Richard A. Ruth on Jonathan R. Hunt’s *The Nuclear Club: How America and the World Policed the Atom from Hiroshima to Vietnam*

On February 10, 1968, the Washington Post quoted the U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Earle Wheeler as saying that five senators had recommended using tactical nuclear weapons on the combined North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong units then besieging the U.S. Marine Corps base at Khe Sanh. Later, Daniel Ellsberg, the former RAND Corporation analyst responsible for releasing the Pentagon Papers, asserted that U.S. military leaders had independently considered unleashing these weapons to relieve its encircled Marines. President Lyndon Johnson denied the reports, but subsequent statements by Wheeler and the head of the Military Assistance Command – Vietnam General William Westmoreland suggest that America’s war planners had entertained such a contingency with the White House and the senators during the most precarious days of the fighting. Johnson understood the grave implications of Ellsberg’s allegation. As the only nation to ever use such weapons in warfare, the United States justified the mass killing of civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki by placing it within the larger moral framework of the industrial-scale slaughter of the Second World War. The United States risked intense international condemnation from foes and allies alike if it were to again use these weapons of mass destruction in its “brushfire war” in Southeast Asia. Westmoreland was more sanguine than the President. He believed that, unlike the American bombing of Japan’s urban centers, using tactical nuclear weapons in the sparsely populated hills below the divided Vietnam’s DMZ would inflict only minimal casualties among non-combatants, thus blunting any potential global opprobrium. Westmoreland missed the point. More worrying for some world leaders would be the normalization of nuclear weapons in conflict that might trigger a  global arms race among the developing nations to secure their own supplies of these terrible weapons. The first casualty in this contest would be a delicate and complex nuclear non-proliferation accord some two decades in the making.  History shows that Johnson tabled the tactical nukes option, leaving the embattled Marines to grind out a precarious defense with conventional weapons and occasional air support.

In mid-1968, a few months after the worst of the Khe Sanh siege and the Tet Offensive had abated, world leaders began adding their names to the United Nations-brokered Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, popularly known as the Non-Proliferation Treaty or NPT. The sophisticated stratum of enriched-uranium weapons and intercontinental delivery systems might seem like a world away from the gritty guerrilla warfare and close-quarter combat that characterized much of the fighting in Vietnam. Still, the two are intricately linked in history. In The Nuclear Club: How America and the World Policed the Atom from Hiroshima to Vietnam, historian Jonathan R. Hunt traces the threads connecting these two arenas in the tense quarter-century following the end of World War II. Hunt explores nonproliferation as “an idea, a policy, and a regime” that nearly every nation ultimately embraced during a period that saw subnuclear wars rage continuously around the world. His is a rich, intricate study of seemingly every dramatic development – diplomatic, military, political, and technological – in the extraordinary global effort that brought the NPT into being. The “nuclear club” of the title includes the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France, and eventually, the People’s Republic of China, the first nations to develop and stockpile nuclear arsenals successfully. Beset by suspicion and disdain, the sometimes-fractious grouping worked to find common cause in preventing the rest of the world from joining their exclusive ranks. The nonproliferation they pushed upon the world was not a repudiation of nuclear arms, nor did it embrace disarmament. Instead, it was a promise to minimize the possibility of further atomic wartime horrors by confining the technology to these powerful states. Meanwhile, the nuclear club nations shared non-weapon-grade nuclear know-how, sometimes labeled “Atoms for Peace,” with those nations that abstained from developing their own.

The Nuclear Club shows the NPT to be among the modern era’s most consequential documents, or, as Hunt describes it, “a Magna Carta for the subatomic realm.” Popularly understood to have prevented ambitious nations from developing these weapons of mass destruction, the NPT had far-reaching consequences that transcended its original purpose. Hunt argues that the treaty preserved the global dominance of the former imperial powers in the decades after a world war had dismantled and dispossessed them of their colonial possessions; it preserved the integrity and outlines of bordered nation-states even as scores of post-colonial struggles threatened to undo them; and it safeguarded the movement of money, people, and ideas around the planet, laying the groundwork for the economic globalization that emerged at the end of the century. While it has prevented further military uses of atomic weapons, it has pushed many of the non-nuclear states into grinding conventional wars that have proved no less tragic and destructive. Hunt argues that the NPT “consummated a transition from basic anarchy to imperfect order in world nuclear affairs.”  Unsurprisingly, national leaders have interpreted the NPT’s preamble and eleven articles self-servingly, even cynically. Citing one astute observation, Hunt quotes an Ethiopian diplomat who observes that there are “as many ways of looking at this treaty as there are [United Nations] member states.”  Despite the sometimes-jaded assessments applied to it, the UN-brokered document has accomplished the ambitious goal set out by the “nuclear club’ of Hunt’s title.

To capture the long gestation of a document of such complexity and nuance, Hunt pursues a lively historical narrative that jumps between Washington, DC. and Moscow, New York and Geneva, and almost every other major world city. Guiding this pursuit, Hunt follows a wealth of sources made available only after the Communist bloc faltered and collapsed during the period of  1989-91; he pursues scores of famous and lesser-known conflicts that wracked global affairs in the first two and half decades of the Cold War.  Getting to that point was a slog; Hunt shows the NPT’s creation to be as intricate and remarkable as any atomic device’s creation. He pursues ideas and agreements cultivated in several earlier attempts at nuclear containment, namely 1963’s Moscow Treaty and 1966’s Treaty of Tlatelolco, to explain the treaty’s global lineage. Its structure, language, and guarantees have made it the most influential force shaping the world order in the nearly eight decades since World War II ended in two atomic flashes. The result is a rich and readable study that transcends mere history to suggest, tacitly but urgently, questions for today’s equally fraught world situation.

Among the strengths of The Nuclear Club is Hunt’s inclusion of historical actors from outside the obvious superpower historical cast that dominate Cold War studies. Hunt evinces this thoroughness by giving appropriate attention to the non-American and non-Soviet political actors who conjured the spirit and the template of the NPT. Readers meet arresting figures such as Frank Aiken, a former Irish Republican Army commander who became Ireland’s foreign minister in the 1950s. Haunted by the violence and ethical compromises of his youth, Aiken is instrumental in advancing the first efforts at nuclear restraint in the early Cold War era by championing an approach that becomes known as the “Irish Resolution.” In his focus on containment over disarmament, Aiken argues that arms races are “only the manifestation of a lack of mutual confidence,” adding, “the real problems are political in nature.”  Another fascinating figure is Mexico’s Alfonso García Robles. Hunt gives García Robles similarly deserved attention for his part in creating the Treaty of Tlatelolco, which becomes the heart of the NPT. In one of the study’s strongest chapters, Hunt follows the urbane, globally educated García Robles as he tirelessly builds consensus for a treaty that banned nuclear weapons in Latin America and the Caribbean. Mexico’s peripatetic diplomat must sidestep myriad byzantine national interests and Cold War obstacles to gain consensus on the nuclear-free zone. His triumph, which helped him win a shared Nobel Prize in 1982, demonstrates that a global ban like the NPT is attainable. Aiken and García Robles evince the two seemingly contradictory spirits that drive many of the Nuclear Club’s historical actors: genuine humanitarian compassion and the pursuit of national strategic advantage. The friction that the two impulses generate – sometimes in the same individual – enliven Hunt’s study of innumerable conferences, proposals, and public statements.

Similarly refreshing is Hunt’s inclusion of figures from outside the international diplomatic milieu. In one memorable section, Hunt invokes scholarship on American domestic anti-nuclear groups that defied Cold War hawkishness to argue for test bans and disarmament for the sake of children’s health. In one effort by the Greater St. Louis Committee on Nuclear Information, activists solicit contributions of baby teeth for its politically charged research. The group sought to determine how global nuclear testing had caused strontium-90, the potentially dangerous radioactive isotope produced by atomic fission, found its way into the bodies of American children. The tooth-collecting campaign caught President John F. Kennedy’s attention and helped shape his approach to this complex issue. Hunt humanizes the global diplomatic efforts by arguing that Kennedy, who had only recently lost a stillborn daughter and a prematurely born son, sharply understood the worries of the parents behind the grassroots anti-nuclear campaign.

Hunt follows a tortuous path, both gloomy and hopeful. It culminates in a document that acquired its first signatures on July 1, 1968. A year on either side of this date saw Moscow send troops into Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring, the USSR and PRC nearly go to war at points along the Ussuri River, and the United States spar with North Korea over the USS Pueblo’s seizure, as well as experience some of its fiercest fighting in the Second Indochina War. All of these conflicts could have been flashpoints for the kind of nuclear-amplified devastation and nuclear arsenal envy that the champions of non-proliferation sought to check. In the end, as Hunt shows, the Herculean efforts by diplomats from across the world’s geopolitical spectrum helped produce a treaty that acquired endorsements from every nation within the nuclear club or nearly every one outside it. The Soviets and the Americans embraced it and pressed their respective allies to follow suit; the communist Chinese, the British, and the French endorsed it; and nearly all non-nuclear powers signed on, even as many did so with diplomatic heartburn, suspicion, and even regret. India, Pakistan, and Israel refused. All of these holdouts acquired nuclear weapons, or are believed to have, following the treaty’s ratification in the United Nations.

Jonathan R. Hunt’s study of the Non-Proliferation Treaty’s birth should summon intriguing questions for readers. Among those that I considered while reading the Nuclear Club was whether the NPT could serve as a model for better agreements to staunch the equally dangerous global challenges posed by human-driven climate change and the unchecked development of artificial intelligence technology. These two global dangers currently lack the vivid visual horrors summoned by the atomic hellscapes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that begin Hunt’s study, but their potential to cause irreparable harm to our world is probably equal to that posed by the nuclear arms proliferation fears that the first A-bombs summoned. I also found myself impressed by the timeliness of Hunt’s study. The book’s chronology reaches only the mid-1970s, but the dangers it addressed are as real today as they were during the Cold War. Iran’s continued nuclear weapons program, North Korea’s long-range missile tests, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (accompanied by President Vladimir Putin’s threats to use nuclear weapons there), and the jitters across the Middle East caused by the Hamas-Israel fighting are all grim reminders that the NPT at the heart of Hunt’s study is an agreement deserving of our attention.