U.S. Policy to Curb West European Nuclear Exports, 1974–1978

2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 110-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jayita Sarkar

After India's detonation of a nuclear explosive in 1974 publicly demonstrated the proliferation risks from nuclear assistance, the U.S. government increased its efforts to control nuclear exports worldwide. In doing so, U.S. policymakers faced challenges from two major West European allies, France and West Germany, both of which pursued their commercial interests through nuclear exports to countries such as Pakistan, Brazil, Iran, and India, among others. Despite multilateral efforts including the formation of the Nuclear Suppliers Group and bilateral negotiations with the supplier governments, the administrations of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter attained only partial success. The commercial interests of nuclear firms, the influence of pro-export coalitions inside supplier countries, and the emerging importance of the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact countries as alternative suppliers influenced the outcome. The United States was more successful in restraining the French through a series of quid pro quo arrangements than it ever was with the West Germans. Using recently declassified archival documents, this article sheds new light on U.S. nonproliferation policy in the aftermath of the 1973 oil price shock.

2018 ◽  
pp. 97-130
Author(s):  
Denzenlkham Ulambayar

Since the 1990s, when previously classified and top secret Russian archival documents on the Korean War became open and accessible, it has become clear for post-communist countries that Kim Il Sung, Stalin and Mao Zedong were the primary organizers of the war. It is now equally certain that tensions arising from Soviet and American struggle generated the origins of the Korean War, namely the Soviet Union’s occupation of the northern half of the Korean peninsula and the United States’ occupation of the southern half to the 38th parallel after 1945 as well as the emerging bipolar world order of international relations and Cold War. Newly available Russian archival documents produced much in the way of new energies and opportunities for international study and research into the Korean War.2 However, within this research few documents connected to Mongolia have so far been found, and little specific research has yet been done regarding why and how Mongolia participated in the Korean War. At the same time, it is becoming today more evident that both Soviet guidance and U.S. information reports (evaluated and unevaluated) regarding Mongolia were far different from the situation and developments of that period. New examples of this tendency are documents declassified in the early 2000s and released publicly from the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in December 2016 which contain inaccurate information. The original, uncorrupted sources about why, how and to what degree the Mongolian People’s Republic (MPR) became a participant in the Korean War are in fact in documents held within the Mongolian Central Archives of Foreign Affairs. These archives contain multiple documents in relation to North Korea. Prior to the 1990s Mongolian scholars Dr. B. Lkhamsuren,3 Dr. B. Ligden,4 Dr. Sh. Sandag,5 junior scholar J. Sukhee,6 and A. A. Osipov7 mention briefly in their writings the history of relations between the MPR and the DPRK during the Korean War. Since the 1990s the Korean War has also briefly been touched upon in the writings of B. Lkhamsuren,8 D. Ulambayar (the author of this paper),9 Ts. Batbayar,10 J. Battur,11 K. Demberel,12 Balảzs Szalontai,13 Sergey Radchenko14 and Li Narangoa.15 There have also been significant collections of documents about the two countries and a collection of memoirs published in 200716 and 2008.17 The author intends within this paper to discuss particularly about why, how and to what degree Mongolia participated in the Korean War, the rumors and realities of the war and its consequences for the MPR’s membership in the United Nations. The MPR was the second socialist country following the Soviet Union (the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics) to recognize the DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) and establish diplomatic ties. That was part of the initial stage of socialist system formation comprising the Soviet Union, nations in Eastern Europe, the MPR, the PRC (People’s Republic of China) and the DPRK. Accordingly between the MPR and the DPRK fraternal friendship and a framework of cooperation based on the principles of proletarian and socialist internationalism had been developed.18 In light of and as part of this framework, The Korean War has left its deep traces in the history of the MPR’s external diplomatic environment and state sovereignty


Author(s):  
Benjamin Tromly

During the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, the United States government unleashed covert operations intended to weaken the Soviet Union. As part of these efforts, the CIA undertook support of Russian exiles, populations uprooted either during World War II or by the Russian Revolution decades before. No one seemed better prepared to fight in the American secret war against communism than the uprooted Russians, whom the CIA directed to carry out propaganda, espionage, and subversion operations from their home base in West Germany. Yet the American engagement of Russian exiles had unpredictable outcomes. Drawing on recently declassified and previously untapped sources, Cold War Exiles and the CIA examines how the CIA’s Russian operations became entangled with the internal struggles of Russia abroad and also the espionage wars of the superpowers in divided Germany. What resulted was a transnational political sphere involving different groups of Russian exiles, American and German anti-communists, and spies operating on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Inadvertently, CIA’s patronage of Russian exiles forged a complex sub-front in the wider Cold War, demonstrating the ways in which the hostilities of the Cold War played out in ancillary conflicts involving proxies and non-state actors.


1990 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 53-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Korey

Despite conservative opposition, in the late 1970s, Jimmy Carter turned the tide in favor of the Helsinki Accord by taking a strong stand in fostering U.S. participation in it. Korey focuses on the U.S. delegation to the Commission on Security and Cooperation (CSCE) in Europe and credits the success of the Helsinki Accord to U.S. adroit negotiation strategies, beginning with the Carter administration. By 1980, U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev came to embrace the “humanitarianism” of the treaty. The Vienna review conference's (1986–89) effort peaked when a milestone was reached in the human rights process, linking it directly to security issues equally pertinent to the East and the West. The author contends that the United States' ardent participation in the monitoring of compliance was particularly effective in putting pressure on the Soviet Union to uphold the agreement within its territory, yielding enormous progress in human rights


1989 ◽  
Vol 26 (02) ◽  
pp. 145-159
Author(s):  
R. A. Dick ◽  
J. E. Laframboise

This paper utilizes available data on existing icebreaking ships to compile a review of the design features that influence ship performance. The data were extracted from a recently completed review of the state of the art of Arctic ship technology and include icebreaking ships from Argentina, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Japan, Sweden, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, the United States, and West Germany. It is the aim of this paper to offer guidance in the initial stages of icebreaker design and thereby give confidence to the designer in the selection of dimensions, hull shape and propulsion.


Author(s):  
Udi Greenberg

This chapter focuses on political theorist Waldemar Gurian, one of the first Catholic émigrés to return from exile to visit Germany in 1948. During the occupation period and the early 1950s, Gurian utilized U.S. wealth to fund a stream of publications, lectures, and educational programs intended to establish a union between the United States and Europe's Catholics. His writings depicted the United States as the guardian of Catholic ideals, autonomy, and communities and insisted that an alliance with the United States presented the only effective path toward defeating Catholicism's ultimate enemy, the Soviet Union. With the massive support of the American diplomatic and cultural apparatus, Gurian and other émigrés worked to popularize these ideas among German Catholics. By the mid-1950s, their efforts helped forge an alliance between Catholics, West Germany, and the United States, a bond that became the backbone of the Cold War effort in Europe.


1961 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 513-514 ◽  

The second session of the Assembly of the Intergovernmental Maritime Consultative Organization (IMCO) was held in London from April 5–14, 1961. Mr. W. L. de Vries, Director-General of Shipping in the Netherlands Ministry of Transport, was elected President of the session and Mr. Ove Nielson, Secretary-General of IMCO, acted as secretary. The Assembly elected Argentina, Australia, India, and the Soviet Union to fill out the sixteen-member Council on which Belgium, Canada, France, West Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States were already represented. The Assembly: 1) established a Credentials Committee consisting of Canada, Japan, Liberia, Poland, and Turkey; 2) adopted a budget for 1962–1963 of $892,-350; 3) approved Mauritania's application for membership by a two-thirds vote following the rule that non-members of the United Nations had to be approved by such a vote after recommendation by the Council; and 4) in view of the advisory opinion of June 8, 1960, of the International Court of Justice to the effect that the Maritime Safety Committee was improperly constituted, dissolved the committee and elected Argentina, Canada, France, West Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, Liberia, the Netherlands, Norway, Pakistan, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States to the reconstituted committee. The Assembly during its second session also approved an expanded work program submitted by the IMCO Council including new duties connected with international travel and transport, with special reference to the simplification of ship's papers. The Assembly asked IMCO to study the arrangements for the maintenance of certain light beacons used for navigation at the southern end of the Red Sea which were being maintained by the United Kingdom with the help of the Netherlands. Also under consideration was a new convention on the safety of life at sea submitted to the Assembly by a Conference on Safety of Life at Sea and containing a number of recommendations to IMCO on studies relating to such matters as ship construction, navigation, and other technical subjects on safety at sea. The Assembly decided that in conjunction with United Nations programs of technical cooperation the UN should be informed that IMCO was in a position to provide advice and guidance on technical matters affecting shipping engaged in international trade.


2008 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 66-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Tal

A proposal drafted by General Lauris Norstad for the creation of a limited inspection zone in Central Europe and in the Arctic Circle—a proposal that came to be known as the Norstad Plan—evolved out of President Dwight D. Eisenhower's Open Skies proposal. The proposal, based on ideas promoted by Eisenhower's disarmament adviser, Harold Stassen, departed from traditional U.S. disarmament policy. The plan was eventually aborted by West Germany and France, but the document heralded a shift in Eisenhower's disarmament policy. The president was ready to give up the all-or-nothing approach and adopt an incremental approach. To this end, the United States would make concessions that would render U.S. proposals more acceptable to the Soviet Union. The plan adumbrated the conceptual change that paved the way for the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and the Non-Proliferation Treaty.


Author(s):  
Laurence R. Jurdem

Nixon’s policy of détente eventually led the United States and the Soviet Union to sign an arms agreement in Moscow in 1972 at what became known as the first Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT). While symbolically the negotiations were considered significant, they did not do a great deal to limit the arms race. Nixon’s resignation in 1974 left the future of SALT in the hands of Vice President Gerald Ford. The treaty was scheduled to expire that year, and the longtime congressman from Michigan was determined to make progress with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. However, due to difficulties during the SALT II negotiations and Ford’s abbreviated presidency, Jimmy Carter inherited the unfinished arms control negotiations when he took the oath of office in early 1977. As American and Soviet negotiators focused on finalizing the SALT II arms agreement, Commentary, National Review, and Human Events expressed their concern over the ongoing debate between the two superpowers about nuclear and chemical weapons. That contentious public policy issue was not simply about arms control but was symbolic of the state of American foreign policy itself.


Author(s):  
Aaron T. Hale-Dorrell

Almost everyone has long misinterpreted Nikita Khrushchev’s ten-year crusade to propagate the cultivation of corn, a crop important across the globe but previously rare across the vast, environmentally diverse Soviet Union. Launched in 1953, this campaign comprised a large part of the new leadership’s efforts to remedy agrarian crises inherited from Iosif Stalin. Khrushchev pressured collective and state farms to increase plantings of corn from an insignificant proportion of their crops to a peak of nearly 20 percent. Expected to feed livestock that were to yield meat and dairy products, corn promised to enrich citizens’ meager, monotonous diets and thereby make good on Khrushchev’s infamous pledges that the Soviet Union was soon to “catch up to and surpass America” in the Cold War “peaceful competition” between communism and capitalism. Echoing Khrushchev’s former comrades, who denounced corn as “harebrained scheming” when ousting him in 1964, scholars have ridiculed it as “an irrational obsession.” Newly available archival documents reveal a more complex and interesting story of how Khrushchev borrowed industrial-farming methods from the United States. Following experts’ advice, he believed that hybrid seeds, machines, agronomy, and other technologies constituting the global trends in farming technology promised even greater increases in productivity under conditions found in the Soviet Union. Yet Khrushchev’s programs achieved only partial success because they could not overcome the entrenched interests, bureaucratic inertia, and competing priorities that encouraged government officials, local authorities, and farmworkers to disregard methods required to grow even modest harvests, let alone the bumper crops that Khrushchev envisioned.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document