ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Romania’s initiative for creating a nuclear weapon free zone (NWFZ) in the Balkans in the late 1950s. Otherwise known as the Stoica Plan, Bucharest’s call for inter-bloc cooperation on creating a ‘zone of peace’ was the first ever such proposal of the Cold War, at a time when the global public was increasingly worried about the destructive potential of nuclear weapons. As a result, the initiative represented one of the main avenues through which the small and economically weak Balkan country could rise from obscurity to a measure of international prominence, and to therefore start widening its margins of manoeuvre within the superpower dynamic. This chapter analyses the Stoica Plan within the complex regional and global contexts that conferred Romania with the opportunity to first gain increased relevance within the socialist camp through shuttle diplomacy between China and Yugoslavia to gain support for its initiative; and, later, to obtain unprecedented global exposure by pitching the Stoica Plan within the framework of the United Nations.
