Nuclear Proliferation: Who's Next to Get the Bomb?

Worldview ◽  
1983 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-15
Author(s):  
George S. Weigel
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Nuclear Proliferation ◽  
The United States ◽  
Technical Knowledge ◽  
Atomic Weapons ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
International Authority ◽  
Turn Over

The scientific and technical knowledge that led in 1945 to the explosion of the first atomic weapons cannot be erased; as long as our civilization survives, so will our capacity to build nuclear weapons. Awareness of this harsh fact has sparked numerous attempts to control their spread. The hope was that nuclear weapons could be confined to a relatively few, politically stable countries and then eliminated entirely.In the Baruch Plan of 1946, the United States offered to turn over its nuclear monopoly to an international authority on the condition that other powers do the same and that the most rigorous safeguards and inspection/verification procedures be established and enforced The Soviet Union declined to go along. Thus the 1950s and early ’60s saw the spread of nuclear weapons, first to the Soviet Union (accomplished by a combination of internal research and international espionage), then to Great Britain and France, and later to the People's Republic of China (instigated by the USSR and doubtless regretted by the Soviets today)

The future unlike the past: nuclear proliferation and American security policy

1981 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 193-212 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Nacht
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Security Policy ◽  
Nuclear Proliferation ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Future ◽  
Nuclear Arms Control

An examination of the past relationships between nuclear proliferation and American security policy substantiates several propositions. First, the political relationship between the United States and each new nuclear weapon state was not fundamentally transformed as a result of nuclear proliferation. Second, with the exception of the Soviet Union, no new nuclear state significantly affected U.S. defense programs or policies. Third, American interest in bilateral nuclear arms control negotiations has been confined to the Soviet Union. Fourth, a conventional conflict involving a nonnuclear ally prompted the United States to intervene in ways it otherwise might not have in order to forestall the use of nuclear weapons.In all respects, however, the relationship between nuclear proliferation and American security policy is changing. The intensification of the superpower rivalry and specific developments in their nuclear weapons and doctrines, the decline of American power more generally, and the characteristics of nuclear threshold states all serve to stimulate nuclear proliferation. It will be increasingly difficult in the future for American security policy to be as insulated from this process as it has been in the past.

The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and the International Atomic Energy Agency

1970 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
George H. Quester
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
International Atomic Energy Agency ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
The United States ◽  
Atomic Energy ◽  
Energy Agency ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Communist China

The United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics have put forward a Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) designed to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons beyond those five nations which currently possess them: France, the People's Republic of China (Communist China), the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The treaty requires that signatories already possessing such weapons not give them to other countries and that signatories not yet posses-sing nuclear weapons forego accepting them or manufacturing them indigenously. To reinforce the latter restraint the treaty obligates states renouncing weapons to accept inspection safeguards on their peaceful nuclear activities, inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

Africa's Nuclear Capability

1984 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oye Ogunbadejo
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Nuclear Proliferation ◽  
The United States ◽  
Nuclear Technology ◽  
Future Trends ◽  
Nuclear Forces ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Subject

The impact of nuclear weapons on the present and future trends in international relations continues to attract wide scholarship. While the literature on the subject has been growing apace, nuclear technology is becoming increasingly sophisticated, and the dangers posed to the survival of mankind are becoming much more acute than hitherto. In broad terms, the fears expressed about these weapons tend to centre around the implications of three major issues: the emergence of greater first-strike inclinations in the two super-power nuclear forces; the possibility of a perceived strategic imbalance favouring either the United States or the Soviet Union; and the dangers of nuclear proliferation.

scholarly journals Nuclear Proliferation and Pakistan

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (01) ◽  
pp. 54-70
Author(s):  
Farooque Ahmed Leghari ◽  
Humera Hakro ◽  
Muhammad Ramzan Kolachi
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Nuclear Weapon ◽  
Qualitative Methodology ◽  
Nuclear Proliferation ◽  
Secondary Data ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Nuclear Assistance

Pakistan, India, Israel in addition to North Korea became successful to get sensitive nuclear assistance from other nuclear weapon states and became successful nuclear weapon states. The major objective of this research is to know Pakistan’s nuclear path that what factors motivated it to get nuclear weapons. The qualitative methodology is used and secondary data is being analyzed with content analysis to get the findings. This article tries to look at nuclear proliferation and nuclear non-proliferation regimes to check out Pakistan’s nuclear path. The article finds three things. First, the sense of conventional military inferiority and insecurity against India led Pakistan to follow nuclear path. Second, the cold war in Afghanistan between the United States and the Soviet Union proved to be a blessing in disguise for Pakistan to fulfill its dream of becoming a nuclear weapon state. Third, Pakistan became successful to get sensitive nuclear assistance from the China. Pakistan became successful in achieving the milestone of getting the capability to manufacture nuclear weapons in 1980s era.

The Communist Contest for Status

2019 ◽  
pp. 82-133
Author(s):  
Deborah Welch Larson ◽  
Alexei Shevchenko
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Competition ◽  
The West ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Economic Production ◽  
Communist Ideology ◽  
The Us ◽  
Catch Up

This chapter argues that both the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China (PRC) pursued social competition with the Western states while at the same time seeking recognition from the states they were trying to subvert. Stalin sought to increase the power and prestige of the Soviet state through coerced industrialization, and Khrushchev made an effort to “catch up and surpass” the West in economic production. The PRC sought to improve its status by allying with the Soviet Union, but the Chinese chafed under their status as “younger brothers” to their senior ally, and eventually Mao challenged the Soviets for leadership of the international communist movement. In the 1970s, China took advantage of the US need to balance Soviet military power by putting aside communist ideology to become a tacit ally of the United States, part of a “strategic triangle.”

Non-Aligned Architecture: China’s Designs on and in Ghana and Guinea, 1955-92

2015 ◽  
Vol 58 ◽  
pp. 261-291 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cole Roskam
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
Mao Zedong ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The People ◽  
Trace Back ◽  
The Will ◽  
Contemporary Chinese

The current international attention devoted to contemporary Chinese-financed and constructed development in Africa has tended to obscure complex and multivalent histories of the relationships between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and numerous African nations; and many of these histories date back decades. The ideological origins behind socialist China’s engagement with Africa, and the geopolitical dynamics that continue to propel them forward, trace back to the time of Chairman Mao Zedong, who first coined the term ‘intermediate zone’ in 1946 to position the vast expanse of contested territories and undecided loyalties existing between the ideological poles of the Soviet Union and the United States after World War II. Nine years later (1955), at the first Non-Aligned Movement conference held in Bandung, Indonesia, Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai declared thatever since modern times most of the countries of Asia and Africa in varying degrees have been subjected to colonial plunder and oppression, and have thus been forced to remain in a stagnant state of poverty and backwardness […]. We need to develop our countries independently with no outside interference and in accordance with the will of the people.

The Sino-Soviet Split and Problems for the United States in Asia, Europe, and the Americas, 1956–64

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas J. Christensen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
Mao Zedong ◽  
Third Party ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Soviet Foreign Policy ◽  
China’S Foreign Policy

This chapter examines the Sino-Soviet split and its implications for the United States' policies in Asia, Europe, and the Americas during the period 1956–1964. Coordination and comity in the communist camp peaked between 1953 and 1957, but alliance between the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China (PRC) was relatively short-lived. This was caused by ideological differences, distrust, and jealous rivalries for international leadership between Nikita Khrushchev and Mao Zedong. The chapter explains what caused the strain in Sino-Soviet relations, and especially the collapse of Sino-Soviet military and economic cooperation. It also considers the effects of the Sino-Soviet disputes on third-party communists in Asia, China's foreign policy activism, and the catalytic effect of the Sino-Soviet split on Soviet foreign policy.

Trial Balloons

2020 ◽  
pp. 84-105
Author(s):  
Simon Miles
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
State Legislatures ◽  
Balance Of Power ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Force ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
East And West ◽  
General Secretary

This chapter is devoted to Konstantin Chernenko' efforts to shift superpower relations back to a détente-like footing during his time as a General Secretary of the Soviet Union. It examines attempts on the part of various Western leaders to carve out a role for themselves as the superpowers' chosen intermediary. It also investigates the balance of power between East and West, including how and why leaders in Washington and Moscow perceived and responded to each other as they did. The chapter analyzes the nuclear freeze movement, which has remained a political force to be reckoned with as the movement called for both superpowers to halt the construction and deployment of nuclear weapons. It talks about the freeze activists in the United States who shepherded the passage of nonbinding resolutions that support their cause in four state legislatures, the House, and the Senate.

The continuing threat of nuclear war

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Cirincione
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
The United States ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
The North ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The World ◽  
Nuclear Winter

The American poet Robert Frost famously mused on whether the world will end in fire or in ice. Nuclear weapons can deliver both. The fire is obvious: modern hydrogen bombs duplicate on the surface of the earth the enormous thermonuclear energies of the Sun, with catastrophic consequences. But it might be a nuclear cold that kills the planet. A nuclear war with as few as 100 hundred weapons exploded in urban cores could blanket the Earth in smoke, ushering in a years-long nuclear winter, with global droughts and massive crop failures. The nuclear age is now entering its seventh decade. For most of these years, citizens and officials lived with the constant fear that long-range bombers and ballistic missiles would bring instant, total destruction to the United States, the Soviet Union, many other nations, and, perhaps, the entire planet. Fifty years ago, Nevil Shute’s best-selling novel, On the Beach, portrayed the terror of survivors as they awaited the radioactive clouds drifting to Australia from a northern hemisphere nuclear war. There were then some 7000 nuclear weapons in the world, with the United States outnumbering the Soviet Union 10 to 1. By the 1980s, the nuclear danger had grown to grotesque proportions. When Jonathan Schell’s chilling book, The Fate of the Earth, was published in 1982, there were then almost 60,000 nuclear weapons stockpiled with a destructive force equal to roughly 20,000 megatons (20 billion tons) of TNT, or over 1 million times the power of the Hiroshima bomb. President Ronald Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ anti-missile system was supposed to defeat a first-wave attack of some 5000 Soviet SS-18 and SS-19 missile warheads streaking over the North Pole. ‘These bombs’, Schell wrote, ‘were built as “weapons” for “war”, but their significance greatly transcends war and all its causes and outcomes. They grew out of history, yet they threaten to end history. They were made by men, yet they threaten to annihilate man’.

15. The Return to Confrontation, 1979–80

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
John W. Young ◽  
John Kent
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Short Range ◽  
The United States ◽  
Arms Race ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Slow Progress ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
East West

This chapter examines why the United States and the Soviet Union returned to confrontation during the period 1979–1980. Despite the slow progress of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT II), there were at least some efforts to control strategic weapons. Short-range and intermediate-range nuclear weapons, in contrast, continued to grow in number and sophistication, particularly in Europe, where NATO and Warsaw Pact forces still prepared for war against each other, despite détente. The failure to control theatre nuclear weapons led to a new twist in the European arms race at the end of the 1970s which helped to undermine recent improvements in East–West relations. The chapter first considers NATO’s ‘dual track’ decision regarding theatre nuclear weapons before discussing the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. It concludes with an assessment of the revival of the Cold War, focusing on the so-called Carter Doctrine.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document