Communist China's Attitude Towards Nuclear Tests

1965 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 96-107
Author(s):  
Hungdah Chiu
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Foreign Minister ◽  
Western China ◽  
Technical Data ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The People ◽  
The World ◽  
Communist China ◽  
Test Ban

On October 15, 1957, Communist China and the Soviet Union signed an agreement on new defence technology according to which the Soviet Union would supply China with technical data for manufacturing nuclear weapons. In May 1958 Foreign Minister Ch'en Yi told German correspondents in Peking that China would make atomic bombs. On June 20, 1959, the Soviet Union, according to China, unilaterally abrogated the 1957 agreements on weapons development. On July 31, 1963, China issued a statement denouncing the Moscow Partial Test Ban Treaty as “a big fraud to fool the people of the world.” On October 16, 1964, China announced that an atomic device had been exploded in western China and proposed that “a summit conference of all the countries of the world be convened to discuss the question of the complete prohibition and thorough destruction of nuclear weapons.”

scholarly journals The Carter Administration and the Evolution of American Nuclear Nonproliferation Policy, 1977–1981

2002 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 261-292 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Michael Martinez
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Nuclear Nonproliferation ◽  
Nuclear Testing ◽  
Energy Agency ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Subsequent Response ◽  
The World ◽  
Uncertain Time ◽  
First Time

In the wake of India's May 1998 decision to resume nuclear testing for the first time since 1974, as well as arch-rival Pakistan's subsequent response, the attention of the world again has focused on nuclear nonproliferation policy as a means of maintaining stability in politically troubled regions of the world. The 1990s proved to be an uncertain time for nonproliferation policy. Pakistan acquired nuclear capabilities. Iraq displayed its well-known intransigence by refusing to allow International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) arms inspectors access to facilities suspected of manufacturing nuclear weapons. North Korea maintained a nuclear weapons program despite opposition from many Western nations. Troubling questions about nuclear holdings persisted in Argentina, Brazil, and South Africa. New nuclear powers were created in Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Even the renewal of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons in 1995 failed to assuage the concerns of Western powers fearful of aggressive measures undertaken by rogue nuclear proliferants.

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’.

Rational Superiority, Crises, and Arms Control, 1961–1963

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Cameron
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
National Security ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Rhetoric ◽  
Nuclear Strategy ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Test Ban

Chapter 1 describes how John F. Kennedy rose to power by articulating his own new nuclear strategy, which would use the latest advances in social and organizational sciences, combined with US superiority in nuclear weapons, to defend the United States’ national security interests. The foremost exponent of this strategy of “rational superiority” was Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara. The chapter then explains how this scheme was dealt a series of blows by Kennedy’s experiences during the Berlin and Cuban missile crises, which disabused him of the idea that nuclear superiority could be used to coerce the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, the Kennedy administration used the rhetoric of rational superiority to advance the Limited Test Ban Treaty and was planning to employ it as part of the president’s reelection campaign in 1964. Kennedy had not reconciled this gap between his public rhetoric and personal doubts at the time of his death.

Inventory Control of Dual-Use Equipment

1995 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 244-247 ◽  
Author(s):  
David R. Franz
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Biological Weapons ◽  
Dual Use ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The World ◽  
Biological Weapons Convention ◽  
The U.S

Proliferation of biological—as well as chemical and nuclear—weapons is a threat to the security of the U.S. in the post-Cold War era. The number of states with biological weapons (BW) programs or with a strong interest in having a BW program has increased significantly since the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) was signed in 1972 (Office of Technology Assessment, 1993). BW programs present difficult intelligence targets. Thus, the Soviet Union was a signatory to the BWC at the time of the Sverdlovsk incident in 1979, yet we knew little of the scope of its BW program until 1991 (Meselson et al., 1994). The spread of biotechnology throughout the world in recent years has made even more governments potentially BW capable.

North Atlantic Treaty Organization

1964 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 652-655 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
North Atlantic ◽  
North Atlantic Treaty Organization ◽  
Secretary General ◽  
Annual Conference ◽  
The West ◽  
The North ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Communist China ◽  
Test Ban

The ninth annual Conference of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Parliamentarians was held in Paris on November 4–8, 1963. Addressing the parliamentarians, Mr. Dirk U. Stikker, Secretary-General of NATO, outlined the three essential aspects of the evolution in international relationships presently confronting the Alliance: first, relations between East and East—the rivalry between the Soviet Union and Communist China; secondly, relations between East and West—the questions arising from the Soviet Union's agreement to sign a partial test-ban treaty and the relations between the West and the uncommitted world; and, thirdly, relations between West and West—relations within the Atlantic Alliance itself.

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).

The Ruhr Authority and the German Problem

1955 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 345-358 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amos Yoder
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
European Integration ◽  
Foreign Minister ◽  
German Government ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The World ◽  
East German ◽  
East And West ◽  
John Foster Dulles ◽  
Do So

Not long ago—early in 1954—the world observed a debate at Berlin between diplomats of East and West who offered their alternatives for solving the German problem. The Soviet solution as set forth by Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet Foreign Minister, was to use Germans as pawns in a diplomatic maneuver whose object was clearly to wreck Western European integration and to strengthen the Soviet Union. The solution proposed by the Western diplomats, John Foster Dulles, Anthony Eden and George Bidault, was to regard Germans as equals with whom they would negotiate a solution to Germany's problems. The Soviets have used the satellite East German regime to parrot their program and they have groomed it to neutralize Germany or lead it into the Communist camp. The Western diplomats have concluded that in order to obtain a lasting German settlement there must be free elections to establish an all-German government, which would be competent to negotiate about Germany's future and would be free to join the Western Alliance, if it chose to do so.

scholarly journals Why Do States Seek to Acquire Nuclear Weapons?

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 33
Author(s):  
Hamdan Hamedan
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
North Korea ◽  
Conventional Wisdom ◽  
Primary Motivation ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The World ◽  
Security Concerns ◽  
The U.S

Conventional wisdom maintains that security concerns are the primary motivation for states to seek nuclear weapons. Indeed, history has shown that the predominant decisions to go nuclear (starting from the U.S., the Soviet Union, China, Israel, Pakistan, and to North Korea) appear to be motivated by security concerns. Yet, the fact there have been nuclear-capable states with precarious security concerns that have decided not to seek nuclear weapons serve to challenge the aforementioned conventional wisdom. Moreover, further research and case-by-case study coupled with understanding of the fact that each state in the world has different security condition and challenges show that security concerns are, in reality, not always the primary motivation.

The Soviet Union and Nuclear Proliferation

Slavic Review ◽  
1985 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 468-488 ◽  
Author(s):  
William C. Potter
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Nuclear Export ◽  
Control Policy ◽  
Nuclear Nonproliferation ◽  
Soviet Leadership ◽  
Export Policy ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
Test Ban

Prevention of the spread of nuclear weapons has long been a theme of the Soviet! Union's declaratory arms control policy. It has also found concrete expression in Moscow's endorsement of the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963, the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in Latin America of 1967 (Treaty of Tlatelolco), the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty of 1968, and, since 1958, in the stringent nuclear export policy of the Soviet Union. Although much of Moscow's nonproliferation rhetoric and elements of its nonproliferation behavior can be explained in terms of narrow self-interest (namely, prevention of access to nuclear weapons by traditional adversaries), the range and consistency of its nonproliferation efforts, as well as certain specific actions, indicate that the Soviet leadership appreciates the dangers posed by the diffusion of nuclear weapons.

Nuclear Weapons in Outer Space

1965 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 3-35
Author(s):  
A. E. Gotlieb
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Outer Space ◽  
The United States ◽  
Scientific Achievement ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The World

In the Latter Part of the last decade, when it began to become apparent that vehicles or devices carrying nuclear weapons could be made to enter into outer space and orbit around the earth's contours, both the United States and its allies and the Soviet Union began to put forward proposals for restricting or prohibiting such operations.The crucial year was 1957 — the year in which the Soviet Union launched its first sputnik in outer space. This scientific achievement, followed in 1961 by the advent of manned orbital satellites, made it apparent to the world at large and the lawyers among them that outer space could be utilized by man for his own purposes — and that these might not necessarily be peaceful ones.

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