Speaker: Jonathan Hunt

The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) is one of the most significant, observed, and contentious accords in world politics. How and why did the international community come to negotiate a treaty that divided nation-states between five authorized “nuclear-weapon States” and a teeming mass of nuclear unarmed? The Nuclear Club pushes back against interpretations that either attribute the NPT’s creation to the superpowers alone and to the United States in particular or that discount the importance of nuclear-security guarantees to the global nonproliferation regime. It also reveals the extent to which the Vietnam War both catalyzed and circumscribed U.S. support for nuclear internationalism as President Lyndon Baines Johnson sought to burnish his peacemaking credentials amid escalating military involvement in Southeast Asia. By reconnecting the origins of Washington’s commitment to nuclear containment to that of communist containment and by reconstructing the international consensus that arose for a closed nuclear club, processes that would go on to shape global nuclear politics for the rest of the Cold War and beyond are cast in sharper relief – an open-ended U.S. commitment to policing nuclearity across an endless frontier and an uneven nuclear order deliberately forged to avert great-power conflict while permitting and even legitimating limited wars.