ABSTRACT
A consensus among historians has emerged that the Baghdad Pact appeared to negate some of the anti-colonial effects of both world wars in that it brought an independent Iraq into alliance with Turkey and Pakistan. To assess Iraq's membership in the Baghdad Pact as well as to understand the implications of membership for Hashemite Iraq's place in UK/US atomic policy, we must acknowledge that the word "politics," as commonly used, has a number of different meanings. This chapter argues that – after the war – Great Britain introduced the United States to its between-the-wars regime of unequal treaties. During World War II, atomic research developed from unequal treaties and legal exceptionalism, by which Europe's 19th-century relations with Africa, the Americas, and Oceania, continued into the twentieth century. The chapter explains the role biophysics played in bringing Iraq into Iraq-Turkey bilateral agreement.
