I would like to thank all contributors for their insightful comments and am appreciative of the opportunity to clarify some points. To begin with, a restatement of the core argument of Nuclear Logics is in order. There are systematic differences in nuclear behavior between states whose leaders or ruling coalitions advocate integration in the global economy and those who reject it. The former seek to gain and maintain power through economic growth via engagement with the global economy; hence, they have incentives to avoid economic, political, reputational, and opportunity costs of acquiring nuclear weapons because such costs impair a domestic agenda favoring internationalization. By contrast, inward-looking leaders incur fewer of those costs because they rely on self-sufficiency, state and military entrepreneurship, and nationalism; they thus reject internationalization and have greater incentives to exploit nuclear weapons as tools in nationalist platforms of political competition. This insight, focusing on competing domestic models of political survival, may be applied to explain the differences between nuclear aspirants in East Asia and the Middle East over the past nearly four decades. East Asian leaders pivoted their domestic political control on economic performance via global integration, whereas leaders in the Middle East relied on inward-looking self-sufficiency, internal markets, and nationalist values. Their respective models created different incentives and constraints, which in turn influenced their preferences for or against nuclear weapons
