The Foreign Service Journal, May 2020

28 MAY 2020 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL major international effort at nuclear arms control failed. As the 1950s unfolded, both the United States and Soviet Union continued to test more and more powerful weapons, racing to acquire the hydrogen bomb. The first Soviet test was at Semipalatinsk in 1955, and the first U.S. test was at Bikini Atoll in 1956. Both continued to build nuclear warheads, so that by the mid-1960s, the United States had an arsenal of approximately 32,000 warheads, and the Soviets, according to the account of former Minister of Atomic Energy Viktor Mikhailov in the Sept. 26, 1993 New York Times , had more than 40,000. Thus, the stage was set for a major nuclear crisis in the Cold War years, when the United States and Soviet Union were constantly confronting each other: whether on the diplomatic front in the United Nations, on the borders between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, in Berlin, or in regional wars and insurgencies across Eurasia and into Africa and Latin America. The fulcrum for communist revolution in Latin America, of course, was Cuba. I am not going to recount the details of the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis here; Graham Allison’s Essence of Decision is still the classic analysis (see 2nd ed., Longman, 1999). New analyses were also undertaken once the old Soviet archives opened up and Russian participants started interacting with their U.S. counterparts at the time of the 40th anniversary. A very good wrap-up of this work appears on the National Secu- rity Archive website (see nsarchive2.gwu.edu ). Suffice it to say, we came close to nuclear war. The Cuban Missile Crisis deeply shook the leaders on both sides, and so it provided the first impetus to pursue true nuclear arms control. President John F. Kennedy’s American University commencement speech in June 1963 was a U.S. watershed: He declared an immediate moratorium on U.S. nuclear tests in the atmosphere, to be maintained as long as others did not test, and announced an agreement with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan to begin negotia- tion of a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. By August 1963, a mere two months later, an atmospheric test ban had been negotiated and signed: the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. As an aside, it is interesting that there was an environmental impetus to these negotiations that made them popular both among the U.S. pub- lic and internationally. People were realizing that strontium-90 from atmospheric testing was getting into the food supply—most crucially, into children’s milk. NATO and the NPT Now fast-forward to the mid-1960s, when a lot was going on. First, beginning in 1965, the Non-Proliferation Treaty was under negotiation. This involved tough bargaining about the behavior of those states that had already tested nuclear weapons; they turned out, eventually, to be the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council: the United States, USSR, China, U.K. and France. The rest of the states also drove a hard bargain, eventually ending up with a three-pillared construction for the treaty: all would work to prevent nuclear proliferation; all would cooperate to share the benefits of the peaceful atom; and all would pursue nuclear disarmament. The disarmament pillar was particularly directed at the nuclear weapons states: they would work steadily to eliminate nuclear weapons while the other countries would eschew them. It was the grand bargain of the NPT inscribed in its Article VI. Among those who had tested nuclear weapons, the bargaining was particularly sharp between the United States and the Soviet Union, because they had tested the most and had deployed by far the biggest arsenals, which is still the case today. It also brought in the NATO Alliance, which had been suffering its own version of an existential threat. In 1967 France withdrew from the military command structure of NATO and threw its headquarters—civilian and military—out of Paris. This, in my view, is the most difficult crisis that the Alliance has weathered, and it led to some deep soul-searching on the part of the allies, led by Belgian Foreign Minister Pierre Harmel. He produced a short and succinct report that called for détente with the Soviets while continuing to pursue firm deterrence measures. This basic conclusion of the Harmel Rose Gottemoeller is the Frank E. and Arthur W. Payne Distinguished Lecturer at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Center for Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. Before joining Stanford, Gottemoeller was the Deputy Secretary General of NATO from 2016 to 2019. Prior to NATO, she served for nearly five years as the under secretary for arms control and international security at the U.S. Department of State. While assistant secretary of State for arms control, verification and compliance in 2009 and 2010, she was the chief U.S. negotiator of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) with the Russian Federation. Prior to government service, she was a senior associate with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, with joint appointments to the nonproliferation and Russia programs. She served as the director of the Carnegie Moscow Center from 2006 to 2008, and is currently a nonresident fellow in Carnegie’s Nuclear Policy Program. She is also a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.