An Agency and a Treaty against proliferation

Washington would thus radically change its policy and abandon secrecy. In his ‘Atoms for Speech,’ given before the General Assembly of the United Nations, the American President Dwight Eisenhower suggested that other countries benefit from the peaceful applications of nuclear energy, entrusting this mission to a new body, yet to be created. Contrary to their previous doctrine, the Americans now accepted that it was possible to ‘uncouple’ the peaceful uses of nuclear energy from its military applications, on condition of demanding from a country benefiting from such a transfer that it commit to only using the assistance granted for peaceful ends. Respecting this commitment would be guaranteed by a system of inspections.

That was to be the role of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), whose statutes were adopted, in 1956, after several years of particularly laborious negotiations, dominated by the American-Soviet standoff. Contrary to what had been envisaged before its creation, the Agency would play almost no role in terms of nuclear disarmament. Its major activity would be concentrated on the system of guarantees of a peaceful use of the atom, developed from 1961 onwards. The dream of a world without nuclear weapons seemed all the more abandoned when the ‘club’ of Nuclear Weapons States (NWS, according to the jargon) expanded to include two new members: France, in 1960, and China, in 1964. These years of ‘nuclear euphoria’ saw an increase in national atomic programmes, driven more often than not by a political will to access nuclear knowledge, a symbol of political prestige, rather than a wish to ensure an energy supply through electro-nuclear technology. Whilst only five countries owned research reactors in 1953, ten years later they would be 26 in number. It is from this era that dates United States co-operation in nuclear terms with Belgium and, in particular, with…Iran.

The major nuclear worry of the United States and the USSR did not so much concern ‘vertical’ proliferation (a qualitative and quantitative improvement of the existing arsenal of States who already had an atomic weapon, the NWS) but ‘horizontal’ proliferation, in other words an increase in the number of countries equipped with a nuclear weapon.

It was with this in mind that, in 1968, the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) was adopted, coming into force on March 5, 1970. Twenty-five years after Hiroshima, the world thus had a Treaty, intended to be universal, with which to battle against the horizontal proliferation of nuclear weapons. Several countries, known as nuclear threshold states, right from the start refused to sign up to it, amongst them Israel, India and Pakistan, today equipped with atomic bombs. On the other hand Brazil, Argentina and South Africa have since abandoned the military nuclear programmes they had undertaken. It might thus have been believed that the process of proliferation had been slowed, if not stopped.

Disillusionment in 1991! On the one hand, the collapse of the Soviet Union led to the emergence of three new sovereign states equipped with nuclear weapons on their territory: Ukraine, Byelorussia and Kazakhstan. Would they lay claim to the USSR’s strategic inheritance? In the end, no: in exchange for skilfully negotiated economic and political advantages, they left the Soviet arsenal in the hands of just Russia and joined the NPT as Non Nuclear Weapons Sates (NNWS).