Table of Contents for The Nuclear Club
Introduction: The Most Exclusive Club on Earth
After the Second World War, the international community led by the United States and the Soviet Union constructed a near-universal regime to manage the most powerful technology ever devised—the power to split or fuse atomic nuclei to release wondrous new isotopes for medical cures and energy production or unprecedented explosive force for mass destruction and death. After numerous false starts, their campaign bore fruit in the 1960s, when multiplying regional crises and an emerging world market in fission reactors led an international society in the throes of decolonization to draw up a Magna Carta for the subatomic realm. The result was three international agreements—the Moscow Treaty limiting nuclear testing to underground, the Treaty of Tlatelolco creating a nuclear-weapon-free zone in Latin America, and the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, formalizing a world of five legal members of the nuclear club and a remaining mass of nuclear unarmed.
1."Peace That Is No Peace": Revolution and Reaction After Hiroshima, 1945–1955
Narratives of change and continuity, humanity and terror, revolution and counterrevolution coexisted in the decade after Hiroshima as the international system descended into a cold war—a state between demobilization and war. George Orwell's vision of a world in which atomic terror staved off "large-scale wars at the cost of prolonging indefinitely a 'peace that is no peace'" proved prophetic. Over the next quarter century, political elites, international diplomats, rationalizing scientists, insurgent revolutionaries, and humanitarian actors from around the world would weave these threads together into a fledgling global regime of nuclear law and order. While their efforts to illegalize the use or possession of nuclear weapons, or to internationalize control over their chief material precursors—uranium and thorium ore—failed, humanitarian and technocratic solutions to the nuclear question continued to inform subsequent efforts to establish nuclear order amid decolonization.
2."Uncontrollable Anarchy": Founding the Nuclear Club, 1956–1961
Irish foreign minister Frank Aiken advanced the first proposal to close the nuclear club at the UN General Assembly in 1958. Four years would pass before the superpowers warily accepted it. Concurrent crises in the Taiwan Strait and the Middle East provided the spark. With its fate hanging in the balance at four successive general assemblies from 1958 to 1962, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) debated its post-Sputnik nuclear defense as Charles de Gaulle's France, David Ben-Gurion's Israel, and Mao Zedong's communist China eyed their own nuclear arsenals. As Africa, Asia, and the Middle East emerged from colonialism to confront the Cold War, the Irish Resolution built on efforts to reorganize regional and global politics to advance a globe-spanning arrangement to keep open the possibility of world order, universal law, and nuclear disarmament.
3.The Atomic Frontier: John F. Kennedy and Nuclear Containment, 1960–1962
President John F. Kennedy believed the interaction of decolonization and the spread of nuclear science and technology represented to him and future U.S. presidents the "the greatest possible danger and hazard." Once in power, his decisions would determine whether Dwight D. Eisenhower's tentative steps toward nuclear arms control and nondissemination bore fruit. The challenges that he and his country faced emanated from the edges of the globe-spanning U.S. alliance network—and from fissures within those alliances—as Kennedy worked to update U.S. foreign policy for a postcolonial era. Over the course of his first eighteen months in office, his administration would pursue a "common law for the Cold War" in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, as France, communist China, and Israel pursued their ambitions to become regional nuclear powers.
4.Pax Nuclearis: Khrushchev, Kennedy, Mao, and the Moscow Treaty, 1962–1963
In negotiating the Moscow Treaty banning nuclear testing in the atmosphere, under water, and in outer space, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union offered themselves as planetary guardians at war with "the contamination of man's environment by radioactive substances." The treaty did more than crystallize U.S.-Soviet détente. It redefined international status and criminalized nuclear fallout while elevating human rights and humanitarianism alongside development and deterrence as central tenets of international status. To establish a fledgling U.S.-Soviet atomic condominium, Kennedy had to recast the U.S. presidency as a protector of North America's suburbs from Third World guerrillas and nuclear-tipped ICBMs both, vesting in his office the responsibility to protect the health and prosperity of younger and future generations through exploits of diplomacy and feats of war.
5.An "Impossible Possibility": Lyndon Johnson and the Nonproliferation Treaty That Failed, 1963–1965
After the Moscow Treaty, Soviet and U.S. leaders looked to nuclear arms control to reduce Cold War tensions and cement their respective hegemonies. A nuclear nondiffusion accord looked like the next step. Nikita Khrushchev and John F. Kennedy's early momentum floundered as allies and nonaligned states played the superpowers against one another. Poland and East Germany vetoed Khrushchev's move to bar Mao's China from the nuclear club in exchange for looking the other way on NATO's nuclear integration. Europe-firsters in the Johnson administration yielded deadlock as foreign assistance and a growing nuclear market brought the atomic arms within developing nations' reach. In the wake of communist China's first nuclear test in October 1964, a presidential commission under former deputy secretary of defense Roswell Gilpatric advocated a heightened focus on nuclear proliferation lest the United States lose control of the course of events in the Third World.
6."This Side of the Angels": LBJ, Vietnam, and Nuclear Peace, 1964–1966
From October 1964 to December 1966 the superpowers resolved their differences over nonproliferation. Gaullist France, nuclear-armed China, and the Vietnam War deepened fault lines in the capitalist, communist, and nonaligned worlds, disrupting diplomacy in Geneva, New York, and Algiers. Into this vacuum stepped an international network of nuclear globalists against whom Europe-firsters in the U.S. national-security state stood opposed. In the end, domestic politics moved Johnson to act. The Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Immigration and Naturalization Act, and the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution collectively drove wedges through the Democratic coalition. He waited until the eve of the midterm elections to throw his lot in with a nonproliferation treaty in an eleventh-hour bid to preserve his Great Society, laying claim to Kennedy's paternal posture of nuclear guardianship as Johnson Americanized the Vietnam War.
7."Tall Oaks from Little Acorns": Making the Treaty of Tlatelolco, 1963–1967
Alfonso García Robles guided the Treaty of Tlatelolco through a series of obstacles arising from Latin America's Cold War—overweening U.S. power in combination with John F. Kennedy's and Lyndon Johnson's staunch anticommunism, Cuba's revolutionary isolation, and Brazil's and Argentina's rising militarism. A manifestation of Latin American ideals of common security and sovereign equality, the treaty added a new corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, barring nuclear weapons and threats from most of the Western Hemisphere.
8."A Citadel of Learning": Building an International Community, 1966–1968
The international community was on the brink of a final treaty by January 1968. With the question of NATO nuclear-sharing resolved, the fate of East-West atomic coexistence hung on a safeguard controversy, while North-South differences ran along lines of security, development, and disarmament. The central task was to forge consensus around a fair and effective treaty. New Delhi asked the nuclear club to extend atomic guarantees to the nonaligned world, but the U.S. feared overextending itself militarily. Goodwill at Geneva made possible searching midlevel explorations, resulting in a practical solution to the safeguards controversy that pried open U.S.-Soviet détente through the global regulation of atomic energy. Soviet and U.S. delegations tabled identical treaty drafts—with the safeguards language studiously left blank, opening a new act in the search for a global nuclear nonproliferation treaty, with nonaligned and neutral views now center stage.
9."A Decent Level of International Law and Order": Final Negotiations for the NPT, 1967–1970
The decisive phase of international diplomacy resulting in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty stretched from the superpowers' introduction of a consensus treaty in late 1967 to the treaty's entry into force in March 1970. As the Vietnam War escalated, the United States, the Soviet Union, and the full membership of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) finalized a nuclear constitution for the world community. Enacted with U.S. leadership, Soviet and British backing, French and Chinese acquiescence, and small powers' invitation, the NPT extended to the nuclear realm a liberal world order to which U.S. hegemony was inextricably bound. Latin American and African delegations held the balance in the UNGA. To achieve enduring legitimacy, the superpowers promoted a global nuclear order featuring an inviting fusion of markets, security, and voice.
Conclusion: Saving Humanity from Itself
The nuclear club's formalization was an acknowledgment of the technological oligopoly and military oligarchy that had replaced a collapsing imperial order as the world proceeded to decolonize from 1945 to 1970. The dual-use nature of advanced nuclear technology, most of all uranium enrichment, plutonium reprocessing, and nuclear explosives of all types, has complicated the enterprise from the beginning.