This book is written on the basis of her Doctoral dissertation in which the psychological way of analysis combined with social constructivism is applied. As far as the nonproliferation issues are concerned, it should be said, this book is one of the most high-level academic achievements in which the constructivist way of analysis is applied in a sophisticated manner. As is well known, the significance of the international norms of nuclear nonproliferation has been widely recognized since the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) took in effect in 1970. Since then, the norms of nonproliferation of nuclear weapons has widely shared by most of countries under the NPT regime except for a few countries such as Israel, India, and Pakistan, who have not yet signed the treaty. Even after the end of the Cold War, the norms have been the most important elements in both global and regional arms control as well as the export control agenda.

Most interestingly, the author focuses her analysis on the political and social dynamics of domestic interactions between and among political groups and influential politicians in Japan, Egypt, Libya, Sweden, and Germany. As she pointed out, it should be noted that the appropriateness of including domestic variables in explanations of international relations is still a matter of debate. The above-mentioned five states have often been dealt with as problematic countries, in the sense that they have had sufficiently physical potentialities to go nuclear if and when they might determine to do so. Nevertheless, they still do not to go nuclear. Why do these five states choose nuclear restraint?

The most persuasive argument might be dependent on security guarantees provided by nuclear-armed great powers, that is security guarantees by a nuclear umbrella. Japan and Germany, for instance, have established the basic framework of their own national security and pursued for a peace strategy for over 60 years on the basis of, and dependent on, the extended nuclear deterrence policy of the United States. As the author points out, as far as Japan and Germany are concerned, the US nuclear umbrella may be a better explanation for nuclear forbearance during the Cold War than simple bipolarity (p. 9), However, the logic of this dependence on alliance politics based on extended nuclear deterrence is not enough to explain why these states have continued to maintain the non-nuclear- armed strategies.

As for Japan, since it adopted three non-nuclear principles as its basic military statecraft in 1967, the Japanese governments have committed to these principles as a national goal. Moreover, the political parties of Japan have strongly supported these principles because Japan has been the only state to have suffered from the dropping of atomic bombs, at Hirosima and Nagasaki in 1945, so the non-nuclear mentality has prevailed nation wide. It should, therefore, be assumed that the basic norms of non-proliferation have been easily shared by the Japanese public. In this sense, it should be said that the Japanese case has been historically experienced unique and peculiar as compared with the cases of other four states.

Certainly, as the author cited, some influential politicians have strongly resisted and orchestrated not to renounce the sovereign right to have nuclear weapons as a means for self-defense. The member of the Upper House Shintaro Ishihara (now the Governor of Metropolitan Tokyo), for example, defined the US nuclear umbrella as a “broken umbrella” and therefore concluded that Japan had to develop its own MIRVed nuclear missiles and nuclear-capable submarines in order to deter any external threat (p. 69). Even after the end of the Cold War, some conservative politicians like Former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Taro Aso, and the late Minister of Finance, Syoichiro Nakagawa, often suggested the necessity to talk about Japan possibly going nuclear. Regardless of such inclination of some conservative politicians to have nuclear weapons, any public opinion survey well illustrated the strong feelings of non-nuclear weapons of the Japanese public.

The author focuses her analysis on the policy decision-making process in each country on which the political symbol of “nuclear taboo” had significant impact. She also tackles with criticism both the realist and neo-liberal institutionalist approaches to nuclear nonproliferation issues as insufficient parsimonious arguments to explain the reasons why some nations renounce to go nuclear. The author's emphasis on the importance of linkage between “ideas” and “norms” of nuclear nonproliferation is based on the constructivist assumption that nuclear forbearance is clearly combined with the domestic process and social mechanism guiding related states to that outcome. The author's ambitious attempts to prove such linkage are successfully done through survey of a number of documents and interview research.

Generally speaking, for the specialists of nuclear nonproliferation, the significance of such linkage between states’ social environments and security environments has become commonsense especially after the end of the Cold War. In that sense, this book has given us most valuable guidance and clear perspective for constructivist analysis of the nonproliferation conundrum.