Why Did the Superpowers Start Opposing the Spread of Nuclear Weapons?

• In Event: Nuclear Diplomacy

Abstract

Why do states oppose nuclear proliferation? Explanations for why states seek atomic forces break down into three categories: national security, international status, and internal politics. At first blush, the same set of explanations would seemingly explain the inverse question—why states resist the emergence of new nuclear powers. Yet nonproliferation is not proliferation’s shadow. Whereas the former is unbounded, implicating the perceived character of a state and the full set of its international relations, the latter concerns inhibiting demand for, or the supply of, independent nuclear arsenals and their prerequisites, and ranges from selective to universal. The course of U.S.-Soviet nonproliferation policy and diplomacy in the 1960s—when Moscow and Washington embraced active, global nonproliferation policies, culminating in the opening for signature of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT)—is both historically and theoretically informative. With reference to previously classified U.S. and Soviet documents, this paper argues that although the superpowers found common cause in building a global nonproliferation regime, they had different motivations. Whereas Soviet leaders aimed at keeping West Germany out of the nuclear business and consolidating their control over the Warsaw Pact, U.S. authorities harbored more ambitious goals—the perceived credibility of forward U.S. military deployments in Western Europe and East Asia.

Authors

• Jonathan R Hunt, U.S. Air War College

• Joseph Torigian, American University