Heuristic Potential of Scenario Analysis in Investigating Nuclear Policies: A Review and Outlook

The article represents a review of Russian and international sources dedicated to applying scenario analysis as a method of studying nuclear policies both in terms of its civilian and military use. The importance of the subject can be attributed to the rising role of nuclear security aspects globally and regionally. The research in the given area is of fundamental significance in terms of perfecting the security studies methodology and it is practically applicable from the standpoint of predicting the most likely turn of events. Scenario analysis methodology is studied on the basis of an extensive review of scholarly literature structured as a classification. To complete this objective, a corpus of both Russian and international publications was studied. The division into topical units is conducted with an understanding of the NPT-based nuclear nonproliferation regime as a three-component system comprising the following elements: disarmament, peaceful use of nuclear energy and nuclear nonproliferation per se. Accordingly, the paper separately examines the application of scenario analysis to predicting the developments related to 1) military nuclear programmes; 2) civilian nuclear technologies; 3) evolution of nuclear non-proliferation regime (illustrated with the Asian-Pacific example); 4) possibilities of crossing the nuclearisation threshold. To demonstrate the potential of scenario analysis for forecasting the latent nuclear powers’ behaviour, the author resorts to the country-based cases in the Asia-Pacific (Republic of Korea, Japan, Commonwealth of Australia). The heuristic potential of scenario analysis manifests itself in the fact that it provides an opportunity to considerably enhance the understanding of global political processes associated with the nuclear factor as well as define the set of variables having a qualitative impact on the course of events. It is shown that the application of scenario analysis appears most effective in conjunction with other methods, of both quantitative and qualitative nature. Among these, one should place emphasis on expert methods (Delphi, foresight, Socratic method, etc.) The article elicits an advantage of scenario analysis, namely the possibility of using it regardless of the theoretical framework, i.e. the potential of universal application in various schools of international relations. A close connection of the method with modelling and simulations is demonstrated. Prospects for further investigations are discussed.