complicating of individual behaviours and choices. At its strongest, the volume provides new insights into national programs and the interplay of regional factors, with a finer degree of shading in its characterizations. Hui Zhang’s China, for example, receives detailed consideration at both the level of its energy needs and its military ambitions, placing these seemingly disparate issues in the context of a need to respond to international institutions. In this respect, China ultimately receives a label of “realist-globalist,” juxtaposing its domestic concerns with international responsiveness.
Although of interest primarily to political scientists and those with a security studies focus in particular, Nuclear Debates in Asia provides a thorough introduction to the region and its nuclear concerns, potentially appealing to the historian, and perhaps even to the historian of science. Area specialists will also find much of interest, although the cases might need a supplement for use beyond the introductory level, and the inclusion of Southeast Asia (chapter 8) proves especially interesting as a new research area. At its core, the volume offers a fresh rejoinder to the established wisdom on many of these issues, and in this respect, points the way towards potentially challenging a primarily Americanist, prescriptive approach to the nuclear issue. If the characterization of Pakistan (chapter 9) as exceptional illustrates the difficulty of breaking free from an older mindset, the volume nonetheless aspires to do much more, bringing its questions to bear upon new countries and their internal politics, and balancing these factors with considerable attention to regional concerns.
John P. DiMoia
Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, Germany
pp. 119-121