Citation:
Abstract:
This thesis investigates how and why Argentina and Brazil’s civilian governments consolidated control over each country’s military-managed nuclear program in the 1980s and 1990s. Through this case pairing, I address the larger theoretical question of how new democracies formed after military rule can decisively subordinate military institutions to civilian authority.
My analysis relies on process tracing methodology, over 900 pages of archival documents, and eleven interviews. I find that Brazil’s democratic transition left the outgoing military regime with significant authority and generated piecemeal civilian efforts to manage the national nuclear program, while Argentina’s democratic transition left the outgoing military regime in disarray and facilitated civilian control over the national nuclear program. I also find that Brazil’s civilian government consolidated control over the nuclear program to minimize military influence in the country’s nascent democracy, while Argentina’s government did not.
From this, I argue that the types of democratic transitions—which reflect different levels of military strength and military interest in certain institutions—affect the difficulty of establishing forms of civilian control. I then argue that the sequence of civilian controls over military institutions fortifies democratic consolidation after certain types of democratic transitions and not others. In so doing, I make a comparative-politics-driven qualitative intervention into a traditionally international-relations-interpreted topic, highlighting how nuclear programs can shed light on domestic political processes as well as international patterns of deterrence and diplomacy.
I am very grateful for any and all feedback, particularly on how to better communicate the stakes of my argument, as well as how to simplify and explain its parts.