The Modern-Age Nuclear Arms Race: Why Can’t We Disarm Our Nuclear Weapons?
For the last forty years, the United States and the Soviet Union (as well as the other members of the always growing “nuclear club”) have spent massive resources on a nuclear arms race that could have been avoided through a workable international control plan. “The Franck Report” stated, “Unless an effective international control of nuclear explosives is instituted, a race for nuclear armaments is certain to ensue following the first revelation of our possession of nuclear weapons to the world.”
Who is to blame for this arms race? In the video the author states Stalin and in part, Truman, were to blame for this race to arms. I think more emphasis on Truman for creating unnecessary tensions with the Soviet Union. Whether Stalin would have accepted any international control plan, however reasonable, is an unanswerable question. But would Roosevelt had he survived, or Henry Wallace become president, have done things differently than Truman? I think, absolutely yes. I don’t believe the atom bombs would have been dropped in the first place, and the out of control arms race may never have existed. It’s naive to believe Stalin would have given up his nuclear weaponry so easily, but I don’t think there would have been as much paranoia and uncertainty had Roosevelt survived.
from jspavey.com
The CIA predicted ten countries could go nuclear within a decade, by 1975 it concluded that “logically” nuclear proliferation would only subside when “all political actors, state and non-state, are equipped with nuclear armaments.”A quarter century and one nuclear power later (both South Africa and Pakistan acquired a nuclear-weapons capability during this time, but South Africa dismantled all its nuclear weapons by 1991), CIA director George Tenet announced in 2003 that we had entered “a new world of proliferation” and warned “the ‘domino theory’ of the twenty-first century may well be nuclear.”
from mathewvandyke,com
Still, just because nuclear forbearance has been the norm thus far doesn’t necessarily mean this will continue into the future. In fact, according to Shavit, an Iranian bomb would “force Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt to acquire their own.” Even President Obama believes that if Iran gets nuclear weapons, its neighbors will be “compelled” to do the same.
There is no evidence for this, but it certainly brings us back historically to the first nuclear arms race. What happened? What could we have done differently? I believe hindsight into the past will make decisions easier for our present and future.
References:
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/nuclear_arms_race.htm
Plutonium Pandemonium 