Dear Professor Einstein: Early Cold War Visions for a World Government and the Creation of the Bipolar World

My poster presents ideas for nuclear nonproliferation. It studies the immediate post-WWII period in which nuclear scientists and the U.S. federal government joined forces to promote the formation of a world government to prevent nuclear annihilation. I argue that not even a looming threat of nuclear war could promote lasting international cooperation. In fact, the visions for a world government took place in a unique time in which the bipolar world of the Cold War had not yet formed. With both the United States and the Soviet Union having acquired the atomic bomb in 1949, ideas about international cooperation were replaced by the striving for world domination.

On the top, a flowchart shows how my contrafactual approach intervenes into scholarly discourse on the outbreak of the Cold War conflict. While I agree that the Cold War was a result of WWII, I disagree with the seemingly teleological view with which this scholarship assumes that the Cold War was an inevitable conflict. Instead, I propose a contrafactual approach which allows us to examine the missed opportunities for postwar international cooperation. This intervention is represented by a visual disruption of the flowchart. Assuming this contrafactual view of the postwar tensions reveals non-aggressive ways of conflict resolutions and allows us to learn about the conditions under which international cooperation is prone to fail.

The body part presents my argument through a display of my sources. They illustrate two early Cold War proposals for turning the United Nations into a peacekeeping world government. The focus lies on a group of nuclear scientists of various nationalities around Albert Einstein, Linus Pauling, and Leo Szilard. After the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they formed the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists (ECAS). Between 1946 and 1951, the ECAS spoke out for the formation of a world government under which all atomic technologies and the political power they vested should be placed. They not only promoted their own proposal but also supported the Truman administration’s visions which became known as the ‘Baruch Plan.’ The ECAS scientists held that the world countries shared a fear of nuclear annihilation. On the one hand, this fear was the motivator for scientists to engage in global politics; on the other hand, the scientists saw this fear as a chance to securing peace through the formation of a world government. These fears will be displayed in a selection of letters which ECAS exchanged with their public supporters. The letters also illustrate oppositional voices against the ECAS’s visions for a world government

The lower part of the poster shows how my work bears policy implications for future nonproliferation treaties. Although today’s world departed from the bipolar power system of the Cold War, examining Cold War ideas for nonproliferation can help us understand the limits of these visions and the chances for peace that they entailed.