Once and Future Partners

The US, Russia, and Nuclear Non-proliferation

William C. Potter, Sarah Bidgood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429626746
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Sécurité nationale

Despite their Cold War rivalry, the United States and the Soviet Union frequently engaged in joint efforts to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. Leaders in Washington and Moscow recognized that nuclear proliferation would serve neither country's interests even when they did not see eye-to-eye in many other areas. They likewise understood why collaboration in mitigating this nuclear danger would serve both their own interests and those of the international community. This volume examines seven little known examples of US-Soviet cooperation for non-proliferation, including preventing South Africa from conducting a nuclear test, developing international safeguards and export control guidelines, and negotiating a draft convention banning radiological weapons. It uses declassified and recently-digitized archival material to explore in-depth the motivations for and modalities for cooperation under often adverse political circumstances. Given the current disintegration of Russian and US relations, including in the nuclear sphere, this history is especially worthy of review. Accordingly, the volume's final chapter is devoted to discussing how non-proliferation lessons from the past can be applied today in areas most in need of US-Russian cooperation.

Chapter One
The origins of US–Soviet non-proliferation cooperation¹

William C. Potter

The impetus for extended US–Soviet cooperation in nuclear-arms control, including non-proliferation, is traceable directly to the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 or, as it was known in the Soviet Union, the ‘Caribbean Crisis’. As many studies have concluded, the crisis was the closest the two superpowers came to nuclear conflict and prompted reconsideration in both the Soviet Union and the US about the risks of nuclear weapons and the need for their control.²

A shared recognition of these dangers and the urgency of mitigating them did not diminish the fundamental nature of their Cold War ideological or military rivalry. It did, however, lead both states to recognise that non-proliferation cooperation served each country’s interests and could usefully be pursued through a variety of formal and informal means, including treaty negotiations, parallel export-control policies, routine bilateral consultations and, on occasion, intelligence sharing and high-level coordinated diplomacy.

Evolution of non-proliferation policy

The word ‘evolution’ is perhaps a misnomer for the development of Soviet or US non-proliferation policy, as it implies a process of continuous and unidirectional change toward a more complex or sophisticated and desirable state of affairs. That description does not accurately capture the dynamics of Soviet and US non-proliferation policy between 1945 and 1992. However, at least four different periods in the development of both countries’ non-proliferation policies and perspectives since the beginning of the nuclear age can be discerned.³

Although the dates in some periods are rough approximations, as the change in policies sometimes occurred gradually and was not always linear, each period had distinctive characteristics and dominant tendencies.⁴ Both countries followed the same sequence and general trajectory, but at difference paces. As such, there were significant parallels in the development of Soviet and US non-proliferation policies, but the formative events and learning experiences were not always the same.

Secrecy and denial

United States

The initial US response to the splitting of the atom and the recognition of its dual potential for military and peaceful purposes was to try to keep information about atomic energy secret. Characteristic of this secrecy and denial approach to non-proliferation was the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 that prohibited the international exchange of scientific information about the peaceful uses of nuclear energy. This restriction applied even to the closest allies of the US, Canada and the United Kingdom, both of which had contributed to the Manhattan Project.

At the same time that the US was drafting legislation to control nuclear-information sharing, at the international level it proceeded to give priority to preventing the spread of nuclear weapons by promoting what became known as the Baruch Plan. Based on an internal US governmental report directed by Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson and Tennessee Valley Authority Chairman David Lilienthal, the Baruch Plan called for the creation of an International Atomic Development Authority (IADA), to which would be entrusted all phases of development and use of atomic energy. More specifically, the IADA was to have ‘managerial control or ownership of all atomic activities potentially dangerous to world security’, ‘power to control, inspect and license all other atomic activities’ and ‘the duty of fostering the beneficial uses of atomic energy’.⁵ The Baruch Plan also called for the cessation of the manufacture of atomic bombs and the disposal of existing atomic stockpiles. These latter steps, however, were conditioned on the prior establishment and operation of the IADA and an adequate system for control of atomic energy. Finally, the Baruch Plan specified that punishment for violations of the plan was not subject to veto in the United Nations Security Council.

The passage of the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 following the Soviet Union’s negative response to the Baruch Plan marked the height of US efforts to prevent by ‘secrecy/denial’ the spread of nuclear technology. By the end of 1953, however, it was apparent that this approach had failed. The Soviet Union had joined the US as an atomic-weapons state and both countries had tested hydrogen bombs. In addition to the development of more sophisticated nuclear weapons, research also had progressed on the peaceful uses of nuclear power, especially in the commercial applications of nuclear reactors for the generation of electricity. Moreover, it was no longer clear whether a US policy of strict secrecy would encourage or discourage indigenous nuclear-development programmes in other states. As Secretary of State John Foster Dulles noted during testimony before the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, knowledge about atomic energy was growing in so much of the world that it was impossible for the US to ‘effectively dam … the flow of information’. Even if we did try to do it, he observed, ‘we [would] only dam our own influence and others [would] move into the field with the bargaining power that that involves’.⁶

Soviet Union

From the American perspective, the Baruch Plan was a magnanimous proposal involving the promised surrender of the US nuclear monopoly in the interests of world peace. The plan was viewed very differently, however, from the Soviet vantage point.

The Baruch Plan’s proposed elimination of the veto power of Security Council members, rather than guaranteeing swift and sure punishment for guilty parties, was seen by Moscow as an attempt by the US to facilitate mobilisation of the Western-dominated UN against the Soviet Union. The plan’s proposal for international control over atomic energy, similarly, was seen in the Kremlin as a manoeuvre by which the West might gain control over the Soviet economy, at least to the extent that it became dependent upon nuclear power.⁷ Inspection procedures called for by the Baruch Plan also probably raised in Joseph Stalin’s mind the spectre of Western intelligence operations within the Soviet Union and possible espionage directed at military-industrial facilities. Since the Soviet Union had yet to test a nuclear explosive, it also had some reason to regard the Baruch Plan as a strategy to perpetuate Soviet nuclear inferiority.⁸ In short, from the Soviet perspective, to have accepted the Baruch Plan’s approach to place the development of atomic energy under UN control would have been tantamount to placing it under the control of the US.

Given these reservations by the Soviet leadership about the Baruch Plan, it is not surprising that their response was a counter-proposal that reversed the sequence of control and disarmament. Whereas the US proposal envisioned first the creation of inspection-and-control machinery and then disar- mament, the Soviets insisted that the destruction of all atomic weapons precede introduction of an international control system. This meant, in practice, nuclear disarmament by the US alone. Although discussions over the alternative proposals continued for several years, fundamental differences between the Soviet and US approaches to the control of atomic energy made agreement impossible.

Throughout the period 1945–54, Soviet concerns with the issue of nuclear non-proliferation were clearly peripheral to the major problem of countering the US nuclear-weapons superiority. Soviet research-and-development (R&D) efforts in the nuclear field, therefore, were primarily oriented to military purposes and conducted in great secrecy and in isolation from other countries. However, this policy of secrecy did not preclude the Soviet Union from exploiting the uranium deposits of Soviet-bloc states in Eastern Europe. It also did not interfere with the enthusiastic, if imprecise, media depiction of the enormous domestic economic potential of nuclear power.

Atoms for Peace

United States

The change in US policy from secrecy/denial to active promotion of peaceful applications of atomic energy was clearly signalled in President Dwight Eisenhower’s famous ‘Atoms for Peace’ speech before the UN in December 1953. Eisenhower acknowledged in his address that the secret of the atom eventually would be acquired by other states, and he emphasised the need to exploit those properties in the atom that were good rather than evil. More specifically, he proposed that the governments principally involved in nuclear R&D make joint contributions from their stockpiles of fissionable materials to an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The agency was to be set up under the jurisdiction of the UN and would be responsible for the storage and protection of contributed fissionable materials. The IAEA also was to have the important responsibility for devising methods to distribute fissionable material for peaceful purposes, especially electrical energy production.

It took nearly four years before Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace proposals found fruition in the establishment of the IAEA. Not only did opposition to the proposals from the Soviet Union need to be overcome, but substantial revisions had to be made in the very restrictive 1946 US Atomic Energy Act. These changes were incorporated in the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 and included the removal of most controls on the classification of information regarding nuclear research, approval of private ownership of nuclear facilities and fissionable material by private industry, and authorisation of the government to enter into agreements for cooperation with other nations on the peaceful uses of nuclear energy. Although these agreements required guarantees by the recipient of nuclear materials or equipment to forswear their use for military purposes, the 1954 Act clearly signalled a basic reordering of US nuclear non-proliferation and export-control priorities. As one observer of the change in US policy pointed out: ‘While the idea of safeguards and protective requirements was by no means forsaken, it now took a backseat to the promotion of atomic energy domestically and internationally.’⁹

One of the ironies of the period of relaxed control over nuclear information ushered in by Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace programme was the development of a US–Soviet peaceful nuclear-energy and -prestige race in tandem with the superpower arms race. One aspect of the former competition was the rush by both the Soviet Union and the US to declassify and disseminate a large volume of technical nuclear information. By 1958, this competition had resulted in the adoption of new guidelines for information declassification in the US that made it possible for any nation to gain access to almost all basic scientific information on research, development and the operation of plants and equipment in the field of nuclear fission.¹⁰

During the same period in the 1950s, the US moved to the fore-front in the international nuclear-export race, exploiting its lead in the field of enriched-uranium research reactors to capture the market abroad. The US position as the only supplier of enriched uranium for these reactors gave it an invaluable political as well as commercial advantage and enabled it ‘to require that the reactors be used only for peaceful purposes, and be inspected first by Americans and then by the IAEA’.¹¹

The administrations of Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon differed widely in their commitment to nuclear-test limitations and other negotiated non-proliferation restrictions. However, until 1974, both Democratic and Republican administrations were inclined to discount – or at least minimise – the relationship between the worldwide growth of nuclear power and the risk of nuclear-weapons proliferation. As such, they tended to subordinate the military implications of nuclear exports to those of commercial advantage. It is telling, for example, that even the major non-proliferation accomplishment of that period, the 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (Non-Proliferation Treaty, or NPT), was promoted by both superpowers as a grand nuclear bargain in which the nuclear powers would provide non-nuclear-weapons states with civilian nuclear technology for peaceful purposes in exchange for the latter’s pledge to forgo a military capability. This ambiguous division between peaceful and military nuclear activity was reinforced by language in the treaty that distinguished between peaceful and military nuclear-explosive capability. Benefits from the former, it was promised, would be made available to non-nuclear parties to the treaty at a low cost.

If the defining characteristic or tendency of the second phase in the evolution of Soviet and US non-proliferation policy was promotion of the peaceful use of the atom, another very important feature of this period was maintaining alliance relations. During the Eisenhower administration, this meant giving priority to the retention of flexibility in the employment of nuclear weapons over that of the ‘non-dissemination’ or ‘non-diffusion’ of nuclear weapons, as non-proliferation typically was referred to at the time. According to one former US government official, this meant, among other things, placing ‘a higher premium on nuclear weapons cooperation with [US] allies – even at the price of encouraging and stimulating independent atomic-weapons programs – than … seeking international agreements retarding the spread of nuclear weapons’.¹² Pentagon officials, for example, made the case that the spread of nuclear weapons ‘would work to the advantage of the United States because the Soviet Union would not allow its unreliable Eastern European allies to acquire nuclear weapons’, while weapons spread to allies such as France and Japan ’would add to the Western advantage in nuclear weapons’.¹³

To be sure, US nuclear policy was not constant during the Atoms for Peace period, and the priority given to non-proliferation rose following the 1960 presidential election. Nevertheless, US nuclear pol...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Glossary
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter One The origins of US–Soviet non-proliferation cooperation
• Chapter Two The 1977 South Africa nuclear crisis
• Chapter Three Peaceful nuclear explosions: from the Limited Test-Ban Treaty to the Non-Proliferation Treaty
• Chapter Four Negotiating and sustaining the Non-Proliferation Treaty: challenges and lessons for US–Russia cooperation
• Chapter Five The establishment of the London Club and nuclear-export controls
• Chapter Six IAEA safeguards: patterns of interaction and their applicability beyond the Cold War
• Chapter Seven Negotiating the draft Radiological Weapons Convention
• Chapter Eight Lessons for the future
• Notes
• Index