Review: <i>The Nuclear Club: How America and the World Policed the Atom from Hiroshima to Vietnam</i>, by Jonathan R. Hunt

In The Nuclear Club, Jonathan Hunt has produced an excellent book describing the origins of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) from 1958 to 1970. Hunt’s detailed analysis effectively threads the needle between traditional and revisionist accounts of the treaty’s origins, showing step by step how the treaty emerged from the tangled bargains of the nuclear-armed superpowers; their close allies, especially in Europe; and the broader decolonizing and developing world of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. In recalling the many layers of the treaty’s construction, Hunt’s account draws on extensive archival research across many countries and languages. Indeed, Hunt’s success in welding together the many influences that drove the NPT’s original negotiation highlights the need for additional research regarding the development of the nuclear nonproliferation regime over time.The Nuclear Club begins by acknowledging the ongoing contest over the meaning of the NPT (10–11). Traditionally, the treaty has been portrayed as a cornerstone of postwar international law, a high point of UN multilateralism in providing public security goods.1 In this account, the NPT served as an effective compromise between the reality of superpower nuclear arsenals and the ideal that nuclear technology should be used for peaceful purposes. Its core bargain, in which states agree to forgo nuclear weapons in exchange for aid in developing peaceful nuclear technology, served as a critical mechanism in allowing relatively peaceful decolonization, in which emerging states were able to enjoy the fruits of advanced technology without the security dilemmas that would have accompanied weaponization. The core role of the NPT in international law helps explain the longevity of the treaty, as well as the growing concerns that it might fall apart. The ongoing non-membership of Israel, India, and Pakistan; North Korea’s decision to withdraw and weaponize; and concerns that Iran might follow North Korea’s example touch not just on the particular circumstances of those countries but rather more broadly on the ability of international law to prevent war and tame potentially destructive technologies.Other observers have challenged this traditional understanding of the NPT as a framework for peace and progress, arguing that the treaty is instead a tool of discrimination and neo-imperial control.2 Far from a gift to the nuclear have-nots of the decolonizing world, the NPT instead froze the nuclear balance in favor of the Global North by allowing the traditional imperial powers of Britain, France, Russia, and the United States access to nuclear weapons while barring other countries from legal weaponization. Aside from its blatant discrimination, the NPT’s offer of nuclear developmental aid served not to empower decolonizing countries but rather to create a new system of surveillance, enabling the traditional imperial countries to intervene in former colonies to uphold the “law and order” of nonproliferation. This intellectual skepticism of the NPT has significant policy implications: after many years of organization, critics of the NPT won a major victory in 2017 by promulgating the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which explicitly repudiates the NPT bargain by insisting on immediate nuclear disarmament.The Nuclear Club effectively weaves back and forth between these two perspectives on the NPT’s origins, rejecting easy categorization to show the complexity and contingency of the treaty’s formation. Far from an obvious imperial project, Hunt shows how the NPT emerged from the concerns of postcolonial countries. Negotiations of the NPT began in earnest following Ireland’s 1958 proposal for limits on the spread of nuclear weapons: “Advanced by a Northern postcolonial republic with an anticolonial tradition, the idea of restricting membership in the nuclear club was first presented as a means by which to achieve republican ends” (47). Similarly, leaders in Brazil and Mexico played important roles in the nonproliferation negotiations of the 1960s: “Latin Americans knew how to maximize their influence in international forums, influencing proceedings so as to ensure that the global nuclear regime better conformed to their circumstances, priorities, and worldviews” (173). Mexican diplomats, especially, played a late but important role in the NPT’s creation, establishing stronger protections on peaceful nuclear activities for developing countries (189–91). The work of these state actors was complemented by a growing class of transnational political activists, including the International Committee for the Red Cross (30–37) and the Committee for Nuclear Information (81–84), whose opposition to nuclear armament and testing helped curb superpower nuclear behavior.On the other hand, Hunt’s work gives the heft of superpower diplomacy its due, showing how the groundswell for both testing limits and nonproliferation generally languished until the superpowers took up these causes for their own purposes. Thus, the Kennedy administration adopted calls for “nondissemination” of nuclear weapons in the fall of 1961 to bolster the image of the United States following the Bay of Pigs fiasco (85–89). Similarly, Nikita Khrushchev’s agreement to join a ban on atmospheric nuclear testing was intended to bolster his leadership of the communist world against the challenge posed by Mao Zedong (109–19). Lyndon Johnson reemphasized the importance of nuclear nonproliferation from 1966 onward out of a desire to deflect attention away from the escalating U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam (162–70). Nonproliferation diplomacy thus entailed significant cooption of postcolonial opposition to nuclear weapons by the superpowers, in ways that did ultimately reinforce the centrality of the United States and Soviet Union to world affairs. As Hunt concludes, “A treaty that [Irish Foreign Minister] Frank Aiken had prayed would preserve world peace…had yielded a two-tier postcolonial hierarchy in which ambiguous nuclear ‘threats’ could supersede the UN Charter’s ban on wars of choice” (256).Building this multifaceted account of the NPT’s origins is by far the greatest contribution of The Nuclear Club. Gathering the variety of perspectives necessary to understand the NPT’s origins required significant archival effort. Hunt accessed resources across multiple continents and in a variety of languages, including archives in Austria, Britain, Belgium, Canada, France, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, Russia, Switzerland, and the United States (x). This monumental effort is evident in the richness of his account, which brings out not only the diplomatic maneuvers of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and the aforementioned Irish and Mexican contributions but also the important mediating role of UN institutions, including the General Assembly, Security Council, and Eighteen-Nation Committee on Disarmament (ENCD); the calculations of leaders in London, Moscow, New Delhi, Paris, and Tel Aviv; and the views of critical audiences in Germany, Japan, Australia, and elsewhere.Indeed, the complexity of Hunt’s account of the NPT’s origins in the critical decade of the 1960s highlights the need for additional work on the evolution of the nonproliferation regime over time. The Nuclear Club ends on a critical note, looking forward across the decades to the ways in which the NPT would become a cornerstone of international security policy, with the Big Five of the UNSC also empowered as nuclear guardians responsible both for the use of nuclear weapons to deter war and for the policing of nuclear nonproliferation around the world. The result has been “the perpetuation of an international social order, the criminalization of a species of advanced technology and engineering, the hierarchization of nuclear and non-nuclear violence, and the legitimation of five world-threatening arsenals” (245). More specifically, though mentioned only briefly, the desire to explain the U.S. toppling of the Saddam Hussein regime in 2003 hangs over The Nuclear Club as an important motivation (4).While the meaning of the NPT thus remains contested, the entire history of that contestation has yet to be written. After all, at its original conclusion in 1968, the NPT’s authorized nuclear weapons states did not actually overlap with the UNSC’s P5. Despite an obvious invitation, the French government chose not to join the treaty in its initial form. More troublingly, in 1968 the People’s Republic of China, which had tested its first nuclear weapon in 1964, was not yet even a member of the UNSC, where China’s seat was occupied by the Republic of China regime in Taiwan until 1971 (245). Both France and China acceded to the NPT only in 1992 as part of the negotiations that led to the NPT’s indefinite extension at the twenty-fifth anniversary conference in 1995.3 Only then did the solid overlap of NPT nuclear weapons states and UNSC P5 really emerge, in sharper contrast to the formal nuclear outlaws of India, Israel, and Pakistan.Similarly, the militarization of U.S. NPT enforcement was less a direct product of the NPT itself than the structural shifts in the international system that accompanied the end of the Cold War. As Hunt ably demonstrates, the initial NPT emerged as a joint U.S.–Soviet project in world order, aimed at stabilizing superpower primacy against the twin threats of rapid decolonization and growing domestic upheaval (8–10). Under this framework, enforcement of the NPT depended significantly on the ability of each superpower to bring its key partners to the table. Unsurprisingly, this original framework of superpower enforcement broke down with the collapse of Soviet power. The declining salience of superpower competition to international security dramatically improved the security circumstances of many former potential proliferators, allowing an expanding and deepening of NPT commitments at the 1995 conference. Yet the breakdown of superpower condominium also created a subset of states (many of them former Soviet clients) that could no longer seek security against American power through a nuclear patron. The result was a new dynamic of nuclear proliferation in which the American hegemony on which NPT enforcement increasingly depended also drove the proliferation incentives of rogue states like North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Libya.In its exceptional account of the NPT’s origins, therefore, The Nuclear Club is a natural complement to other excellent works detailing later developments in the nuclear nonproliferation regime, including Malfrid Braut-Hegghammer on the evolving challenges facing would-be proliferators, Eliza Gheorghe on market-thwarting tools for controlling the proliferation of nuclear technology, and Tristan Volpe on how potential proliferators adopted strategies of nuclear latency.4 We can only hope that future research will explore the re-founding of the NPT regime in the 1990s with the level of care and detail that The Nuclear Club provides in its initial Cold War founding in the 1960s.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.