CGSR | 'The Nuclear Club: How America and the World Policed the Atom from Hiroshima to Vietnam

The Nuclear Club: How America and the World Policed the Atom from Hiroshima to Vietnam by Dr. Jonathan R. Hunt

Abstract: Why did the United States and the Soviet Union work together to finalize the 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of nuclear weapons? While most explanations attribute the making of a global nuclear nonproliferation regime to the rationalization of the superpower arms race after the Cuban Missile Crisis or rank U.S. domination, The Nuclear Club presents an alternative explanation: The combined efforts of nuclear powers and smaller states to nip the rise of regional nuclear powers in the bud through a combination of global governance and U.S.-Soviet détente. The results were paradoxical: the reinforcement of nuclear umbrellas under which superpowers allies sheltered and the internationalization of nuclear arms control, including the legitimation of military intervention in the name of nuclear nonproliferation.

Bio: Jonathan R. Hunt is a historian of international relations and an assistant professor of strategy at the U.S. Air War College. He is the co-editor with Simon Miles of The Reagan Moment: America and the World in the 1980s (Cornell University Press, 2021) and the author of The Nuclear Club: How America and the World Policed the Atom from Hiroshima to Vietnam (Stanford University Press, 2022). He received his PhD in History in 2013 from the University of Texas at Austin. He has taught or held fellowships at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, RAND Corporation, Emory University, the University of Southampton, the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, the Rothermere American Institute of the University of Oxford, and the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He has written for Foreign Policy, War on the Rocks, the Washington Post, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and The Atlantic.

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