|
|
|
Eliza Matthews, "Against Idealism: United States Foreign Policy Makers in Pursuit of 'Progress' in the Nuclear Debate--A Historical Analysis" Throughout our lives, as human beings intent on preserving our own "twin towers" of survival and progress, we often like to fool ourselves into thinking that the world we live in is somehow evolving into a safer, more enlightened, more self-sustaining organic whole. Many of us would like to believe that the forces of Good (ie. "Progress") will eventually win out over the forces of Evil (ie. narrow self-interest)-that maybe within our own life-times our governments may finally possess the confidence to do away with weapons of catastrophic destruction and join together in a truly global community. Such thinking is of course unrealistic and often amounts to little more than navel-gazing idealism! It has always been the dream of governments worldwide to construct an invincible weapon with which to dominate one's enemies. However, when the United States and Russia finally developed the technology of the invincible nuclear weapon, they were left at an effective stalemate; to wit-Mutually Assured Destruction (M.A.D.). Neither side believed that nuclear weapons were a force for Good, it was believed however that they were a necessary evil. This left foreign policy makers on both sides with a difficult problem. How could both sides pursue the ideal of progression away from nuclear war and towards peaceful co-existence yet not squander the realistic strategic advantage (ie. "Cold Peace") that nuclear weapons provided? This presentation will present from a historical perspective the story of how these policy makers addressed the challenge of progressing towards a non-nuclear world and whether or not they achieved their ideal. It will pay special attention the stalemate that was created with the development of nuclear weapons by the United States and the Soviet Union, which in turn created the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction MAD. "Against Idealism" will also present from a historical perspective the story of how these policy makers addressed the challenge of progressing towards a non-nuclear world largely through policies of nuclear non-proliferation and whether or not they have or will ever achieve their goal or indeed "progressed" at all since 1945. The centrepiece of this discussion will be the 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and the talk will focus upon the early period of the Cold War prior to the Treaty's inception and the Post-Cold War era with the aim of being to starkly illustrate how the nuclear regime and the reality of what policymakers had to deal with differed between these times. Biography: Eliza Matthews is completing her PhD on American Foreign Policy and the Non-Proliferation Treaty in the post-Cold War era in the Department of History and the Department of International Relations at the University of Queensland. |
 |
