Conclusion: Limitations, Contributions, and Policy Implications

Since the beginning of the nuclear age, curbing the proliferation of atomic weapons has been a primary concern of international society. Scholars and policymakers have carefully studied the behaviour of nuclear-weapon states (NWS) and have developed multiple theories to explain why countries want to acquire atomic arsenals. Forecasting proliferation was the chief ambition behind the early concepts of nuclear latency in the 1980s (Meyer 1984). Latency denotes the time-lapse required by a country to cross the nuclear threshold. Early perspectives bound latency to ambivalence by implying an association exists between the pursuit of peaceful nuclear energy and hidden nuclear-weapons ambitions. In this book, I addressed latent nuclear countries as those nuclear-capable states that did not acquire nuclear weapons for political rather than technological reasons.