ABSTRACT
The 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) is widely regarded as the cornerstone of the broader nonproliferation regime that aims to forestall the further spread of nuclear weapons and related technologies. The NPT has been signed by 190 states and was indefinitely extended in 1995, making it the most successful arms control treaty in history. While it is central to current global nonproliferation efforts and routinely cited as a successful compromise (“a grand bargain”) between the competing priorities of nonproliferation, disarmament and access to peaceful nuclear technologies, the treaty’s underlying mechanisms are less widely understood. The main theoretical conundrum of the NPT is its apparent success in spite of the fact that it is openly discriminatory in defining two different classes of parties to the treaty, nuclear (NWS) and non-nuclear-weapon states (NNWS). While the reason for its acceptance by NWS is easy to understand, since the treaty legitimizes their possession of nuclear weapons, the decisions by NNWS to accede are much harder to grasp. First and foremost, the regime established by the NPT was deeply asymmetrical, since it openly violated the fundamental principle of the modern international state system: the norm of sovereign equality. This formal inequality established in the NPT is the root cause of the ongoing dispute over the real purpose behind the treaty and what is often called the need for a balanced implementation of its three “pillars” of nonproliferation, disarmament, and peaceful uses of nuclear technology.2 Given the NPT’s present-day centrality, the shortage of accounts examining the historical circumstances of its creation is surprising. In fact, this also holds true for the emergence of the wider nonproliferation regime, which has been neglected by historians in favor of other aspects of nuclear policy during the Cold War. Earlier research dealing with the NPT primarily covered the negotiations between the superpowers in the 1960s and the role of nonproliferation in the wider politics of détente, usually with a special focus on Western alliance dynamics and on the future nuclear status of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). As a consequence, there has been very little investigation of the motivations and strategic calculi of the various middle and small powers that joined the treaty.3 The recent “renaissance” (Scott Sagan) in nuclear studies promises to make up for this negligence. The present volume is part of
these ongoing efforts to widen our knowledge and understanding of the nuclear realm.4 The contributions in this volume investigate various aspects of the NPT negotiations which so far have not received much attention. Above all, the main focus of this volume is the attitudes and positions adopted by a selection of NNWS up to 1968, when the treaty was opened for signature. The chapters included in the volume focus on both European and non-European states. The positions of the latter have so far been largely ignored by scholars, despite their significant role in the maintenance of the regime in the present. Based on newly declassified archival and previously inaccessible other evidence, these country studies give an impression of how governments other than the superpowers perceived the global proliferation threat and how they reacted to efforts at the creation of a global agreement to forestall such proliferation. Quite a number of the cases covered in the volume deal with states which seriously considered, if only temporarily, acquiring an independent nuclear deterrent. Indeed, one of the cases studied here, India, ultimately abstained from joining the NPT and instead manufactured her own nuclear weapons. Those states which decided to accede to the NPT faced the challenge of protecting their own interests of various kinds, such as preventing nuclear acquisition by neighboring states, receiving defense commitments from their allies, developing their civilian nuclear capabilities and protecting their commercial competitiveness. As the various chapters demonstrate, there is no single answer as to why NNWS ultimately acceded to the NPT – the decisions were filtered through a multitude of often conflicting factors and influences, juxtaposing domestic politics, considerations of prestige, bureaucratic infighting, technological competence, personal rivalries, regional confrontations, patron-client relationships, and scientific ambitions based on “developmentalist” identities, to name but a few.
