Beyond Dependency: the Future of the Non-proliferation Treaty

Abstract

‘When this Treaty comes into force’, Lyndon Johnson wrote to the president of the Senate and the speaker of the House of Representatives in January 1968, ‘it will be for all the world the brightest light at the end of the tunnel since 1945’.¹ The Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), United Nations Ambassador Arthur Goldberg told the General Assembly three months later, would ‘assure that control over nuclear weapons, with their catastrophic power of destruction, shall spread no further among the nations of the earth’.² Who profits more from the treaty — nuclear or non-nuclear nations — Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Kuznetzov asked the General Assembly rhetorically. ‘All states stand to gain from the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons’, he said. Thus, all would find adherence to its principles advantageous.³