Ready to Fire? Missile Tests and Crisis Involvement

Abstract Is it enough for a country to possess a sophisticated weapon to gain significant military advantages over its foes? I argue that a complex weapon’s impact on improving a country’s firepower and, hence, proneness to coercive politics is not a given but rather conditional on how often this weapon was test-fired. Accordingly, this study delves into worldwide missile testing trends that frequently escape scholarly attention. It builds on a crisis bargaining framework, hypothesizing that the more often countries conduct missile tests, the more likely they are to initiate crises against others. In the meantime, publicly conducted missile tests are expected to reduce the risk of a crisis among nuclear-capable opponents. To test these expectations, I expand the Missile Tests Dataset’s country, variable scopes, and case narrative sources. Rare Events Logit estimations support the hypotheses. Additionally, countries that procure missiles but do not test them are less likely to initiate crises than those that test-fire missiles. Essentially, this manuscript underscores the need for missile and nuclear proliferation studies to investigate countries’ commitment to peacetime training of their most destructive and complex weapons for combat duty. Otherwise, solely focusing on weapon possession might lead to overestimating or underestimating a country’s military capabilities.