{"id":35180,"date":"2018-10-19T13:27:06","date_gmt":"2018-10-19T17:27:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/?p=35180"},"modified":"2021-02-03T16:33:16","modified_gmt":"2021-02-03T21:33:16","slug":"sarkar-gives-talk-on-economics-of-american-nonproliferation-policy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/2018\/10\/19\/sarkar-gives-talk-on-economics-of-american-nonproliferation-policy\/","title":{"rendered":"Sarkar Gives Talk on Economics of American Nonproliferation Policy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Jayita Sarkar<\/a>, Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, spoke as part of the\u00a0Pardee School Project on the Political Economy of Security Fall 2018 Speaker Series on October 19, 2018.<\/span><\/p>\n

Sarkar delivered a talk entitled\u00a0“The Economics of American Nonproliferation Policy,” Read the presentation abstract below:<\/span><\/p>\n

Conventional wisdom attributes U.S. commitment to prevent the global spread of nuclear weapons as a consequence of American national security interests. Yet, a closer look at U.S. nonproliferation policy reveals a compelling economic logic. Without incorporating economic factors and their convergence with the Cold War American national security state, the understanding of U.S. nonproliferation policy remains incomplete. This study examines how the overlap of economic and security factors played out in U.S. nuclear assistance to allies, friends and sometimes, near adversaries, thus creating techno-economic dependence on the United States.<\/p>\n

Beginning with President Eisenhower\u2019s \u2018Atoms for Peace\u2019 proposal and its consequences, U.S. policymakers generated this complex web of techno-economic dependence for reactor models, fuel, spare parts, expertise and knowhow, which in turn served the purpose of nonproliferation. American monopoly as a nuclear supplier from the 1950s onward became a deliberate tool for nonproliferation abundantly applied by policymakers in Washington. By the 1970s, as American postwar economic preeminence shattered with the \u2018Nixon shock\u2019\u2014 the end of dollar convertibility to gold of the Bretton Woods system\u2014 and the 1973 oil price shock, U.S. market share in terms of global nuclear reactor sales had also declined, while those of West European suppliers like France and West Germany had increased. With American monopoly as the world\u2019s nuclear supplier over, the web of techno-economic dependence on the United States needed readjustment in order retain U.S. leverage. In the Nixon\/Ford era, this took the form of developing the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) after India\u2019s 1974 nuclear explosion, which was guided as much by Washington\u2019s economic goals to reclaim its market share and protect U.S. nuclear industry against West European competition as by security risks from nuclear proliferation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Project\u00a0on the\u00a0Political Economy of Security was founded in 2014 to advance academic and policy-relevant knowledge regarding the intersection of economics and security. The domain of political economy of security encompasses those studies that link political economy and security studies.<\/span>\u00a0The project is co-directed by\u00a0Kaija Schilde<\/a>, Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Pardee School, and\u00a0Rosella Cappella Zielinski<\/a>, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Boston University.<\/span><\/p>\n

Jayita Sarkar<\/a>, an historian by training, is Assistant Professor of International Relations at Boston University\u2019s Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies. Her expertise is in the history of U.S. foreign policy, nuclear proliferation, the global Cold War, South Asia and Western Europe. Her research has appeared or is forthcoming in the\u00a0<\/span>Journal of Cold War Studies,\u00a0Journal of Strategic Studies,<\/em>\u00a0<\/span>Cold War History<\/em>,\u00a0<\/span>International History Review<\/em>, and elsewhere. Dr. Sarkar has held fellowships at MIT, Harvard, Columbia and Yale universities, and obtained a doctorate in International History from the Graduate Institute Geneva in Switzerland.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Prof. Jayita Sarkar spoke as part of the Political Economy of Security Fall 2018 Speaker Series.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11588,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8411,8432],"tags":[10745,10951,9998,10950],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35180"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11588"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35180"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35180\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35198,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35180\/revisions\/35198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35180"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35180"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}