This chapter identifies ten lessons for international relations that emerge from the book.

This chapter presents latent nuclear deterrence theory. It explains how it is possible to gain international leverage from a nuclear program if countries do not have nuclear weapons.

This chapter explains why countries obtain nuclear latency. It introduces the drivers and constraints of latency. It conducts a statistical analysis to determine which variables are correlated with nuclear latency onset, and then analyzes twenty-two cases to identify the main motives for getting latency.

This chapter introduces a database on the international spread of uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing facilities. This database identifies countries with nuclear latency and serves as the basis for the empirical analyses carried out in the book.

This chapter conducts a statistical analysis of nuclear latency’s political consequences. Using a design-based approach to causal inference, it determines how the onset of nuclear latency influences several foreign policy outcomes: fatal military disputes, international crises, foreign policy preferences, and US troop deployments.

This chapter presents case studies from ten countries: Argentina, Brazil, Egypt, India, Iran, Japan, Pakistan, South Africa, South Korea, and Spain. These cases show that many world leaders believe that nuclear latency provides greater international influence.

This chapter provides an overview of the book.

A core promise of the nuclear nonproliferation regime is that it will provide nonnuclear weapons states with access to civilian nuclear technology. At the same time, nonproliferation advocates see the regime as a major tool in limiting the development of this dual-use technology and the spread of nuclear weapons. This chapter examines the effect of membership in the nonproliferation regime on the provision of nuclear latency – the underlying capability to quickly acquire a nuclear weapon. Using data and findings from the previous chapters, it shows that regime membership, for all its positive effects, comes at the cost of contributing to members’ latent nuclear capability.