The roar of crashing banks and stock markets has drowned the drumbeat for war on Iran of late; but behind the headlines of economic turmoil, a nuclear-weapons crisis persists. Obama has vowed that he will do ‘whatever it takes’ to stop the Iranian enrichment programme. The threat of military force must stay on the table—‘As President, I will use all elements of American power to pressure Iran’. He will have support in Europe: French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner warned over a year ago that ‘the world should prepare for war over Iran’s nuclear programme’. The legal pretext for an attack is provided by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which has emerged in the post-Cold War era as a cornerstone of the ‘international community’. Recent articles in this journal have examined the formal aims and practical record of the npt in preventing the spread of nuclear weapons, and the policies of the Bush Administration towards it.footnote¹ What follows will look at two further questions. Firstly, what is the political history of the Treaty as an international agreement—which powers conceived it, and for what reasons; which accepted it, and why; which have rejected it, and with what consequences? Secondly, what has been the effect of the Treaty in world politics, understood as an arena of conflicts involving not only states, but movements and ideals?

These questions hold a particular relevance for New Left Review. Its founding editors in 1960 were leading participants in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the largest mass movement in Britain since the War, and crucible for a new youth-protest culture. No cause was more central to Edward Thompson, Stuart Hall and the New Left of the time than opposition to the British Bomb and to the deadly arms race between the superpowers.footnote² Yet cnd faded, once its adherents had been beaten back inside the Labour Party. It was solidarity with the National Liberation Front in Vietnam, rather than the threat of atomic devastation, that would mobilize the great protests of the 1960s. Two decades later, however, when the arrival of us Cruise and Pershing missiles in Western Europe once again revived nuclear fears, a European-wide campaign against the arms race sprang into being, with Edward Thompson once again at its fore. Setting out to unite dissenters in both West and Eastern Europe against the Cold War, end rallied huge demonstrations against nuclear weapons on an international scale and produced a more developed set of debates than its predecessor. Of these, perhaps the most sustained took place in the milieu of this journal, with the publication in 1980 of Thompson’s famous essay, ‘Notes on Exterminism’, followed by contributions from Raymond Williams, Noam Chomsky, Lucio Magri, Mike Davis and others.footnote³ But by the mid 1980s end, too, had receded, leaving little mark on the course of events in the final years of the Cold War. Its aftermath was not the expansion of protest that had been the sequel to cnd, but the capitulations of Gorbachev and Yeltsin, and the triumph of the West.

Twenty years on again, popular protests against the invasion of Iraq—officially designed to stop it getting nuclear weapons—mobilized far greater numbers than even end, not only in Europe but throughout the world. But this time the peace movement was even shorter-lived, as an effective political force. Nor has there been any movement of anti-imperialist solidarity against the extended military occupation of Iraq, of the kind that played a critical role in ending the war in Vietnam. Now, when an attack is menaced against Iran, there is less sign than ever of any vocal or organized resistance to the rationale for it. Nuclear disarmament, once the cause of a movement for peace, has become the prime justification for acts and threats of war. In this transformation, the role of the npt has been central. Level-headed analysis of it is overdue.

The diplomatic origins of the Treaty lie in a contingent convergence of interests between the superpowers during the Cold War. The two atomic bombs dropped by the United States on an already defeated Japan in 1945 established its supremacy in this field, as well as making it the only power to have used nuclear weapons to date. Intended in part to intimidate the Soviet Union, the deliberately spectacularized demonstration of force galvanized Russian efforts to acquire arms to match. By 1949, the ussr had its own atomic bomb. In 1952, the us tested the far more powerful hydrogen bomb; by 1955, the ussr had pulled level with it again, and by 1957 both powers had liquid-fuel missile-delivery systems, though America remained far ahead both in numbers and technology. The megatonnage of a single weapon was now nearly 4,000 times that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.footnote⁴ Britain, regarded by Washington as a completely dependable ally, and still in possession of a sizeable empire, was allowed to pursue its own programme, exploding a fission device in 1952 and a small fusion one in 1957—triggering the first protests at Aldermaston the following year. But the uk, as a loyal annexe of the us, did not alter the basic duopoly of the two great nuclear antagonists.

Matters changed in 1960. France, Europe’s other major colonial power, saw no reason why it should forego what Britain had obtained, and in that year succeeded in detonating a device in Algeria. Although Paris had been a signatory of the Atlantic Pact, it was not viewed by Washington in the same light as London. France had failed to ratify the European Defence Union, persisted with a destabilizing war in North Africa and plotted an attack on Egypt that the us thought it necessary to scotch. By 1960, moreover, De Gaulle—with a long history of refusing to bend to the American will—was at the helm of the state, and would soon be rejecting British membership of the Common Market as a Trojan Horse for us interests. A nuclear France pursuing an independent foreign policy was an unpalatable prospect.

Moscow’s concern lay elsewhere. West Germany had renounced its rights to a national nuclear-weapons programme in the Paris Settlement of 1954, but retained the possibility of achieving nuclear status through a united Europe. With French help, it now hoped to do so within the eec. Any such possibility was bound to alarm the ussr, after its experience at the hands of Germany in the Second World War. For the first time, this created potential common ground on a nuclear-arms question between Washington and Moscow: the us was hostile to French ambitions, the ussr to German. The result was the passage of a 1961 un General Assembly resolution, which called for the groundwork to begin on a treaty that would ban the proliferation of nuclear weapons to any further states, while guaranteeing the arsenals of the two superpowers.footnote⁵ Here matters came to a temporary halt, however, since Washington’s attempts to prevent the emergence of an autonomous Franco-German nuclear axis involved balancing with Bonn against Paris. The Adenauer government was wooed with promises of a nato mix-manned Multi-Lateral Force, which would allow German generals and scientists access to American atomic weapons—anathema to the Soviet leadership. Washington’s desire to factor a joint-run Western force into any non-proliferation formula stymied negotiations over the npt for the next four years.

The impetus that got them going again came from the other front of the Cold War, where anti-imperialist forces were on the move in the Third World. As these began gaining ground in the 1960s—the Cuban revolution, decolonization in Africa, guerrilla struggles in Latin America—Washington had more reason to heed Soviet talk of peaceful coexistence; especially if this could be translated into curbing Moscow’s material support for national-liberation struggles and, above all, securing a measure of diplomatic silence on the fast-expanding war in Vietnam. On its side, the Soviet leadership was now in open conflict with China—a rift that had started precisely over the issue of nuclear weapons, when Khrushchev had refused to share Russian technology with Mao. China’s explosion of a test device in December 1964 showed that even a poor country, albeit the largest at the Bandung Conference, could equip itself with a deterrent. The Chinese bomb concentrated minds in Washington and Moscow alike on the need to restrict the emergence of further nuclear powers in the Third World, as well as in Europe.