H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-11 on Hunt, The Nuclear Club64 min read

The contemporary nuclear order and the status of the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which stands at its core, have never been more critical or under siege. Between Russian President Vladimir Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling over the war in Ukraine, North Korea’s nuclear build-up, and developments in the Iranian nuclear program, our need to understand nuclear proliferation and non-proliferation dynamics has never been more pronounced.

H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum

Roundtable Review 16-11 

Jonathan Hunt. The Nuclear Club: How America and the World Policed the Atom from Hiroshima to Vietnam. Stanford University Press, 2022. ISBN: 9781503636398.

4 November 2024 | PDF: https://issforum.org/to/jrt16-11 | Website: rjissf.org | Twitter: @HDiplo

 

Introduction by Or Rabinowitz, University of Jerusalem and Stanford University. 2

Review by Mariana Budjeryn, Harvard Kennedy School 6

Review by Shane J. Maddock, Stonehill College. 9

Review by Sean L. Malloy, University of California, Merced. 14

Review by Nicholas L. Miller, Dartmouth College. 17

Response by Jonathan Hunt, US Naval War College. 21

The contemporary nuclear order and the status of the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which stands at its core, have never been more critical or under siege. Between Russian President Vladimir Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling over the war in Ukraine, North Korea’s nuclear build-up, and developments in the Iranian nuclear program, our need to understand nuclear proliferation and non-proliferation dynamics has never been more pronounced.

Jonathan Hunt’s new book, The Nuclear Club: How America and the World Policed the Atom from Hiroshima to Vietnam is, therefore, a welcome addition to the existing recent literature on the nuclear age and the emergence of the 1968 NPT.[1] The book holds nine chapters, which span the period from 1945 to 1970.They include a discussion of the immediate aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the negotiation of the 1963 Moscow Treaty (the Partial Test Ban Treaty, PTBT), and the 1968 Treaty of Tlatelolco, which established a nuclear-free zone in Latin America. The four reviewers in this roundtable, Mariana Budjeryn, Shane J. Maddock, Sean L. Malloy, and Nicholas L. Miller, all agree that Hunt makes a significant and timely contribution to the emerging field of nuclear studies. They commend Hunt for writing a rich historical account, using previously untapped sources from multiple archives and in different languages. Still, their praise is not limited to this quality alone.

Sean L. Malloy describes Hunt’s book as possibly the best single-volume history on the subject. He points out the strengths of the book’s treatment of the relationship between the NPT and what he describes as “the changing American imperial strategies” in the era of decolonization. According to Malloy, this robust analysis offered by Hunt transforms the book “from a niche history of nuclear non-proliferation” to an essential contribution to the larger discourse about the Cold War and US foreign policy.

Mariana Budjeryn commends Hunt for exposing the emergence of the international institutions created to manage nuclear possession and nuclear nonproliferation, the parallel construction of the international system in the post-World War II period, and the intrinsic connections between the two. She praises Hunt’s study for “unnaturalizing” the contemporary processes for the reader by focusing on the institutions and structures that observers and scholars of the nuclear age have grown to take for granted. She notes Hunt’s insightful exploration of the “intentions, drivers, and contingencies that combined to shape our nuclear world into what it is today.”

Nicholas L. Miller lauds Hunt for writing a “fascinating, panoramic exploration” of the roots of the nonproliferation regime. He praises Hunt’s account for delineating the mechanism through which a diverse set of actors, “American and Soviet officials, diplomats from the developing and postcolonial world, nongovernmental experts, and the public at large,” played their part in shaping the different agreements propping up the global nuclear order, and the NPT at its core.

Shane J. Maddock points to the book’s substantial contribution to nuclear studies in the chapters treating the multilateral negotiations that shaped the treaty. More specifically, Maddock praises the chapter focusing on the 1967 Treaty of Tlatelolco (chapter 7, 172-191) and its influence on the final text of the NPT.

The four reviewers also point to some of the book’s weaknesses. Maddock takes issue with Hunt’s claim that small powers, like Ireland and Mexico, were influential in the formative stages of the NPT. He raises questions about their actual impact on the final result. Maddock notes that juxtaposed to this claim about the significant role of the more minor powers is Hunt’s counter-argument that the NPT accorded disproportionate power to Washington and Moscow. Hunt quotes in this context National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger’s 1972 statement that the treaty was reached “at the expense of other powers.” (242). Maddock points out this “fundamental contradiction” between the two narratives is unresolved.

Miller notes that although the book is rich in sources and footnotes, it is not immediately apparent to the reader what main contribution it makes to the existing corpus of literature. In other words, it is unclear what exactly it “adds to the table” that previous work has not already added, especially given some overlap with Maddock’s 2010 study, Nuclear Apartheid.[2] Miller further notes the missed opportunities to engage with the contemporary political science literature on the emergence of the NPT, notably Andrew Coe and Jane Vaynman’s 2015 study on the drivers of the treaty. He also points to the different weight accorded by Hunt, on the one side, and Coe and Vaynman, on the other, to the role of the minor powers in negotiating the treaty.[3]

Malloy takes a broader sociological approach in his criticism of Hunt’s book. He acknowledges that Hunt’s decision to link “suburbanization, patriarchy, and the bomb” is intriguing. He contends, however, that Hunt’s treatment of race-related issues could have benefited from a more detailed theoretical discussion, as with other thought provoking issues that Hunt raises.

In a somewhat similar vein, Budjeryn notes that Hunt mainly focused on “the workings of US power in preserving its nuclear preeminence by mounting effective policy and institutional barriers to prevent others from acquiring the bomb.” By doing this, Hunt essentially accepts the standard narrative of the existing nuclear proliferation literature regarding the centrality of the US and its role in propping up the non-proliferation regime. She suggests that the work would have benefited from a deeper exploration of the role accorded to China and post-Soviet Russia as members of the nuclear club in the post-Cold War era. This area, she notes, has mainly remained uncharted, at least so far.

Hunt’s response to both the praise and criticism is thoughtful and engaging. First, Hunt outlines the difference between the overarching explanations for the NPT’s formation offered in Maddock’s Nuclear Apartheid and the Nuclear Club. Where Maddock stresses the US quest for nuclear monopoly, alongside “racial and gender hierarchies,” Hunt stresses the US desire to consolidate nuclear power in the hands of both Moscow and Washington and the creation of what “US national-security mandarin Walt Rostow dubbed ‘a common law for the Cold War’” (70-71). He acknowledges Malloy’s point that his international-oriented approach limits his ability to study racial, national identity, and gender issues related to the NPT’s formation. He points out, however, that some related notions are indeed reflected in the book. Specifically, he points to his focus on the emergence of the powerful image of “shielding women and children from nuclear harm” and his treatment of the 1965 report by the Gilpatric Committee, whose first draft cited fear of “populous, non-white nations” developing nuclear weapons, which were among the justifications used in promoting the NPT’s establishment.

Regarding Miller’s criticism that small and middle-power actors, like Mexico, were not as influential as Hunt suggests in forming the NPT, Hunt disagrees. Hunt contends that the historical record proves that their influence on the final shape of the treaty was not, as Miller frames it, “a veneer,” but rather made a significant impact in both the “timing and substance” of the final text, especially considering the concern of the middle powers that the US would use the treaty to enhance its control over the global civilian nuclear market. Last, Hunt acknowledges Budjeryn’s observation on the need to explore non-Western archival and other sources. As an avenue for additional future research, Hunt points to archives in Eastern Europe, as well as Russia and Ukraine.

To conclude, in telling the history of the NPT, Hunt took upon himself an admirable intellectual task, which the detailed comments of the reviewers note. He touches on several intriguing questions for future research that extend beyond the existing narratives on the emergence of the NPT and the nuclear politics surrounding it, such as the relationship between race, suburbanization, domestic politics, and nuclear policy-making.

 

Contributors:

Jonathan R. Hunt is an Assistant Professor at the US Naval War College in the Deterrence Studies Institute of the Center for Naval Warfare Studies. His research comprehends the international and global history of the Cold War with an emphasis on U.S. foreign policy on matters of war, peace, and trade. He is the author of The Nuclear Club: How America and the World Policed the Atom from Hiroshima to Vietnam (Stanford University Press, 2022) and a co-editor with Simon Miles of The Reagan Moment: America and the World in the 1980s (Cornell University Press, 2021). He received a BA in Plan II Liberal Arts Honors, History, and Russian and East European Studies and also a PhD in History from the University of Texas at Austin and has been a fellow or scholar at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, RAND Corporation, the University of Oxford, and Harvard University, among others. He has taught at the University of Southampton and the US Air War College. This year he is a fellow at the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs’ Nuclear Security Program, part of International Security Studies.

Or (Ori) Rabinowitz is a Senior Lecturer at the International Relations Department of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, and a Visiting Associate Professor of Israel Studies, 2022–2024, at Stanford University. She is the author of Bargaining of Nuclear Tests (Oxford University Press, 2014) and several academic studies on nuclear proliferation and Israel’s nuclear history.

Mariana Budjeryn is a Senior Research Associate at the Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center, Project on Managing the Atom (MTA). She is the author of Inheriting the Bomb: The Collapse of the USSR and the Nuclear Disarmament of Ukraine (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023), for which she won 2024 Colby Military Writers’ Award. Formerly, she held appointments of a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at MTA, and a visiting professor at Tufts University and Peace Research Institute Frankfurt. Mariana is a member of the Committee on International Security and Arms Control of the National Academies of Sciences and a senior nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution. Her research and analytical contributions appeared in the Journal of Cold War Studies, Nonproliferation Review, Foreign Affairs, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, War on the Rocks, and in the publications of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars where she is a fellow with the Global Europe program.

Shane J. Maddock is Professor of History at Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts. He earned his BA from Michigan State University (1989) and his PhD from the University of Connecticut (1997). He is the author of Nuclear Apartheid: The Quest for American Atomic Supremacy from World War II to the Present and co-author of American Foreign Relations: A History 8th ed. (University of North Carolina Press, 2014). He also edited The Nuclear Age (Houghton Mifflin, 2001). His current research focuses on American vernacular music in the mid-twentieth century.

Sean L. Malloy is Associate Professor of History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California–Merced. He is the author of Out of Oakland: Black Panther Party Internationalism During the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2017) and Atomic Tragedy: Henry L. Stimson and the Decision to Use the Bomb Against Japan (Cornell University Press, 2008).

Nicholas L. Miller is an Associate Professor in the Department of Government at Dartmouth College. Miller’s research focuses primarily on the causes and consequences of nuclear weapons proliferation. His book, Stopping the Bomb: The Sources and Effectiveness of U.S. Nonproliferation Policy, was published by Cornell University Press in 2018. His work has also been published in a wide variety of scholarly journals, including the American Political Science Review, International Organization, and International Security, as well popular outlets like Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and War on the Rocks.

The invention of nuclear weapons ushered in a new world. Humans suddenly found themselves in possession of enormous destructive force, capable of obliterating civilization. In the seventy-eight years since nuclear weapons were used in war, for the first and, hopefully, the last time, a small number of nuclear possessors and an expansive international system for preventing more states from acquiring nuclear weapons has emerged.

Given the extent to which the global nuclear order and its two aspects—nuclear possession and nuclear restraint—underpin the contemporary international system, it is all the more astonishing that few comprehensive historical accounts have been written over the decades to trace its emergence and institutionalization. Mohammad Shaker’s classic work on the history of multilateral negotiations of the 1968 Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT),[4] as well as accounts of the emergence of the NPT by the US and Soviet negotiators, George Bunn and Roland Timerbayev, respectively, stand as prominent exceptions (with Timerbayev’s book available only in Russian, regrettably).[5] Recent social scientific contributions, including Michal Onderčo’s study of the 1995 NPT review and extension process and Rebecca Davis Gibbons’s inquiry into the US role in global nuclear nonproliferation, are welcome additions to this literature, tackling important aspects of the nuclear nonproliferation regime.[6]

But Jonathan Hunt’s The Nuclear Club takes a step back and asks a critical, foundational question: why and how did the global nuclear order emerge in the shape and form that it took? Hunt goes back to the very origins of thinking about managing the newly discovered destructive power of nuclear weapons, which even predated the explosions over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As any good work of historical scholarship, it unnaturalizes those contemporary processes, institutions, and structures that we have grown to take for granted, and explores paths not taken, as well as intentions, drivers, and contingencies that combined to shape our nuclear world into what it is today.

Importantly, Hunt traces the emergence of the international institutions for managing nuclear possession and nonproliferation alongside the construction of the post-World War Two international system and exposes how these two processes were intricately connected. The new system of the United Nations that emerged out of the ashes of a devastating world war was pregnant with a hope that “representative consent would eventually triumph over arbitrary power,” but this ambition was hamstrung from the outset by the creation of the UN Security Council (UNSC), a permanent club of the war’s victors, vested with the power to veto important decisions about international peace and security based on their national interests (49). As this international power structure took shape, it laid the foundation for “recognized” nuclear possession, which under the NPT would eventually go to the five permanent members of the UNSC, with hopes for the international control of nuclear weapons morphing eventually into international control over their nonproliferation to nations beyond this “nuclear club.”

Despite Hunt’s claim of the primacy of the United States and its “structural power” in shaping the global nuclear order, he accounts for how American power collided and colluded with that of the USSR in this process, while also giving proper dues to the anti-colonial, anti-nuclear testing movement, the normative entrepreneurship of Ireland’s foreign minister Frank Aiken, and the activism of scientists such as Bertrand Russell and the Pugwash group in shaping the environment in which the powerful attempted to evade restraints and preserve their exclusive nuclear status (254).

Yet Hunt’s focus remains primarily on the workings of US power in preserving its nuclear preeminence by mounting effective policy and institutional barriers to prevent others from acquiring the bomb. In this respect, Hunt’s account does not depart from the received wisdom in the field of nuclear studies that awards the United States this critical, outsized role in shaping and preserving the existing nuclear order (see footnote 3 above). This certainly does not make the account any less valuable or true to historical evidence. But what Hunt could have also explored in greater length is how the creation of the elitist “nuclear club” awarded other members such as China and post-Soviet Russia the opportunity to eventually grow into the space safeguarded for them by their nuclear club membership, an area that remains largely unexplored.[7]

Hunt concludes that the result of this effort is the current “two-tier postcolonial hierarchy” of nuclear haves and have-nots, which, he aptly notes, shifted the “killing fields” from North America and allied Europe to geographies that had not benefited from nuclear patronage, the most recent and egregious example being the invasion by nuclear Russia of non-nuclear Ukraine (256). It remains to be seen how durable this system proves to be, with tensions manifesting themselves, inter alia, in the conclusion of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in 2017 that challenges the very premise of the existing nuclear order and the legitimacy of the nuclear possession inside the club.[8]

The book is extensively and meticulously researched and has the welcome benefit of being written in an eloquent, readable style, which is no small accomplishment for a work based on dry government documents and diplomatic memos. Most of its sourcing, however, is from the English-language, mostly US collections, including Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) compilations, US presidential libraries, the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA), and US Department of State documents. While researchers are necessarily limited by time and languages in their command, as well as access to archival collections, which might be easier in the West and more difficult elsewhere, it is regrettable that Hunt did not find a way to consult more Soviet and non-Western documents, which could have better accounted for the global scope of the global nuclear order. While access to archives in Russia is logistically and otherwise challenging, there have been a surprising amount of new declassification and releases in the Russian archives in the past decade.[9]

Still, Nuclear Club is an essential reading for any student of nuclear politics of the past and all those who ponder the world’s nuclear future. If we follow Albert Einstein’s suggestion that problems cannot be solved with the same mind that created them, Nuclear Club should also raise important questions about the possibility of change in the global nuclear order, which Hunt’s research suggests would be difficult to affect without changing the basic power structures of the international system as a whole. One can only hope that the book reaches as wide an audience as possible at a time when nuclear risks are at their highest point in decades.

In The Nuclear Club, Jonathan Hunt provides an account of the multilateral effort to halt the global spread of nuclear weapons. At different points in the text, he dubs the 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) that resulted from these efforts “the Magna Carta for the subatomic realm” (2) and a “nuclear constitution” (216). This claim highlights a central theme of Hunt’s study—that the NPT constituted an effort to eliminate anarchy and create order in world politics, principally in order to aid the superpowers in retaining their dominance. In seeming contradiction to this central point, he also stresses the role that states outside the two Cold War blocs played in advancing efforts to halt nuclear proliferation, with a particular focus on the efforts of Irish Foreign Minister Frank Aiken and Mexican diplomat Alfonso García Robles. Hunt stresses that no country was forced to sign either the Limited Test Ban Treaty (1963) or the NPT. The agreements gained adherents because “the nonproliferation regime offered something to everybody” (7).

The recognized nuclear weapons states had their status legitimated and preserved in the agreement, their allies shared in the protection of the nuclear powers’ arsenals, rising regional powers could construct latent nuclear weapons capabilities through access to technologies ostensibly designed to advance their nuclear power generation infrastructures, all states were guaranteed access to peaceful nuclear technologies, and many states received these security assurances and access to advanced technologies by sacrificing nothing given that they had no intention of acquiring nuclear weapons. In the end, however, Hunt concludes that the NPT primarily had a conservative effect, arguing that “it is clear that the destruction of Hiroshima sparked a rolling counterrevolution to preserve hierarchy in a world otherwise made level by the abolition of imperial prerogatives; the universalization of the nation-state; the ideal of inviolable borders; and the prodigious growth of international travel, migration, communication, as well as flows of capital and ideas” (18). He also contends that the nonproliferation regime ultimately became a warrant for the nuclear superpowers to ignore the United Nations (UN) Charter, citing the 2003 US invasion of Iraq as a telling example (3-4).

Hunt makes a substantial contribution to nuclear nonproliferation studies through his focus on the multilateral negotiations that shaped the NPT. His chapter on the 1967 Treaty of Tlatelolco, which created a Latin American nuclear-free zone, is an especially important element of his argument. In it, he traces the influence the regional agreement had on the final text of the NPT. Impressive research in primary sources from multiple countries and in several different languages informs his interpretations and conclusions. In the course of examining the origins of the NPT, he also touches on several other intriguing topics, including the paternal role that presidents adopted when legitimating their nuclear policies and the importance of domestic politics in motivating both presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson to pursue nuclear arms control agreements. Anyone interested in the world politics of the 1960s and the origins of the nonproliferation regime would be well-advised to read this book.

As noted above, Hunt spends most of the book discussing the 1960s, which makes the subtitle a bit misleading. The first chapter covers the period from 1945 to 1955, while the remaining eight chapters plum the period from 1956 to 1970. Consequently, the Baruch Plan, Washington’s first diplomatic effort to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, is covered only briefly, and the primary and secondary research on the first decade of the postwar period also seems more limited than in subsequent chapters.[10] Rather than US policy, Hunt centers the first chapter on three strains of thought regarding nuclear weapons that emerged in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: humanitarian universalism, existential deterrence, and technocratic development. After establishing these three concepts, however, he returns to them only sporadically in subsequent chapters. The concept that receives the most significant attention in the remainder of the book is humanitarian impulses. He introduces the concept with a discussion of the International Committee of the Red Cross and its efforts to aid the survivors of the first two nuclear attacks, but he also contends that President Harry Truman drew on this strain of thought when lamenting the women and children who died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki (32).

While Truman’s unease about civilian deaths is supported with ample primary evidence, it must be balanced against other private and public statements he made about the bombings. For example, on 11 August 1945, just two days after Nagasaki’s destruction, Truman defended his decision to use the bombs, contending “When you have to deal with a beast you have to treat him as a beast.”[11] He also made numerous statements throughout the rest of his life defending the bombings and denying that he had any regrets. What emerges when one juxtaposes Truman’s divergent claims is the president’s extreme ambivalence about his decision. Clearly, as time passed, Truman put more stock in nuclear weapons as a guarantor of US security and suppressed his qualms about their destructive power. When faced with a decision to begin development of far more destructive thermonuclear weapons, Truman did not hesitate, approving hydrogen bomb production after only seven minutes of discussion and not mentioning any concerns about civilian deaths.[12] Hunt returns to this theme of humanitarian universalism in subsequent chapters and generally couches it in discussions of how later presidents assumed a role of paternal protectiveness regarding the US population and the world.

The Nuclear Club also gives a concise overview of President Dwight Eisenhower’s disarmament and arms control policies. The Castle Bravo explosion and the subsequent contamination of Japanese fishermen on the trawler The Lucky Dragon appear at the end of the first chapter, but the outcry over nuclear testing these events provoked and the growth of international antinuclear activism in the 1950s do not receive extensive analysis in it or other chapters. The second chapter seems to suggest that Irish Foreign Minister Frank Aiken’s call for nuclear restraint in 1958 sparked the first serious debate about nuclear nonproliferation. Other studies, however, have detailed how the presidential assistant for disarmament, Harold Stassen, first raised the issue of what he called “the fourth country problem” as early as 1955 and discussed it with British officials who shared his concern.[13] Stassen also formulated his ideas into proposals that he introduced at the UN Disarmament Committee meeting in 1956. Once the narrative moves onto the 1960s, however, his research and argument are more expansive and detailed.

Beyond issues of coverage and focus, some elements of Hunt’s overarching argument prompt questions about his emphases and interpretations. He contends that both Kennedy and Johnson endorsed arms control measures, at least in part to solidify their standing with suburban voters. He combines this claim with references to both presidents taking on the air of a protective parent. Both presidents employed rhetoric that featured the tropes that Hunt highlights, but, as with Truman, their thinking and statements also contain contradictory patterns. Kennedy only narrowly won the popular vote in 1960, which meant he could little afford to lose support from any constituency. The scholarship that Hunt cites to support the notion that Kennedy took his political standing into account when making foreign policy decisions, moreover, more often points to the president’s fears of looking too weak when confronting the Soviet Union than it does his worries of appearing too belligerent or unconcerned about the public health.[14] While Kennedy and Johnson did use peace rhetoric at times in their public remarks, Johnson especially did not always see such language as having a serious intent. He once told an aide to add “a little peace demagoguery for the mothers” to one of his speeches.[15]

The political reality of the 1960s dictated that both presidents had to devote ample attention to the concerns of Cold War hawks in Congress. Beyond conservative Southern Democrats, such as Senator John Stennis of Mississippi, Kennedy and Johnson had to court the votes of Cold War liberals outside the South, such as Senators Thomas Dodd of Connecticut and Henry “Scoop” Jackson from Washington, who, along with conservative Democrats, often proved deeply skeptical of arms control agreements. Despite large Democratic majorities in this era, neither president could discount these factions when treaties required supermajorities in the Senate.[16] While the evidence suggests Kennedy pursued nonproliferation measures out of authentic concern about a world full of nuclear powers, Johnson’s commitment to nonproliferation is more difficult to ascertain.[17]

Hunt detects appeals to humanitarian universalism, not only in presidential rhetoric, but also in Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s nuclear strategy of “graduated response,” which he first publicly detailed in 1962 and is sometimes referred to as the “no cities” policy because it prioritized military targets rather than urban areas (104-105). But McNamara’s new proposal was hardly humanitarian. First, cities were spared so they could be held hostage to America’s second-strike capabilities. Second, military targets were intermingled with urban targets, which made the doctrine essentially meaningless, especially given that the massive thermonuclear explosions that would have ensued scarcely constituted a surgical strike. What McNamara proposed was a counterforce strategy in which the United States in theory could have acquired a decapitating first-strike capability by destroying the majority of the Soviet arsenal. This strategy was potentially destabilizing because it placed a premium on firing off one’s nuclear weapons before one’s opponent used theirs and it also provided a justification for endless growth in nuclear arsenals. Every time Soviet leaders deployed more nuclear weapons; the United States would need to produce more to counter them.[18] McNamara eventually abandoned the strategy for one of mutual assured destruction, precisely because of those flaws.

The most significant issues with Hunt’s argument hinge on his claims that smaller powers, such as Ireland and Mexico, played a significant role in the origins of the NPT and, because of that fact, that the agreement was not imposed on anyone. He also contends that the NPT and the larger nonproliferation regime enabled the two superpowers to pursue military interventions around the globe in defiance of the UN Charter. Near the end of his study, he cites National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger observing in 1972 that the agreement had been “made at the expense of other powers” (242). This fundamental contradiction is never resolved. It is also not clear that the NPT had the effect on US military policy that Hunt contends. The United States had already taken on the role of global policeman decades before the NPT went into effect. Washington had not needed an NPT to justify its interventions in Korea, Cuba, and Vietnam.

Hunt also could have discussed more fully the lack of compliance of the nuclear weapons states with their obligations under the agreement. The NPT only superficially required the superpowers to make any sacrifices to earn the commitment of non-nuclear weapons states not to produce or acquire nuclear weapons. The superpowers did promise in the treaty to pursue nuclear disarmament and to share peaceful technologies (for a profit, naturally). In the immediate aftermath of the agreement, however, the only arms control treaty that required the superpowers to forego a class of weapons was the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty (1972). The Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties of that era only limited the growth of their arsenals and produced no real cuts. The Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty (1987) finally eliminated an entire class of weapons and the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties (START) also led to substantial cuts in both American and Russian nuclear arsenals. That progress led the NPT to be renewed indefinitely in 1995. Ultimately, President Barack Obama declared in 2009 that the world should seek the abolition of nuclear weapons. But the news since 1995 has mostly been grim. The Senate rejected the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in 1999. President George W. Bush withdrew from the ABM Treaty in 2001 and President Donald Trump withdrew from the INF Treaty in 2019.[19] The last remaining nuclear disarmament treaty, New START (2010), is also nearly dead, since Russian President Vladimir Putin suspended Russian compliance with the agreement in February 2023. The Limited Test Ban Treaty and NPT may soon be the sole survivors of efforts to control nuclear arms and that further highlights how little they constrain the actions of existing nuclear powers.

One can also raise questions about the overall impact of the NPT. While it is true that a world of dozens of nuclear powers has not come to pass, the number of nuclear weapons states has increased significantly since the treaty came into force in 1970. Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea all possess nuclear arsenals and are not legitimate nuclear weapons states under the terms of the NPT. South Africa also produced nuclear weapons in violation of the treaty but destroyed its stockpile of six nuclear weapons in 1991. Iran continues to loom as a potential breakout state and, in the midst of Russia’s war with Ukraine, Putin claims to have provided Belarus with access to tactical nuclear weapons. Should a treaty that allowed the number of nuclear states to nearly double be considered a success? Have any states refrained from producing nuclear weapons because of the treaty?

One could add to those questions: why did non-nuclear weapons states sign the treaty if they received so little from it? The Nuclear Club does not fully answer that question, but it provides evidence that moves the scholarly debate significantly closer to an answer. That is its greatest strength and good reason for anyone interested in that question to give this book careful consideration.

Jonathan R. Hunt’s The Nuclear Club is, on the one hand, a methodologically conventional high-level diplomatic history of the series of negotiations that led to the signing of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in July 1968. The primary focus is on Washington and the shifting calculations of administrations from presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower through Richard M. Nixon, but Hunt also pays substantial attention to Soviet motivations as well as to the United Nations (UN) and to the role of smaller powers ranging Ireland to Mexico. Within this niche, The Nuclear Club instantly assumes the status of one of, if not the, best single-volume histories on the subject. The only real competition in this regard are Shane J. Maddock’s Nuclear Apartheid and Michael Krepon’s Winning and Losing the Nuclear Peace, though arguably these works are complementary in that Hunt’s focus is more narrowly on the NTP and related treaties of the 1960s while Maddock and Krepon reach back to the dawn of the atomic age and forward through the end of the Cold War.[20] Within the realm of nuclear history, Hunt’s work is also complementary to the existing literature on international negotiations over the “peaceful atom,” most notably Jacob Darwin Hamblin’s The Wretched Atom, as well as scholarship that is focused on grassroots efforts to control the bomb, including the classic works of Lawrence S. Wittner as well as Vincent J. Intondi’s more recent studies African Americans Against the Bomb and Saving the World from Nuclear War.[21] In this context, The Nuclear Club is a solid, if not revolutionary, contribution to the historiography of nuclear age.

Beyond the realm of nuclear history, Hunt also seeks to make a larger contribution to our understanding of the Cold War and the relationship of that conflict to “a world after empire” and the way in which the emerging superpowers, and particularly the United States, sought to maintain global hegemony in the face of post-World War Two decolonization and the emergence of a non-aligned Global South as well as a rising China under Chairman Mao Zedong. It is a testament to the strength of Hunt’s work, as well as the overall advance of the field of diplomatic history, that he feels no need to engage in a hand-wringing debate over whether the U.S. had imperial ambitions in the wake of the Second World War. Rather, he simply and forthrightly addresses the question of how control over both atomic weapons and atomic energy served as a means by which US leaders could continue to justify imperial ambitions and interventions in an age of nominal decolonization. From the perspective of the great powers, and particularly from Washington, the combination of decolonization and the revolutionary potential of the atom “necessitated a spirited counterrevolution to consolidate brute force and moral capital in existing hands, and by doing so prolong their moment in the sun” (243). In this context, “the NPT resembled fetters set out to trap [newly post-colonial countries] before they ascended to international society’s summit” (6).

While pulling no punches in his account of the way in which the US leveraged non-proliferation in service of imperial ambitions, Hunt also explores the way in which the changed international climate in the era of decolonization provided openings and opportunities for smaller powers to leverage these negotiations in service of their own ends. While treaties such the as the NPT and the Limited Test Ban Treaty (LTBT) may have been unequal and slanted towards the handful of powers who were already in the nuclear club, “countries were free not to join, unlike the 1842 Treaty of Nanking, the 1885 Treaty of Berlin, or the 1903 Platt Amendment” (11). Indeed, the fact that US hegemony was at least nominally embedded in a rules-based international order (of which the NPT was to be the keystone), and the existence of the Soviet Union (and later China) as effective competitors, allowed smaller powers room for agency during the Cold War. In some cases, this took direct forms such as when Mexican undersecretary of foreign affairs Alfonso García Robles maneuvered to secure approval for the Treaty of Tlatelolco (1967), which created a nuclear-free zone in Latin America and the Caribbean. In other cases, the impact was more indirect, as when Hunt chronicles the ways in which the disastrous American war in Vietnam undermined the larger project of leveraging the NTP for both domestic and international purposes. “Unfortunately for [President Lyndon] Johnson,” notes Hunt, “by the fall of 1968 international nuclear diplomacy had become a sideshow when compared to the Vietnam War” (237).

Hunt’s treatment of the relationship between the NPT and changing American imperial strategies in the era of decolonization is very strong and helps elevate The Nuclear Club from a niche history of nuclear non-proliferation to an important contribution to the larger discourse about the Cold War and US foreign policy. One missing element, however, and one that somewhat handicaps Hunt’s ability to fully explore this subject, relates to the question of how racial ideology shaped American treatment of both the atomic bomb as well as the larger issues related to the daily operations of the US empire. Sprinkled throughout The Nuclear Club are tantalizing quotes that illustrate the ways in which race, the bomb, and US foreign policy were deeply intertwined, particularly in Asia. Whether it was Eisenhower’s defense secretary Neil McElroy warning of the “yellow peril” (96-97) or President John F. Kennedy asserting that the Chinese “would be perfectly prepared, because of the lower value they attach to human life, to sacrifice hundreds of millions of their own lives” (96), racialized thinking was deeply embedded in the outlook of the US foreign policy and military establishments that were charged with overseeing the bomb. Hunt does not interrogate this evidence, nor does he offer an any judgement on the extent to which racial ideologies were driving factors in US policy in this regard (as opposed to race being used as a justification for policies derived from more realpolitik calculations). This is a complicated subject with no simple answers. Having traveled at least half the distance in raising the issue, The Nuclear Club would have been well served by engaging more directly with the scholarship on race, US foreign policy, and the bomb, including works such as Matthew Jones’ After Hiroshima.[22]

A final element of The Nuclear Club worth highlighting is its persistent (and damning) focus on the ways in which the management of thermonuclear weapons that could end all life on earth was frequently intertwined with, if not subsidiary to, US domestic politics. Hunt focuses particularly on the ways in which first Kennedy and then Johnson sought to leverage negotiations over the NPT and related efforts to position themselves as paternal guardians of suburban America. In Hunt’s account:

atomic culture forged a link between U.S. armed might, America’s suburbs, and global order. When pursuing controversial policies or facing tough elections, a series of US presidents defended their policies by asserting an executive duty to protect home-owning families and the larger human lineage from total destruction (15).

Linking suburbanization, patriarchy, and the bomb is an intriguing combination, though as with Hunt’s treatment of race it could have benefited from a more in-depth and theoretically grounded consideration of how these complex phenomena intersected with policy making around the NPT. Did Kennedy and Johnson embrace this domestic form of “atomic diplomacy” solely out of raw political calculation (and if so, what is the evidence for its effectiveness)? Or did deeply ingrained notions of family and patriarchy shape the world view which these man and their advisors brought to the nuclear question in meaningful ways?

As with issues around racial ideology, these are complicated and messy questions with no easy or simple answers and it is perhaps too much to ask for Hunt to deal with them in the depth they deserve while also offering a more conventional diplomatic history of the NPT. In this respect, The Nuclear Club joins Maddock’s Nuclear Apartheid, Hamblin’s The Wretched Atom, and Matthew Jones’ After Hiroshima as important works rooted in the traditional methodological past of diplomatic history and the history of science while also tentatively gesturing towards the need for a more theoretically sophisticated approach to the intersection of issues such as race and gender in order to fully understand our nuclear past and present. Taking that next step is more crucial than ever, not only because of our continuing nuclear peril, but also given the degree to which factors that are similar (though by no means identical) to those chronicled by Hunt with respect to the NPT may be at work in the fraught discussions of how to respond to a global climate emergency with similarly high stakes for the lives of everyone on the planet.

The Nuclear Club is a fascinating, panoramic exploration of the origins of the nuclear nonproliferation regime. From the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the entry into force of the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1970, Hunt shows how a diverse set of actors—American and Soviet officials, diplomats from the developing and postcolonial world, nongovernmental experts, and the public at large—combined to shape the treaties that help constitute the global nuclear order. While there are many different strands in the book’s argument that make it hard to briefly summarize, Hunt emphasizes the conservative, self-interested intentions of the superpowers—maintaining their dominance while exerting control over newly independent and postcolonial states—as well as the role of developing and postcolonial countries like Ireland, Mexico, and India in shaping the nuclear order, ensuring that it was not entirely one-sided at the smaller countries’ expense. Hunt concludes on a rather dark note, highlighting how the nonproliferation regime has preserved unjust international hierarchies while helping to legitimize wars of choice.

The Nuclear Club is an impressive work of scholarship on multiple dimensions. It is highly engaging and readable, which I do not say about many academic titles. It appropriately captures the complexities of the creation of the nonproliferation regime, demonstrating how it resulted from the pushing and pulling of a diverse set of actors, both at the domestic and international levels, and highlights how countries often acted in surprising ways that run counter to popular understandings of the nonproliferation regime. For example, while many analyses focus overwhelmingly on the role of the superpowers in creating the regime,[23] Hunt shows that Washington and Moscow worked hard to address the concerns of postcolonial and developing world nations, and how they sometimes directly took inspiration from their handiwork, for instance the 1958 Irish Resolution, which laid the early groundwork for the NPT, and 1967 Treaty of Tlatelolco, which barred nuclear weapons in Latin America and the Caribbean. If I were asked recommend one book to help someone understand how the NPT was finally concluded in 1968, The Nuclear Club would be a strong contender.

With that said, I think the book could have done more to clarify its contribution and strengthen or extend several of its core arguments. One thing I was consistently puzzled by while reading the book is the lack of explicit engagement with prior work on the topic. That is not to say Hunt does not cite or draw on relevant works; a simple perusal of the endnotes shows that he does. However, there is very little discussion of how Hunt’s argument or research is similar to, or different from, prior work in this area, which makes it hard for the reader to understand the book’s value. It would be helpful to communicate what the book brings to the table that is missing, for instance, from prior book-length works on this topic and time period by Mohamed Shaker, Susan Shrafstetter and Stephen Robert Twigge, and Shane Maddock.[24] Significant portions of Hunt’s argument appear to overlap with Maddock’s in particular, which likewise emphasizes American efforts to institutionalize a two-tiered nuclear order favoring the United States and its European allies.

In the realm of political science, Hunt also misses opportunities to engage with relevant work, most notably Andrew Coe and Jane Vaynman’s 2015 article on the origins of the NPT,[25] which argues that the treaty was the product of collusion between the United States and Soviet Union once they realized that proliferation undermined their influence over their allies. This also overlaps in key ways with Hunt’s account (for example, see 75-76, 128-129, 202, 222) even though there are also interesting differences. Coe and Vaynman, for instance, overwhelmingly emphasize the superpowers and reject the idea of the NPT as simply a ‘grand bargain’.”[26] Hunt, by contrast, highlights how non-nuclear states played important roles in shaping the treaty (e.g. Chapter 7), even if it did not exactly amount to a fair trade with the nuclear powers.

In terms of the argument in the book itself, it arguably places too much weight on concerns about postcolonial nations in motivating the NPT. This is clearly an important part of the story; there is no doubt that the United States was worried that countries like India, Israel, Pakistan, Egypt, and Brazil might acquire the bomb, with dangerous consequences. Yet as Hunt’s own narrative shows, concerns about West Germany were central to the diplomacy leading to the NPT (see, inter alia, 62-63, 77-80, 124-125, 142-143, 161-162, 194, 217). Indeed, keeping West Germany non-nuclear was probably the main reason that the Soviet Union supported both the Limited Test Ban Treaty (LTBT) and NPT, and it was important to American officials too, who went to the lengths of inventing exotic schemes like the Multilateral Force, which promised to provide Germany with access to nuclear weapons as part of a joint force within NATO so that it would not need its own arsenal. Leaving West Germany aside, several other of the “most likely” proliferators were former or current colonizers rather than post-colonial nations, for instance Japan, South Africa, and Sweden. US officials saw proliferation as a global problem; even if proliferation was most likely to begin in the developing world in the late 1960s, many felt that it would reverberate back and trigger nuclear programs in countries like Germany and Japan.[27]

One could also argue the book overemphasizes the impact of postcolonial nations and nuclear “have-nots” on the treaty. As noted above, Hunt convincingly shows they played an important role in the process, in a way that is often minimized by research that focuses on the superpowers. Yet if we look at several of the specific articles in the NPT they helped inspire—for instance, Article IV on the promotion of peaceful uses and Article VI, which commits the nuclear powers to make efforts at disarmament—they did not end up panning out too well for the non-nuclear states in practice. As Dane Swango has shown, US officials from the outset were willing to provide nuclear assistance even to countries outside the NPT.[28] It was not until the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act of 1978 that the United States conditioned nuclear assistance on full-scope safeguards. Moreover, statistical analyses have shown that NPT membership did not make a country more likely to receive civilian nuclear assistance between 1950 and 2000.[29] In other words, if the nuclear “have-nots” hoped that Article IV would provide tangible rewards to non-nuclear states who joined the treaty, they were mostly disappointed.

As for Article VI, the story is well known: substantial cuts to nuclear arsenal sizes only took place after the end of the Cold War and we currently appear to be heading into a more dangerous nuclear era, with virtually all nuclear powers modernizing and/or expanding their arsenals. Indeed, it was precisely this lack of substantial progress toward disarmament that helped motivate the recent Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.[30] One could certainly argue that Articles IV and VI are still important, as they may help motivate the behavior of nuclear powers on the margins and provide discursive tools for the non-nuclear states to push back against them. Conversely, a more cynical observer might say that the main accomplishment of non-nuclear diplomatic entrepreneurs like Mexico was their providing a veneer of fairness to the treaty, helping to induce nuclear have-nots into joining without ultimately providing them with much of substance.

Finally, Hunt implies at the beginning and end of the book that the nonproliferation regime has had unintended negative consequences in terms of legitimizing military intervention abroad. But this goes beyond what the book’s evidence can reasonably sustain, given that it does not analyze such cases. I would argue there have been fewer counterproliferation wars (or even limited attacks) than one would expect if the regime so clearly legitimized them.[31] The international community by and large did not condone Israel’s attacks on Iraqi or Syrian reactors, nor did it support the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Given Israel’s lack of interest in the NPT and penchant for unilateral action, one could easily imagine that its leaders would have carried out these attacks even if there was no NPT. Likewise, the United States could have easily justified the 2003 Iraq invasion based on (supposed) chemical and biological weapons programs and human rights, leaving aside the nuclear issue. One could go even further and argue the NPT has made counterproliferation wars less likely—both by deterring countries from starting nuclear weapons programs and providing countries with greater confidence in their rivals’ nuclear activities due to safeguards.

These criticisms notwithstanding, The Nuclear Club is a major accomplishment. It belongs on the shelves of historians and political scientists alike who are interested in nuclear nonproliferation.

Response by Jonathan Hunt, US Naval War College

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