International Control Of Atomic Energy Research Articles

“A Keg of Dynamite and You're Sitting On It”

In 1946, the scientists who worked on the federal government's Manhattan Project requested that the organization then known as the War Advertising Council prepare a public service advertising campaign to educate Americans about the need to establish an international authority to control atomic energy. An analysis of this campaign, which failed because the fractious scientists couldn't agree on the best way to achieve the campaign's aim, has implications for current concerns. Like the atomic physicists who could not agree on the best approach to achieving international control of atomic energy, today's scientists lack a cohesive voice in the debates about climate change and intelligent design. It is not enough to assume, as the scientists do, that all people will act rationally if given enough information.

Christianity, Dissent, and the Cold War: A. J. Muste's Challenge to Realism and U.S. Empire*

“If Dachau was a crime,” peace activist A. J. Muste wrote in his 1947 book on the bomb, Not by Might, “then Hiroshima is a crime.” He warned that, unless Americans repented of the “hideous sin” of atomic warfare, international control of atomic energy would remain a chimera. By dropping the bomb, Muste argued, the United States had “introduced a profound tension into international relations. We are suspected and feared, and we are ourselves suspicious and afraid. Presently we shall be hated—in some places we are already—unless we reverse our course.”1 Muste was indeed a prophetic figure, whose principled dissent and championing of civil liberties during the Cold War resonated with his contemporaries and remains prescient today. In particular, he offered an incisive analysis of U.S. foreign policy and a sharp critique of realism, which came to dominate Protestant and liberal circles after World War II. Muste believed that the arms race and the Vietnam War grew directly out of contradictions within realist thought as well as racist and nationalist assumptions that went unexamined by its practitioners. He drew on his religious faith to construct his own existentialist solution to the problem of anxiety in the nuclear age, one that bore moral witness to the practices and values of U.S. empire and that anticipated the New Left's confrontation with Cold War liberalism over the war in Vietnam. As this essay will show, his example demonstrates that Christianity shaped resistance as well as accommodation to the Cold War and reminds us that religion, like all powerful cultural constructions, is contested and politically versatile.

A 60-year conspiracy

It’s a 10-minute walk from my office to where everything changed forever. A sculpture by Henry Moore marks the site at the University of Chicago where, on December 2, 1942, physicists achieved the world’s first self-sustaining nuclear reaction. Yet, for most people in the world, their introduction to nuclear physics would come abruptly less than three years later, when the United States dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A group of Manhattan Project scientists had warned that this was a dangerous and ruthless way to usher in the nuclear era—a decision that would inevitably prompt a race among other nations to obtain this ultimate weapon. Their warnings went unheeded. But rather than retreat in despair to their laboratories, in December 1945 they began publishing the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. They believed the stakes for the human race were too high to entrust this debate to a handful of scientists, military leaders, and government officials. (For them, “publish or perish” took on a literal meaning.) They felt an obligation to make their knowledge accessible to the general public and to address the consequences of what they had themselves created. Reflecting on the Bulletin’s mission, Eugene Rabinowitch, the magazine’s cofounder, aptly described it as “part of the conspiracy to preserve our civilization by scaring men into rationality.” Regrettably, six decades after the Bulletin’s founding, fear remains in abundance, while rationality is in short supply. As such, the Bulletin’s sixtieth anniversary is a bittersweet celebration. On the one hand, we take extraordinary pride in what this publication has accomplished in alerting the public to the dangers of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, as well as highlighting important political issues such as government secrecy and human rights. On the other hand, we recognize that in a world still bristling with more than 20,000 nuclear warheads and where terrorist groups scour the globe for fissile materials, our mission remains far from complete. As Joseph Cirincione of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace observes in this issue, we had a window of opportunity 60 years ago to push for the international control of atomic energy (p. 42). Instead, we chose a different path, leading us down the dead end of a costly and dangerous arms race. But, whereas our choices six decades ago were circumscribed by the looming threat of Soviet power, our current political climate allows for considerably more freedom of movement. Many of the programs to safeguard fissile materials, reduce nuclear stockpiles, and prevent nuclear proliferation are already in place. As Cirincione notes, “All that’s lacking is real action and real money.” Hopefully, this opportunity will not be allowed to pass, as it did 60 years ago. It’s rare that the world gets a second chance. Mark Strauss EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR Kennette Benedict EDITOR Mark Strauss MANAGING EDITOR Catherine Auer ASSISTANT EDITOR Jonas Siegel ASSISTANT EDITOR Josh Schollmeyer ART DIRECTOR Joy Olivia Miller WEB DESIGNER Jim Grisius DEVELOPMENT& MARKETING DIRECTOR Lisa Miller ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR E. Ruth White EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT Anthony McGeath

Bertrand Russell on Nuclear War, Peace, and Language

 Reviews BERTRAND RUSSELL ON NUCLEAR WAR, PEACE, AND LANGUAGE D B Philosophy Dept. and Peace Studies / Central Connecticut State U. New Britain,  ,  @.. Alan Schwerin, editor, “under the Auspices of the Bertrand Russell Society”. Bertrand Russell on Nuclear War, Peace, and Language: Critical and Historical Essays. (Contributions in Philosophy, No. .) Westport,  and London: Praeger, . Pp. xxv, . .. his volume contains seven essays on Bertrand Russell, mostly based on Tpapers presented to annual meetings of the Bertrand Russell Society, and now made available to the general public in a hard-bound volume of  pages. The editor, Alan Schwerin of Monmouth University, has divided the book into two parts: () “On Nuclear War and Peace”, with the emphasis in two of three Reviews  papers on Russell’s complicated and changing attitude toward the Soviet Union, and () “On Language”, with most, though not all papers focusing on Wittgenstein’s critique of Russell’s views on ordinary language. The volume is well edited and the essays thought-provoking, making this a valuable addition to any Russell scholar’s bookshelf.     ,    Two of the essays in Part  deal with Russell’s political positions in the late s and mid-s, dates separated by less than a decade but characterized by two very different strategies to promote and achieve peace. Ray Perkins, in “Bertrand Russell and Preventive War”, analyzes the period from the late s to the early s, focusing on a  incident when Russell, in an address to students at the Westminster School, was widely believed to have advocated preventive nuclear war against the Soviet Union. Perkins’ position is that this charge is exaggerated, and that what Russell put forward—in this and most other writings of the period—was the conditional proposition that the West should wage war against the Soviet Union unless the Soviets agreed to international control of atomic energy and weapons, and that the  would likely comply. However, a combination of public misunderstanding of the conditional nature of Russell’s proposal, and the publication in  of a clearly belligerent private letter of Russell’s, sent in  to a Berkeley, California psychiatrist named Walter Marseille, led many critics, including I. F. Stone, to assume that Russell had defended a preventive war strategy all along. This was complicated by erroneous admissions and denials on Russell’s part about what he had actually said, which Perkins attributes to “faulty memory and a desire to draw attention away from the bellicose nature of the Marseille letter” (p. ). Perkins’ article is important for its clear exposition of the conditional nature of Russell’s argument, which Perkins was the first to stress as significant. Readers interested in this controversy should also consult Perkins’ articles in two debates in the pages of this journal: a previous debate with Douglas Lackey over the moral assessment of Russell’s approach, and a subsequent debate with the author of the present review over the characterization of Russell’s conditional strategy.  I. F. Stone, “Bertrand Russell as a Moral Force in World Politics”, Russell, n.s.  (): –.  Douglas P. Lackey, “Russell’s Contribution to the Study of Nuclear Weapons Policy”, Russell, n.s.  (): –; () Ray Perkins, Jr., “Bertrand Russell and Preventive War”, Russell, n.s.  (): –; () Lackey, “Reply to Perkins on ‘Conditional Preventive War’”, Russell, n.s.  (): –; () Perkins, “Response to Lackey on ‘Conditional Preventive War’”, Russell, n.s.  (): –.  David Blitz, “Did Russell Advocate Preventive Atomic War against the ?”, followed by  Reviews By the mid-s, Russell’s strategy had changed, as he realized that the use of the hydrogen bomb in war could spell the end of humanity. This period, focusing on the events leading up to and immediately following the  Russell–Einstein Manifesto, is ably analyzed by Andrew Bone, editor of the recently published Volume  of The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell which covers this period. Russell had moved, as Bone subtitles one of the sections of his essay, from “coercion to coexistence” (p. ) as a result of the changes in the Soviet Union in the post-Stalin period, and the development of the hydrogen bomb as weapon of choice in the arms race. Now, Russell had to decide what to do with anti-war forces that were openly in sympathy with the Soviet Union—in Bone...

Reply to Ray Perkins on Russell’s Conditional Threat of War

 Discussion REPLY TO RAY PERKINS ON RUSSELL’S CONDITIONAL THREAT OF WAR D B Philosophy, and Peace Studies Program / Central Connecticut State U. N B,  ,  @.. ay Perkins brings up a number of important points in “Russell and PreRventive War: a Reply to David Blitz”, his measured response to my article “Did Russell Advocate Preventive Atomic War Against the ?” I would like to consider the following issues which Perkins brings up: (a) did Russell’s position amount to a “conditional advocacy of preventive war”? (b) was his estimation of the likelihood of Soviet compliance with Western demands a mitigating factor that “partially vindicates Russell from the charges of advocating an immoral policy”? and (c) was Russell’s later confusion about what he actuallydidsayintheperiodunderquestion—to—anattempttomaintain his “humanitarian credibility” relative to a position which was “morally problematic” to many otherwise sympathetic observers? (a). Preventive War or Conditional Threat The major issue is that of characterizing Russell’s thesis. I refer to it as “conditional threat of war” (), and distinguish that from “advocacy of preventive war” (), while Perkins refers to is as “conditional advocacy of preventive war” (which he designates as PWc). Here are the statements behind the acronyms, formulated in terms of the Soviet Union (Russia) in the late s: (i) : “If Russia does not acquiesce in the Baruch Plan for the international control of atomic energy, then the West should conditionally threaten war.” (ii) : “Because Russia did not acquiesce in the Baruch Plan for the international control of atomic energy, the West should wage preventive war.” (Ibid.) Ray Perkins prefers the following formulation, which he terms PWc: (i)′ PWc: “The /West ought to wage war against the Soviets unless they agree, under  Russell, n.s.  (): –. Discussion  threat of war, to international controls (of atomic energy/armament).” (“Reply”, p. ) Perkins then specifies an important variant of this thesis, to include the likelihood of Soviet compliance, as follows: (ii) PWc: “We ought to wage war against the Soviets unless they agree, under threat of war, to internationalize controls; and they will probably agree.” Perkins argues that what Russell defended is captured by PWc : “conditional advocacy of preventive war”, qualified by the probability of Soviet compliance . However, I maintain that Russell did not publicly advocate preventive war, either conditionally or unconditionally, and that consideration of Soviet compliance was secondary and non-decisive. At the outset, I want to deal with a point of criticism concerning my formulation of  which Perkins has made. Perkins notes that if all the consequence involves is the conditional threat of war, rather than the actual waging of war, the consequence is mild indeed. The problem is that repeating the term “conditionally threaten” within the statement of the conditional threat is either redundant or too weak, and I have no objection to reformulating the conditional threat of war thesis as follows: ′: “If Russia does not acquiesce to the Baruch Plan for the international control of atomic energy, then the West should threaten to wage war.” The conditional aspect of the proposition is given by its implicational structure, and does not need to be reiterated in the proposition itself. I suspect that Perkins would like to see a stronger consequence in the formulation , such as “immediately wage war” rather than the weaker “threaten to wage war”. But I think that the weaker formulation is preferable, both in terms of what Russell did say, and what current events have demonstrated. As critics of  policy towards Iraq indicated in the recent debate in the Security Council , the decision to go to war is so serious that a two-step process is required: the first to determine the violation of the condition, and the second to authorize the use of force. This latter is needed because it is possible that other conditions may have also changed when the “casus belli” has occurred, and the automatic application of the consequence may be ill advised. Indeed, this is precisely what happened once the Soviet Union had both rejected the Baruch Plan and fully developed its own nuclear force: Russell came to believe that the consequence should not be applied in these doubly changed circumstances and reformulated his strategy in the mid-s.  Perkins, “Russell and Preventive...

'Loquacious … and pointless as ever?' Britain, the United States and the United Nations Negotiations on International Control of Nuclear Energy 1945-48

This article re-examines the position of the British government in the negotiations for international control of atomic energy during the period 1945-48. These negotiations are generally associated with the 'Baruch plan', a US proposal to place nuclear energy under the control of an international development authority. The article argues that Britain was far from merely reacting to US initiatives: by March 1946 the Labour government had its own 'Baruch plan' ready to present to the UN. It explores to what extent British hopes for continued close cooperation and the passage of the US Atomic Energy Act influenced British policy towards nuclear control. Most importantly, this article shows that previous claims that the British government did not take the negotiations seriously cannot be upheld.

Seizing the Contested Terrain of Early Nuclear History: Stimson, Conant, and Their Allies Explain the Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb

In the late autumn and early winter of 1946–47, more than a year after the atomic bombings of Japan, as the Baruch Plan for international control of atomic energy was going down to defeat in the nascent United Nations, two influential articles appeared in respected national magazines justifying the 1945 attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the December 1946 Atlantic Monthly, physicist Karl T. Compton, MIT's president and a wartime atomic-energy adviser, published “If the Atomic Bomb Had Not Been Used.” Two months later, in February 1947, a more extended treatment of the issues appeared in Harper's Magazine as “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb,” under the authorship of Henry L. Stimson, the wartime secretary of war who had helped to guide America's use of the two bombs.1 Despite differences in emphasis and length, these two articles seemed deeply informed, honest and open, and generally persuasive. They were ventures by respected Americans to examine the wartime use of the bombs, to describe the care and considerations leading to those decisions, to explain why alternatives would not have worked and were rejected, and to show that the bombings had been necessary to end the Pacific war and save lives. Appearing at a time when most Americans continued to endorse the atomic bombings,2 and when few mistrusted their government or questioned the major wartime decisions, these essays confirmed popular beliefs. Compton's article seemed to be mostly a revealing history with some calm advocacy. Stimson's was an even richer history, disclosing new documents, and seemed largely to eschew advocacy for candor. Taken together, these two articles affirmed, and emphasized, the rectitude of American leaders and of the A-bomb decisions.

American Intellectuals and Nuclear Weapons

The engagement of American intellectuals with the nuclear threat has been limited and episodic. In the immediate post-Hiroshima period, many intellectuals became active in the campaign for international control of atomic energy, but with the failure of that campaign and the onset of the Cold War, the involvement of intellectuals with this issue diminished. Though the level of engagement increased during the years of concern over radioactive fallout from atmospheric testing (1954-63) and again in the early 1980s, it has generally remained low. A striking exception to this generalization, however, has been those intellectuals who have played a leading role as civilian nuclear strategists. Responding to John Dewey's call for intellectuals to adopt a pragmatic /instrumentalist approach to social reality and to Reinhold Niebuhr's insistence upon a recognition of the role of power and self-interest in the affairs of nations, these intellectuals played a central role in seeking to rationalize American nuclear power as a means of serving the nation's global Cold War interest while at the same time reducing the possibilities of a general nuclear war. Insofar as intellectuals have played a role in encouraging radical opposition to nuclear weapons and heightening public awareness of the reality of the nuclear threat, it has been primarily the work of poets, novelists, and science-fiction writers.

Was the Baruch Plan a Proposal of World Government?

Bernard baruch's introduction of the US plan for the international control of atomic energy in the UN Atomic Energy Commission [UNAEC] on 14 June 1946, which promised to prevent a nuclear arms race and to avoid what in another year would be called the Cold War, has justifiably earned the closest scrutiny by recent historians. Why did the plan fail? And what are the lessons for the future? A developing consensus holds that Americans were as insincere in their proposal as the Russians were obdurate in their rejection of it. Larry Gerber, who has most recently surveyed the sources and literature, concludes that Baruch's 'realism' about US national security as a world power, combined with his 'Wilsonian internationalism' aimed at a liberal capitalist world order, and supported by similar attitudes and assumptions of other American policymakers, 'prevented them from considering the possibility of agreement on anything but American terms'.1 Gregg Herken has found that belief in the atomic bomb as the 'winning weapon' in the war with Japan, and then in the diplomatic conflict with the Soviet Union, undermined the reluctant conviction among American policymakers, including Baruch, that control of atomic energy should be surrendered to an impartial international authority. But reliance on the bomb, because it ushered in the nuclear arms race, produced not victory, but the 'illusion of security'.2 Joseph Lieberman called the Baruch Plan 'a disastrous failure in statecraft', the guilt and responsibility for which he saw shared by both the United States and the Soviet Union, though he particularly blamed American ignorance of Russian history and post-war defence interests. Failure was consequence and cause of the Cold War;

The Quest for Security: American Foreign Policy and International Control of Atomic Energy, 1942-1946

M OST historians of the Cold War acknowledge that the American nuclear monopoly and the disputes over international control of atomic energy contributed to the breakdown of Soviet-American relations. Beyond this limited consensus, however, there is considerable disagreement about America's diplomatic uses of the bomb, about the reasons for and the generosity of America's proposal for international control of atomic energy, and about the reasons for and the reasonableness of Russia's rejection of this proposal. These subjects merit close scrutiny and explain much about the form that the Cold War took. But any analysis of these problems, contrary to the practices of some historians, must begin in the Roosevelt, not the Truman, years. Franklin D. Roosevelt made the decisions on the international relations of atomic energy that shaped the limits within which Harry S. Truman could comfortably operate. In turn, then, any analysis of the Cold War and of the sources of Soviet-American mistrust must also take into account, at least, the actions of the Roosevelt administration and Roosevelt's decisions to establish a nuclear alliance with Great Britain and to exclude the Soviet Union both from that alliance and from any knowledge of the Manhattan Project. Roosevelt understood that the bomb could be a military counterweight to Soviet armies and that it could help America gain its diplomatic objectives. Roosevelt's decisions loosely defined the limits of comfortable action for his successor, but the Truman administration was not confronted with a predetermined choice. During the war Truman could have sought to reverse the course of policy. Even after the war, there was more flexibility than he

The Lot of the Civilian Population in War-Time

The International Review has already given the text of the Resolutions passed at the XXth International Conference of the Red Cross last year. One of these (No. XXVIII) is of particular importance and we shall no doubt have reason to revert to it. It reads as follows:The XXth International Conference of the Red Cross,in its endeavours for the protection of the civilian population, reaffirms Resolution No. XVIII of the XVIIIth International Conference of the Red Cross (Toronto, 1952), which, in consideration of Resolution No. XXIV of the XVIIth International Conference of the Red Cross (Stockholm, 1948) requested Governments to agree, within the framework of general disarmament, to a plan for the international control of atomic energy which would ensure the prohibition of atomic weapons and the use of atomic energy solely for peaceful purposes,)thanks the International Committee of the Red Cross for the initiative taken and the comprehensive work done by it in defining and further developing international humanitarian law in this sphere,states that indiscriminate warfare constitutes a danger to the civilian population and the future of civilisation

Disarmament Through Other Eyes

Dr. Dyson here takes exception to David E. Lilienthal's contention that concentration on disarmament rather than on other means to peace may endanger that very goal.Mr. Lilienthal was the first chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and co-author of the 1946 Acheson-Lilienthal report on the international control of atomic energy. His views on the implications of the atom for human affairs were vigorously set forth in the Stafford Little Lectures, delivered in February 1963 at Princeton University, and have subsequently been presented in the October Bulletin (“The Mythology of the Atom”), published in book form by Princeton University Press (Change, Hope and the Bomb), and featured in the New York Times Magazine (“Skeptical Look at ‘Scientific Experts,’” September 29).“My thesis in respect to nuclear weapons,” wrote Mr. Lilienthal in his preface to the Bulletin report, “can be stated in this way: That in a world of change, we have continued to cling to an unchanging view of the atom, a view which seems to me a myth, namely, that the solution to the dangers of nuclear weapons lies within the field of nuclear weapons.”

Soviet Policy Toward International Control of Atomic Energy.Joseph L. Nogee

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsSoviet Policy Toward International Control of Atomic Energy. Joseph L. Nogee William R. KintnerWilliam R. Kintner Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Politics Volume 24, Number 4Nov., 1962 Sponsored by the Southern Political Science Association Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1017/S0022381600016248 Views: 3Total views on this site PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Book Review: Soviet Policy towards International Control of Atomic Energy

Book Review: Soviet Policy towards International Control of Atomic Energy

Soviet Policy Toward International Control of Atomic Energy

Soviet Policy Toward International Control of Atomic Energy

Soviet Policy toward International Control of Atomic Energy

Soviet Policy toward International Control of Atomic Energy

Soviet Policy towards International Control of Atomic Energy

Soviet Policy towards International Control of Atomic Energy

Disarmament in Perspective

Essay| October 01 1957 Disarmament in Perspective Robert W. Frase Robert W. Frase Associate Managing Director, American Book Publishers Council Robert W. Frasehas written articles on the problem of international control of atomic energy and armaments for American and British journals. He has served as consultant to the United Nations in the preparation of international bibliographies on the political, economic and social aspects of atomic energy published by that organization. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Current History (1957) 33 (194): 227–232. https://doi.org/10.1525/curh.1957.33.194.227 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Robert W. Frase; Disarmament in Perspective. Current History 1 October 1957; 33 (194): 227–232. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/curh.1957.33.194.227 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentCurrent History Search This content is only available via PDF. © 1957 by The Regents of the University of California1957 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

International Control of Atomic Energy

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsP. E. HodgsonThe view that the future will bring controlled disarmament is expressed by Dr. Hodgson in the (British) Atomic Scientists Journal. Excerpts from his article are reprinted below.

President Eisenhower's Proposals for the International Control of Atomic Energy

President Eisenhower's Proposals for the International Control of Atomic Energy