Despite great progress, we still know less than we would like about why states develop nuclear weapons and what policies are most effective at preventing nuclear proliferation. As we have seen, efforts during the Cold War to halt the spread of atomic weapons pulled policy in different, often contradictory, directions. Despite some failings and continuing puzzles and paradoxes, however, a strong case can be made that the NPT was a watershed event in international affairs with two major consequences. Negotiated between two ideological enemies, the NPT was a key part, for better or worse, of the stabilization of power politics that began with the Limited Test-Ban Treaty in 1963 and was fully manifested in the Helsinki Accords of 1975. This comes through clearly in the Gilpatric committee deliberations. Neither the Soviets nor the Americans alone could halt proliferation, but "both ha[d] much to lose" if "lesser powers" acquired nuclear capabilities. The Soviet Union and the United States had "multiple, overlapping interests" that suggested the "timeliness of early steps to achieve an essentially bi-polar entente, resembling the Concert of Europe, the informal coalition based on limited mutuality of interests that kept the peace in Europe for more than half of the nineteenth century."613 The need to stem nuclear proliferation brought these bitter enemies together and helped give rise to detente.614
Equally important, the treaty made nuclear non-proliferation a shared value of the international community in the same way human rights, anti-terrorism, and maintaining a stable international economic order have come to be seen as globally shared interests. While hard to quantify, it is clear that this global norm has helped slow (and in some cases, reverse) nuclear proliferation over the past few decades. In 1961, the famous strategist Hermann Kahn claimed that with "the kind of technology that is likely to be available in 1969, it may literally turn out that a Hottentot, an educated and technical Hottentot it is true, would be able to make bombs."615 What is striking, however, is how wrong the predictions made by Kahn, President Kennedy, and others turned out. Writing in 1985, the National Intelligence Council noted that for "almost thirty years the Intelligence Community has been writing about which nations might next get the bomb." While "some proliferation of nuclear explosive capabilities and other major proliferation-related developments have taken place in the past two decades," they did not have "the damaging, systemwide impacts that the Intelligence Community generally anticipated they would."616 Over time, non-proliferation, and not nuclear possession, has developed into a well-respected global norm. We have witnessed an extraordinary shift in attitudes about nuclear weapons from the earliest days of the nuclear age.
This points to another important but largely unrecognized fact: the history of the nuclear age is not the same thing as the history of the Cold War. While they obviously overlapped and interacted, different dynamics were at play in each arena. By the mid-1960s, the goal of non-proliferation at times made the Soviets and Americans less ideological rivals than realistic partners in what often appeared to be a concert or condominium to manage the most important military question in world politics. And when states like Britain, France, China, Israel, India, South Africa, and Pakistan developed nuclear weapons, and others ranging from Brazil to Taiwan toyed with weapons programs, Cold War considerations were only one factor, and often not the most important motivation. Even though the nuclear programs that have caused the most worry in the past decade, those of Iran, Iraq, Libya, and North Korea, began during the Cold War, the persistence of these programs after the disappearance of the Soviet Union reveals other motives were at play.
It is difficult to untangle the relationship between the two parallel drivers of postwar world politics, the Cold War and the nuclear revolution. Most historians would accept that no account of the Cold War is complete without understanding the influence of the bomb on world politics. But the history of the nuclear age reveals a narrative that is both part of yet outside the story of the US-Soviet rivalry. The Cold War is long finished, but the drama of the nuclear age continues, with untold, uncertain endings.
World History
