ABSTRACT
In the wake of World Wars One and Two, it appeared that the era of empires was over. In the centuries before these wars, the means of achieving the status of a “great power” was to establish a global empire that allowed a nation to project force and to become rich through the exploitation of the resources and labor of its colonies. A new international order was now emerging. The new empires would magnetize around economic ideologies. Even before a second nation obtained nuclear weapons, the world was already being divided into factions between the East and West, between communism and capitalism. When the former Soviet Union did achieve nuclear weaponry in late 1949, a bi-polar political world was cemented in which the non-nuclear nations of the world were expected to fall into either pro-U.S. or pro-Soviet blocs. A Cold War had begun between these two nuclear-armed superpowers: a cold war because the lethality of nuclear weapons made a hot war “unthinkable.” These Cold War dynamics established a framework within which many technologically advanced nations pursued nuclear weaponry, aspiring to become “superpowers.” Some nations that had lost traditional empires, mostly in Europe, were still sufficiently wealthy to quickly pursue the development of these weapons and become “partners” of the United States in this new political alignment.
