دانلود کتاب باشگاه هسته ای چگونه آمریکا و جهان، اتم را از هیروشیما تا ویتنام کنترل کردند

The relationship between the Vietnam War and nuclear weapons was on Walt Rostow’s mind as he addressed the National War College’s Class of 1968 beneath a cloudless sky in Washington, D.C. While across the National Mall, President Lyndon Johnson’s White House digested the headlines on the morning of May 8— Robert Kennedy’s victory in Indiana’s Democratic primary and National Liberation Front mortar attacks on Saigon—Rostow surveyed the horizon beyond the Anacostia River from Fort Lesley J. McNair. How long, he asked the graduating officers in their dress uniforms, until “Germany, Japan, Italy, India, and others” built the atom bomb? The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) that the United Nations (UN) was debating in New York would ask for higher sacrifices than the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) or the Alliance for Progress in Latin America, for which the United States had merely assumed a “due share in a communal effort.” To the average American voter or to foreign leaders fearful of second- or third-class status, the U.S. State Department had billed the agreement as a natural successor to the 1963 Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapon Tests in the Atmosphere, in Outer Space, and Under Water—“that is, an exercise in U.S.-Soviet détente, a good deed in a naughty world.” In truth, U.S. leaders and their Soviet counterparts shared a compelling interest in halting “the potential diffusion of power at its most important point.” This new world order would require, above all, a steady appetite for overseas adventures to enforce on the world’s unruly masses a common law for the nuclear age. The treaty negotiations thus marked a subtle but momentous shift in how the world governed itself with the help of farflung U.S. legionnaires, as Rostow and Johnson prepared to lock the country “into responsibility in the world—right around the periphery of Communist China and the Soviet Union, on the toughest of all issues.”2 As Rostow linked victory in Vietnam to an endless crusade against the runaway atom, the UN First Committee was meeting in Manhattan’s tony midtown neighborhood of Turtle Bay. Over the first eight plenary sessions clear divisions had revealed themselves in the sprawling complex, where representatives from developing countries faced off against those with commanding leads in world nuclear markets. On 16 May, Mexican deputy foreign minister Alfonso García Robles made the case for surgical revisions to the NPT that would help atomic newcomers catch up to more industrialized countries. To drive his points home, he compared the new accord with the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in Latin America, known as the Treaty of Tlatelolco after the Aztec square in Mexico City where it had been finalized the previous year, whose lack of discriminatory features made it “far superior to the draft before us.”3 For the NPT to earn a commanding majority in the UN General Assembly (UNGA), where Latin American and African delegations had enjoyed numerical dominance since 1965, García Robles challenged his audience to revise its preamble and articles so that they looked more like those in the Treaty of Tlatelolco. After the Second World War, a cosmopolitan community of politicians, activists, bureaucrats, scientists, and diplomats constructed a near-universal regime to manage the most powerful technology ever devised—the power to split or fuse atomic nuclei to release wondrous new isotopes for medical cures and energy production or unprecedented explosive force for mass destruction and death. After numerous false starts, their campaign bore fruit in the 1960s, when multiplying regional crises and an emerging world market in fission reactors led an international society in the throes of decolonization to draw up a Magna Carta for the subatomic realm.