Numerical Strength and Nuclear Status in the Politics of the Third World

Abstract

N APRIL 18, 1965, a celebration took place in a town in Indonesia. The celebration was to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the first Afro-Asian conference held in Bandung in 1955. A number of changes had taken place in the world in those ten years. Opening the commemorative conference President Sukarno drew attention to one great change that had occurred since the first Bandung conference: Now, one of us has an atomic bomb.'L While Afro-Asianism entered its second decade of formal but unstable existence, the United Nations organization entered its third. The United Nations did so amid renewed demands for the seating of Communist China in the Organization. China, the most populous country in the world, had just become the first non-white country to develop its own nuclear weapon. True, her image of internal cohesion was soon to be shattered by a worsening cultural revolution. But perhaps China's status as an emerging world power could not be diminished for long by internal shocks-anymore than the global status of the United States since 1963 has been seriously diminished either by the increasing incidence of civil disobedience or by the single shock of a presidential assassination. Moreover, whatever China's own domestic difficulties, her atomic achievement had given an added impetus to the whole quest for a nonproliferation treaty in the world-a treaty which would hopefully rescue mankind from the hazards of an expanding nuclear club. A number of countries were particularly careful in their scrutiny of proposals for nonproliferation. Among such countries was India, the