In the early days of the Cold War, neither US nor Soviet officials pursued nonproliferation efforts with any vigor. In hindsight, their policies appear unsophisticated and unrealistic. Some American officials believed the United States could maintain its nuclear monopoly indefinitely, while others proposed preventative war against the Soviets before they acquired their own weapons. For their part, the Soviets saw disarmament proposals as a propaganda tool while engaging in espionage and a full-scale crash program to develop their own atomic bomb. Despite the terrible destruction brought by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the epoch-changing nature of these new weapons went largely unrecognized or misunderstood in official military circles during the first years of the Cold War.
There were attempts to regulate this fearsome new weapon, although it is difficult to gauge how serious these efforts were. In January 1946, the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission (UNAEC) was created during the first meeting of the UN General Assembly. During this session, the United States submitted the Baruch Plan, based on the Acheson-Lilienthal Report, which proposed UN control of all uranium-235 and plutonium facilities, extensive monitoring in all member states, and eventually global disarmament. The Soviets responded on June 19, 1946, with what came to be known as the Gromyko Plan, which required the United States to disarm. The United States modified the Baruch Plan and President Harry S. Truman signed the Atomic Energy Act of 1946, which created the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and banned all sharing of nuclear technology and information, even with Britain.
Cold War tensions between the superpowers increased and even halfhearted disarmament and arms-control efforts were largely dropped. Members of the Western alliance were stunned when the Soviets tested an atomic device on August 29, 1949, and, less than four years later, developed a hydrogen, or thermonuclear, bomb. Britain tested its own nuclear device in October 1952. The United States also continued to build its nuclear stockpile, a long moribund UNAEC was formally dissolved, and by the end of the Truman administration little hope existed for any bilateral or international effort to control the spread of nuclear weapons. The war on the Korean Peninsula generated new fears that atomic weapons could be used again.
US president Dwight D. Eisenhower’s non-proliferation legacy was mixed at best. On December 8, 1953, Eisenhower announced his Atoms for Peace program, which envisioned the sharing of nuclear technology for peaceful purposes through international channels. Eisenhower’s plan was criticized for its naive belief that knowledge and technology provided to countries for their civilian nuclear efforts would not advance their weapons programs. While the United States provided civilian technology to dozens of countries, it did require most of them to adhere to safeguards and inspections. Most importantly, the Atoms for Peace program led to the creation of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which monitors global proliferation to this day.
On the other hand, Eisenhower’s defense strategy did not rule out the use of nuclear weapons in future military conflicts; in fact, the president believed general war was inevitable if the Soviets and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) clashed in Europe.571 As late as 1960, Eisenhower told Robert Bowie "we must be ready to throw the book at the Russians should they jump us." We would be fooling our allies and ourselves, Eisenhower continued, if "we said we could fight such a war without recourse to nuclear weapons."572 This view had implications for the spread of atomic weapons. As the historian Marc Trachtenberg has pointed out, Eisenhower not only did not discourage nuclear proliferation; he actively sought to share nuclear weapons with close NATO allies. The military strategy of massive retaliation called for immense and preemptive use of nuclear weapons if there was clear evidence the Soviet Union was planning to attack. This meant authorization for the use of US nuclear weapons was pre-delegated to non-American forces, including the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). Eisenhower also strongly supported the European Atomic Energy Agency (Eurotam) and the so-called France-Italy-Germany (FIG) agreements to
Advance nuclear cooperation in Europe. According to Trachtenberg, the administration’s attitude toward nuclear sharing went beyond Britain and France to include the FRG.573
Fears that the FRG would gain access to nuclear weapons prompted both the Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies to propose non-proliferation agreements for Europe. On November 17, 1956, the Soviet prime minister, Nikolai Bulganin, announced a comprehensive disarmament plan that required the destruction of all nuclear forces. After the United States rejected the proposal as propaganda, Bulganin proposed a less ambitious plan that prohibited nuclear weapons tests and created a collective security arrangement that included a nonaggression pact between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. On October 9, 1957, Poland’s minister of foreign affairs, Adam Rapacki, proposed a nuclear-weapons-free zone for central Europe. Rapacki modified the proposal twice more in response to criticism from NATO, proposing a nuclear freeze and gradual reductions. The United States and its NATO allies rejected these proposals on the grounds they did nothing to counter the Warsaw Pact’s superiority in conventional military forces, nor did they make any substantial progress toward German reunification. Soviet unhappiness about the FRG’s increased access to nuclear weapons was one of the reasons that the Soviet premier, Nikita S. Khrushchev, initiated pressure on Berlin.574
Despite these proposals and tensions, it is surprising to see how little attention was paid to the issue of nuclear proliferation among journalists, academics, and strategists at that time. Most of the so-called "wizards of Armageddon" studied the effects of the strategic nuclear balance between the Soviet Union and the United States and spent very little time thinking about what was then called the "Nth country" problem. The so-called bomber and missile gap, the tradeoffs between nuclear and conventional forces, the fear of an arms race, the nature of strategic vulnerability, the requirements of deterrence, and the merits of different nuclear strategies occupied the time of policymakers and strategists.
While the strategic community was slow to understand the importance of nuclear proliferation, by the late 1950s and early 1960s profound changes in world politics were forcing policymakers to confront new nuclear challenges. US and Soviet officials began to recognize that their early, lackadaisical attitudes toward non-proliferation were no longer prudent. The question of who would and would not get access to nuclear weapons became an issue of fundamental importance, not only between the superpowers, but also within each alliance and the non-aligned world as well.
World History
