Explosive Challenge: Diplomatic Triangles, the United Nations, and the Problem of French Nuclear Testing, 1959–1960

2009 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mervyn O'Driscoll
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Nuclear Movement ◽  
The North ◽  
British Prime Minister ◽  
Run Up ◽  
The Third World ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Test Ban ◽  
East West

France's first nuclear tests in Algeria in 1960 occurred at a critical moment in the Cold War. The United States, Great Britain, and the USSR had suspended their tests in 1958 and had been holding test ban talks in Geneva. British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan faced a vociferous anti-nuclear movement at home and wanted to foster East-West détente. The U.S. State Department wished to prevent Soviet propaganda in the Third World, including the newly independent African and Asian states that strongly opposed French testing. Nonetheless, both Britain and the United States adopted a sympathetic stance toward France in the run-up to the first test in February 1960. Macmillan hoped to move Britain into the European Economic Community and therefore wanted to avoid antagonizing France, whose support for British membership would be crucial. Macmillan also wanted France's backing for a four-power summit to try to achieve East-West détente. Similarly, the United States did not want to alienate France, a key member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

Trust, but Verify

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Arms Control ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
East West

This book uses trust—with its emotional and predictive aspects—to explore international relations in the second half of the Cold War, beginning with the late 1960s. The détente of the 1970s led to the development of some limited trust between the United States and the Soviet Union, which lessened international tensions and enabled advances in areas such as arms control. However, it also created uncertainty in other areas, especially on the part of smaller states that depended on their alliance leaders for protection. The chapters in this volume look at how the “emotional” side of the conflict affected the dynamics of various Cold War relations: between the superpowers, within the two ideological blocs, and inside individual countries on the margins of the East–West confrontation.

The political economy of international shipping: Europe versus America

1985 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan W. Cafruny
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
International Shipping ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
The North ◽  
Political Challenge ◽  
The Third World ◽  
Theory Of Hegemonic Stability

The political challenge to the post-World War II order in shipping has been issued in the context of the North-South debate, but American power and interest are central to current developments. In the bulk and tanker sector the United States retains a strong interest in stability and successfully defends the existing order. In the liner sector, on the other hand, the United States has participated in recent assaults on the postwar order, producing great tension between Europe and America. There is a strong correlation between this growing maritime conflict and the political processes anticipated by the general theory of hegemonic stability. But “hegemony” and “power” are distinct concepts. Instability in international shipping arises neither from America's loss of power in shipping nor from challenges from Europe and the Third World. Rather, instability reflects American attempts to establish a closer identity between the existing regime and short-term national interest.

scholarly journals Rethinking the Security Architecture of North East Asia

2010 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 273
Author(s):  
Michael J Kelly ◽  
Sean Watts
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
East Asia ◽  
North Korea ◽  
The United States ◽  
United Nations Security Council ◽  
Collective Security ◽  
North East ◽  
The North ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Cold War

In the aftermath of the Cold War, many began to question the continuing efficacy, or at least call for reform, of collective security structures such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the United Nations Security Council. Yet, North East Asia never enjoyed a formal, institutionalised collective security structure. As Russia and the United States recede and China emerges in North East Asia, this article questions whether now is the time to consider such an arrangement. Financially, Japan and South Korea are locked into a symbiotic relationship with China (as is the United States), while the government in Beijing continues to militarise and lay territorial and maritime claims to large areas of the region. Moreover, the regime in North Korea, with its new nuclear capabilities, remains unpredictable. Consequently, central components to the question of collective security in North East Asia are the equally vexing questions of what to do about North Korea and whether a new formalised security arrangement would include or exclude the People's Republic of China.

6. Cold wars at home

2021 ◽  
pp. 102-119
Author(s):  
Robert J. McMahon
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Third World ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Third ◽  
Nation States ◽  
The Third World ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
State Relations ◽  
At Home

‘Cold wars at home’ highlights the domestic repercussions of the Cold War. The Cold War exerted so profound and so multi-faceted an impact on the structure of international politics and state-to-state relations that it has become customary to label the 1945–90 period ‘the Cold War era’. That designation becomes even more fitting when one considers the powerful mark that the Soviet–American struggle for world dominance and ideological supremacy left within many of the world’s nation-states. The Cold War of course affected the internal constellation of forces in the Third World, Europe, and the United States and impacted the process of decolonization, state formation, and Cold War geopolitics.

The Unbearable Whiteness of Grand Strategy

2021 ◽  
pp. 329-345
Author(s):  
Adriane Lentz-Smith
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
National Interests ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Foreign Relations ◽  
The Third World ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter explores grand strategy as an intellectual and cultural project by considering its willful unseeing of race as a political project. To ignore race is to misapprehend how power works in the United States and how domestic formulations of subjectivity, difference, and racialized power imbue American foreign relations. The chapter focuses on African Americans in the era of Cold War civil rights. For Carl Rowan and Sam Greenlee, the two African American veterans who provide concrete cases for thinking about the United States and the world, their blackness and ambitions for their people would color how they interpreted America's role in political and military struggles in the Third World and beyond. As with other people of color, their encounters with white supremacy shaped their understandings of liberation, violence, and the United States security project. Their perspectives challenge scholars’ conceptions of the Cold War as a period of “defined clear national interests” and “public consensus.” Centering the stories of Rowan and Greenlee highlights not simply ongoing contestation over the myth and history of the Cold War, but, more fundamentally, the unthinking whiteness of grand strategy itself.

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.

Particular generalisation: the Antarctic Treaty of 1959 in relation to the anti-nuclear movement

Polar Record ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-125 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Kendall Moore
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Strategic Orientation ◽  
Nuclear Movement ◽  
The Us ◽  
Antarctic Treaty ◽  
Nuclear Tests ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Test Ban ◽  
The Antarctic

ABSTRACTThis article presents the US role in the formation of the Antarctic Treaty of 1959 in relation to the era's anti-nuclear movement. The purpose is two-fold: to highlight the strategic orientation of US Antarctic policy, suggesting that it was less enlightened than it is frequently portrayed; and to highlight the influence of the anti-nuclear movement upon the treaty's inclusion of a test ban which the United States initially opposed, hoping to reserve the right to conduct nuclear tests. The treaty is depicted as a particular generalisation: one aspect of the cold war that gains significance when scrutinised in relation to another that is much better-known.

Conflict and Cooperation in Intra-Alliance Nuclear Politics: Western Europe, the United States, and the Genesis of NATO's Dual-Track Decision, 1977–1979

2011 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 39-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristina Spohr Readman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
North Atlantic ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Conflict And Cooperation ◽  
The North ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Missiles ◽  
East West

On the basis of recently released archival sources from several member-states of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), this article revisits the making of NATO's landmark 1979 dual-track decision. The article examines the intersecting processes of personal, bureaucratic, national, and alliance high politics in the broader Cold War context of increasingly adversarial East-West relations. The discussion sheds new light on how NATO tried to augment its deterrent capability via the deployment of long-range theater nuclear missiles and why ultimately an arms control proposal to the Soviet Union was included as an equal strand. The 1979 decision owed most to West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt's political thought and initiative. Intra-alliance decision-making, marked by transatlantic conflict and cooperation, benefitted from the creativity and agency of West German, British, and Norwegian officials. Contrary to popular impressions, the United States did not truly lead the process.

A Subversive Agent From Colombia

Worldview ◽  
1974 ◽  
Vol 17 (6) ◽  
pp. 29-34
Author(s):  
Denis Goulet
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
North American ◽  
Third World ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Policies ◽  
The Third ◽  
The North ◽  
American Heritage ◽  
The Third World

In a letter to a friend in the United States dated May 16, 1969, a leading Colombian sociologist declared:I have been trying to disattach myself from portions of the North American heritage which I had received, and with which I find myself increasingly at odds. For this reason, I cannot identify myself with any institution of the United States that would uphold or sustain the present economic and social policies pursued toward the Nations of the Third World.

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