Keeping the Genie in the Bottle: The Feasibility of a Nuclear Non- Proliferation Agreement

Abstract

During his campaign to mobilize support for the partial test-ban Treaty in 1963, President Kennedy warned that the evil genie of fire-power must be curtailed while time to do so still remained available. His warning has been repeated by dozens of Presidents and Prime Ministers since then but no significant action has yet been taken. Though it is injurious to every single member of the nuclear club that proliferation should take place, they have been unable to agree on any single procedure to arrest so unwelcome but probably a development. The non-nuclear powers of the present day have attempted to force the pace of action by convening the 18-nations Disarmament Conference in Geneva, by exploring the issue of dissemination in depth during the 20th session of the General Assembly, and by calling for a world disarmament conference (which will supposedly include mainland China) to be held during 1967. The non-nuclear powers recognize that there are at least a dozen of their colleagues who could attain an independent capability during the next five to ten years. Their fear that the international system will be destabilized as weapons proliferate is matched only by their frustration at the powers* inability to adopt preventive measures to arrest this spread. Unfortunately, proliferation is now regarded with the same degree of callousness and of myopia by policy-planners as the problems generated by the population explosion. The advanced industrial nations, which could contribute sizeably to birth control and massive agriculture programs, are either unwilling or unable to cope with the issues that will surely become critical in the 1970s. Their defensive statements are logical and apologetic, but abjectly myopic. Diplomacy and policy planning, they insist, are concerned with short-term procedural issues and not with long-run or radical schemes to retain international equilibrium. The few wealthy and nuclear-armed nations are too troubled by immediate policy conflicts to attend to problems of the next decade. Though they claim that this position is based upon a shrewd recognition of the necessities