This paper tries to demonstrate that some of the historiographical insights on the transformation of the international system in the 1970s can be particularly useful for our understanding of the efforts to craft a global nuclear regime during that decade. It first discusses some of the key results of this historiography and then it looks at some of their possible implications for the more specific field of research of nuclear history.
2. The 1970s as the crucial decade
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, a large part of the scholarly community focused on the fateful events of the late 1980s and early 1990s, with the end of bipolarism often being regarded as the single most important event in the second half of the twentieth century. This initial fascination with what was indeed a momentous sequence of events had a deep impact on historical research, highlighting discontinuity and underplaying long- and mid-term trends â not to mention alimenting the debate about âwho won the Cold Warâ. A growing body of historical literature, however, has argued that the concept of a sudden end of the cold war in the late 1980s is profoundly mistaken, suggesting an alternative approach that looks at those long-term trends that altered the basic configuration of the bipolar system already in the 1970s and chiseled away at its rigid features, thereby undermining its structure and preparing and facilitating its eventual demise in the late 1980s. The list is long and it includes such events as the breakdown of the postwar economic order, based on the containment of finance and on the centrality of the dollar as the pillar of monetary stability; the general reshaping of the international financial and economic order which followed; the emergence of new great powers such as China and India, their realignment in the international system, and more in general the rise of the non-Western world; the collapse of the old order in the Middle East and the growing US involvement in the region, followed by the Iranian revolution and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism; the growing importance of non-state actors such as transnational movements as well as international organizations. These are all phenomena whose origins can be traced even further back, but which became more conspicuous throughout the 1970s, making that decade âthe seedbed of future crisesâ and deeply affecting the old bipolar order.1 They contributed significantly to its modification and erosion, before the events of the late 1980s dealt it a final blow. And even if we confine ourselves within the parameters of the cold war, it is important to remember, as Arne Westad has shown, that it was in the 1970s that the bipolar confrontation became truly global, moving from an Europe increasingly stabilized through the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) and Ostpolitik to the peripheral crises in Asia and Africa (much as it happened, incidentally, to the epicenter of the problem of nuclear order).2
A number of pioneering works, therefore, have sought different conceptual and chronological frameworks to present the evolution of the international system from more complex perspectives. The single most relevant contribution to this approach is probably the collective edited volume by Ferguson, Maier and others, which looks at the 1970s as the moment when globalization came of age, shattering the basic features of the cold war era and creating the premises for the transformation that followed.3 Daniels Sargentâs own monograph has explored the different reactions of US policy-makers when faced with the challenges of the transition to a new era, while Hal Brands has argued that the rise of the USA to unipolarity was âa longer term and more complex processâŚ. [which] originated in the 1970s, with the unchaining of an entire set of profound global trendsâ.4 Economic historians such as Frieden have also followed a similar interpretive pattern in their general economic histories of the development of capitalism, but the list of those who search for different explanatory frameworks is much longer and cuts across several disciplines: in his book on postwar Europe, for instance, Tony Judt attributed a somewhat similar transformational impact to the societal innovations ushered in by the great upheaval of 1968.5 Thomas Borstelmann has explored the contradictory and simultaneous impact of free market enthusiasm and the growth of civil rights both in the USA and across the globe.6 In his history of the globalization of the cold war, again, Westad finds a long-term continuity between the imperial wars of European expansion, the peripheral conflicts of the cold war, and post-cold war US-led interventions across the globe.
By adopting such a long-term approach, the 1970s and the 1980s can be seen as a period when two very different international systems overlapped and many of the features of the current one gradually emerged, even though they would not be fully revealed until sometime later as they were somewhat obscured by the permanence of cold war bipolarism. It was, Sargent writes, a period of âplural and simultaneous challengesâ; it was an era of turmoil, according to Charles Maier, which âprovoked a fundamental rethinking of the economic and political axioms that had been taken for granted since the Second World Warâ.7
A first important implication of this approach regards what we often think of as a clearcut divide between the cold war and the post-cold war world, particularly in the field of security and even more specifically when we talk about nuclear weapons. There are indeed a number of striking differences between now and the cold war: the threat of a nuclear holocaust in which the two blocs annihilate each other, to mention only the most obvious one, has at least temporarily receded into the background, and in spite of the tensions between the West and Russia after the Crimean and Ukrainian crises, or the growing instability provoked by the North Korean nuclear program, we are nowhere near the levels of tension between two nuclear superpowers which the world experienced in 1962 or in 1983. Yet it is misleading to think that the current nuclear world, the one we live in, started anew in 1991: after all, many of its features did indeed take shape in the 1970s, and it only makes sense to try to relate them to the sweeping changes of that period as well as to the need of the key actors of the time to balance their cold war priorities with the emerging requirements of an shifting international system.
A number of scholars have issued a similar warning. William Walker has actually cautioned us to be wary about talking of a new, or second, nuclear age, and has suggested to look at the changes of the last 20 years as âcomplicating and aggravating the traditional problem of nuclear order [âŚ] rather than replacing itâ.8 Paul Bracken, who has been perhaps the most outspoken proponent of the concept of a second nuclear age, argues that in any case its beginnings should be traced way before the end of the cold war, and concludes that for quite some time such a second nuclear era overlapped with the first one.9 Some of its key features, in other words, can already be detected quite early and are closely intertwined with long-term trends that became clearly visible by the 1970s: the gradual rise of a multipolar world where Asian powers would play an increasingly important role, the diffusion of technologies that make proliferation easier, or the combination of techno-nationalism and local conflicts thatmay make the second wave of nuclear states more likely to use atomic weapons than in the past, are widely discussed in the literature or the documents of the 1970s.10 Even the chance of a terrorist or non-state actor getting access to nuclear weapons was already mentioned in some of the documents of the â70s as a possibility that may come about in a not-too distant future.11 After all, it was a decade which was deeply marred by all sort of violent terrorist attacks.
As is the case with many other features of the contemporary international system, therefore, the current nuclear age might be better understood not only as the result of the momentous changes of the late 1980s, but also as the output of a long-term process which has its roots in the overall transformation of the international system that began with the crumbling of the old bipolar structure in the previous decade.
3. The 1970s and the attempt to craft a global nuclear order
If we follow this approach and define the 1970s and detente not as a mere pause inside the overarching architecture of the cold war, but as an era of âdisruption, decay and changeâ12 of that architecture, what other specific consequences can we draw for our task of understanding the interconnection between international history and the making of a global nuclear order? I will try to highlight at leastfive major ones. First of all, by highlighting the difference between the 1970s and the previous phase of the postwar era, we have a better grasp of the disconnect between the making of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and the evolution of the international system. The NPT had its roots deeply steeped in the cold war, as it was first conceived at a time when both superpowers still retained a reasonably firm control over the international system. When they tried to implement their own ideas of a nuclear order, however, they not only needed to make all sorts of compromises with each other but also with their own allies. Such arrangements included not only the pre-signature negotiations between 1966 and 1968 but also some of the subsequent steps, such as the complex deal between the IAEA and EURATOM which granted the European allies what was largely a right of self-inspection, much to the detriment of the attempt to present the NPT regime as a truly global one; or the US reaction â and eventual acquiescence â to the development in Europe of the two large consortia for uranium enrichment, EURODIF and URENCO; the Soviet attempts to establish their own nuclear network in eastern Europe and to take into account the eastern Europeansâ own nuclear ambitions; the need to accommodate the West German and Japanese drives to achieve what by and large amounted to a latent nuclear capacity; and so on and so forth. The result was a series of adjustments that shaped the superpowersâ attempt to create a nuclear order which had originally been envisaged mostly as a means to stabilize a cold war world by preventing a West German nuclear rearmament. By the time that order came about, however, it found a world which was bipolar no more. It is indeed in the very years between the end of the 1960s and the first half of the 1980s, when the regime was put into place, that the rigidity of the post-World War II bipolar world began to evolve and transform â and it is indeed important to place conceptually this attempt to create some sort of order in the nuclear domain against the background of the collapse of the older paradigms of stability.
A second consideration is strictly correlated to the previous one and it follows logically from it. In order to understand the difficulties which the attempt to create...
