FRANCIS J. GAVIN
At first glance, understanding the dynamics of how nuclear weapons spread during the Cold War, and what was done to slow this proliferation, should not be difficult. Weren’t nuclear weapons a threat to international stability, inducing widespread support for efforts to hem in this menace to world peace? The real story was not so simple. As scholars have long recognized, nuclear weapons influenced international politics in complex and often contradictory ways during the Cold War. On the one hand, atomic weapons have an enormous destructive power - the capacity to kill millions of people and destroy the fabric of civilized life. On the other, this weapon of terror, may have induced caution among the states that possessed them. Many analysts believe the prospect of mutual destruction prevented World War III, serving as a foundation for what John Lewis Gaddis famously labeled “the Long Peace."569
This dilemma was just one of many that policymakers, strategists, and outside observers wrestled with as they tried to understand the military and political purposes of such fearful weapons. These issues were never resolved during the Cold War, as analysts joined government officials in devising the most intricate, sophisticated military strategies for weapons they hoped would never be employed and believed had no meaningful battlefield purpose. These fears also inspired millions around the world to join grassroots, nongovernmental efforts to prevent the bomb from ever being used.
This essay explores the history of efforts to come to terms with the puzzles and tradeoffs involved in confronting nuclear proliferation and non-proliferation during the Cold War. Many of these dilemmas have still not been resolved. For example, scholars vigorously debate whether
Proliferation threatens global security or stabilizes international politics and prevents war. Questions persist as to the reasons why states attempt to acquire nuclear weapons, the leading explanations being security, prestige, or bureaucratic/organizational impulse. Disagreement continues over whether the bipolar structure of the international system during the Cold War encouraged or hindered nuclear proliferation. Perhaps most maddening, no one has been able to accurately predict the "who and when" aspect of proliferation. Forecasters have almost always been caught off guard by who did, and did not, enter the nuclear club. Fears of tipping points, nuclear dominoes, and proliferation epidemics have existed from the start of the nuclear age, with worry accelerating in recent years, despite the fact that there are far fewer nuclear powers today than anyone could have reasonably hoped for thirty or forty years ago. Similarly, fears of rogue states with atomic weapons and nuclear terrorism have worried policymakers since the earliest days of the atomic age.
As this chapter reveals, nowhere are these nuclear puzzles more challenging than in the area of non-proliferation policy. If nuclear proliferation should and can be stopped - not universally held beliefs, particularly in the earlier part of the Cold War - what were the best policies to achieve this goal, appeasement or force? Did it make sense to apply the same nonproliferation policy toward democratic, neutral Sweden as toward the People’s Republic of China (PRC)? These dilemmas were especially sharp when viewed through the contours of the Cold War alliance system. Arms-control advocates argued that global non-proliferation could only be achieved when states that already had nuclear weapons reduced and eventually eliminated their stocks of atomic weapons, avoided anti-ballistic missile (ABM) defenses, and promised never to use nuclear weapons first. Countries that were asked to forgo these weapons, however, demanded robust and credible protection from the superpowers’ nuclear umbrella in return for their abstinence. In the US case, providing extended deterrence to states like West Germany, Japan, and South Korea demanded strategic superiority and a willingness to craft military strategies based on the early and massive use of nuclear weapons in a conflict with the Soviet Union.
The most intriguing feature of non-proliferation, however, was that it became a shared goal of two bitter Cold War enemies, the United States and the Soviet Union. Moreover, they pursued it at the expense of, among others, their closest friends and allies. A West German official complained that US efforts to enlist the Soviet Union in nonproliferation lent to "concessions from the wrong side and to the wrong address.”570 This shared interest, however, proved so powerful that at times it trumped traditional Cold War rivalries, attitudes, and policies; it also provided much of the impetus to detente.
World History
