The Albritton Center for Grand Strategy at the Bush School of Government & Public Service at Texas A&M University presents “The Nuclear Club: How America and the World Policed the Atom from Hiroshima to Vietnam” with Dr. Jonathan Hunt.
The talk will be held on Thursday, February 16 in the Presidential Orientation Theater in the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum, 1000 George Bush Dr. W., College Station, TX 77845. Registration is required for the event, which begins at 5:00 p.m. CST. Please register online to attend. If guests are unable to attend in person, a Zoom link will be included in the RSVP confirmation email.
The Nuclear Club (Stanford UP, 2022) reveals how a coalition of powerful and developing states embraced global governance in hopes of a bright and peaceful tomorrow. While fears of nuclear war were ever-present, it was the perceived threat to their preeminence that drove Washington, Moscow, and London to throw their weight behind the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty (LTBT) banishing nuclear testing underground, the 1967 Treaty of Tlatelolco banning atomic armaments from Latin America, and the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) forbidding more countries from joining the most exclusive club on Earth. International society, the Cold War, and the imperial U.S. presidency were reformed from 1945 to 1970, when a global nuclear order was inaugurated, averting conflict in the industrial North and yielding what George Orwell styled a “peace that is no peace” everywhere else. Today the nuclear order legitimizes foreign intervention worldwide, empowering the nuclear club and, above all, the United States, to push sanctions and even preventive war against atomic outlaws, all in humanity’s name.
About the speaker
Jonathan R. Hunt is a historian of U.S. foreign relations with a focus on great-power competition with Russia and China from 1912 through the present. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Strategy at the U.S. Air War College.
