Session Abstract

This panel examines how the United States, Japan, West Germany, and South Africa shaped and were shaped by the emerging international norms and institutions for nuclear non-proliferation in the post-1945 world. It explores the ambivalent emotions and sometimes contradictory actions of the nuclear superpower and the three rising regional powers toward the global regulation of nuclear energy. Those mixed signals and commitment from the four powers to non-proliferation efforts symbolized the troubled start of the multilateral nuclear non-proliferation regime that emerged at the turn of the 1970s after the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) of 1969. The panel thereby addresses the origins of contentious issues in post-1945 global nuclear history that currently rend the twenty-first century world, including the changing meaning of sovereignty, the shifting boundary between peaceful and military uses of nuclear power, and the limits of nuclear information control in an age of globalization. It also enriches the theme for our 2013 Annual Meeting: Lives, Places, Stories, as each panelist engages with those four countries in a transnational context based on his/her multi-archival research and world-wide academic standing. Focusing on Washington’s concerns over the uncontrolled global diffusion of the Gas Centrifuge for Uranium Enrichment in the 1960s, the first paper examines the mixed consequences of the U.S. policy shift to sharing its technological secrets with the United Kingdom, West Germany, and the Netherlands through the URENCO (Uranium Enrichment Co.) consortium established in 1971. Despite U.S. efforts to ensure tight secrecy for the gas centrifuge, A.Q. Khan stole the technology from the Dutch in 1975. The other three papers show diverse nuclear motivations of Japan, West Germany, and South Africa. The second paper analyzes Japan’s search of nuclear weapons from the late 1950s onwards, its choice to construct a virtual nuclear state in the mid-1970s, and its ambivalence toward the NPT regime thereafter. By unearthing the policy tradition of Premier Kishi Nobusuke, it revises a standard understanding of postwar Japan’s security culture as a pacifist, trading state based on the Yoshida Doctrine. The third paper reconsiders West Germany’s ambiguous status within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) from 1955 to 1975, where the formal rejection of nuclear capability jostled with German desire to avoid permanent inferiority within the alliance, while Cold War diplomacy and domestic politics further complicated debates over nuclear sharing before Bonn agreed to ratify the NPT in 1975. In contrast to the two instances of nuclear restraint in Japan and West Germany, South Africa refused to sign the NPT, and would continue to do so for the next two decades. The fourth paper pursues Pretoria’s nuclear turn in the first half of the 1970s scrutinizing not only its geopolitical and cultural aspirations but also its tacit agreement with the United States. To encourage dialogue between the audiences and the presenters, the panel concludes with a half-hour open discussion on the implications of the emergence of the nuclear non-proliferation regime.