Julian Schofield and Micah Zenko
independent retaliation).
However, it is not clear the extent of British dependence
given that the British did not incorporate the same safeguards on warheads as the U.S.
Ultimately, the British were the recipient, between 1958 and 1991, of between three and
four hundred U.S. nuclear warheads (for artillery, missiles and depth charges), under
NATO’s nuclear-sharing arrangements.
Although the U.S. was a status quo power, whose global influence was not
eroding and did not require offensive action, the fact that it did not share nuclear weapons
with the British disconfirms the easy deterrence explanation that status quo powers would
freely share nuclear weapons. The fact that the U.S. used the British as a dependent pet
proxy for the duration of the confrontation with the Soviets in Europe suggests the good
fit of the proxy model. However, the reluctance of the U.S. to share nuclear technology
with its closest ally, and its ultimate interest in bartering for Commonwealth uranium
offers partial confirmation of the elusive deterrence model as well.
2. Soviet Union to China
Whereas for Joseph Stalin China was an inevitable rival sharing the same
geopolitical space of Eastern Asia, for Krushchev, the experience of Soviet isolation
warranted an attempt to turn China into a nuclear pet proxy to confront the U.S. in the
Western Pacific. The Soviet Union’s initial position was against nuclear sharing, defined
by Joseph Stalin’s distrust of China dating back to the 1920s, and influenced by his
alternating and realpolitik support to Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong.
even reluctance, despite common Communist revolutionary goals, for Stalin to implicitly
extend the nuclear umbrella the year the Soviets detonated their first nuclear device in
1949.
Stalin’s primary motives for providing extended nuclear deterrence as part of
the Sino-Soviet treaty of 1950 was to satisfy the need not to lose China in its
confrontation with the U.S., but he had no intention of ever extending nuclear
assistance.
Stalin refused Chinese requests for nuclear weapons in 1949 and again in
1952.
Stalin’s death led to Nikita Krushchev’s belief that a Sino-Soviet alliance was
strategically an absolute necessity, and ideologically an inevitability, to the extent that he
ignored evidence that Mao did not share his belief in a common fate, and would depart
the alliance once China had obtained a nuclear device.
When China again requested a
device in 1953 and again in 1954, the Soviets were receptive to Mao’s argument that the
U.S. would likely attack China, and refused the provision of nuclear weapons less
unconditionally.
Krushchev’s 1954 visit to China was done with the goal of seeing
how assistance to China could enhance Soviet security.
A part of the Soviet reluctance
was Mao’s eagerness to provoke a war with the U.S. over the strategically
inconsequential island of Taiwan, and the fact that Krushchev had extended the nuclear
umbrella to China.
Despite clear efforts by China to develop its own nuclear weapons
program reported by elements within the KGB, Krushchev maintained Soviet assistance
to the peaceful nuclear program because of the fear of losing an ally as important as
China.
Another motive was for the Soviets to cultivate China as a major naval base in
the Pacific for its ballistic missile submarines, and to integrate China’s navy into the
Soviet Union’s Pacific strategy.
This would have posed a major challenge to U.S.
interests in the Pacific, and possibly led to a reduction of U.S. effort in Europe, the Soviet
Union’s primary region of interest. The Korean War had demonstrated that China could
9
Convention