Logistics of Ballistics: Power and Politics in the Global Missile Network

Who proliferates and why? Extant scholarship focuses heavily on the potential effects of weapons transfers. Scholars have sought to understand the relations created and sustained by weapons transfers and the effects on conflict dynamics such as regional and enduring rivalry, superpower competition, and strategy in war, as well as alliance yoking and foreign policy coordination. These analyses focus on the downstream effects of weapons rather than the structure of the network itself. I argue that by situating states in their larger relational environments, we can see how the interaction between the capability-enhancing and symbolic dimension of missiles forms a symbolic message that mediates political relationships between states. “Missile messaging” is a central component in states’ management of their general deterrence relationships.This paper combines data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute with original research to show that careful examination of global missile transfers as a network can shed light on the material and symbolic facets of coercion. I show that coercion is found in the delayed an indirect effects of missile transfers, effects which are only visible when weapons transfers are studied as a network. Additionally, I show that my findings partially reflect the battlefield uses of missile technology (and thus the material facets of coercion): they affect casualties, the onset and duration of war, and overall strategy and tactics. In examining missiles and the larger network structure, this paper contributes to our understanding of proliferation and demonstrates the advantages of a relational perspective in explaining the motivations for weapons technology transfers.