Robert Boardman

Nuclear exports and world politics

This book presents ten essays by an international group of specialists in nuclear politics that examine recent trends in nuclear supply policies. Focusing on the policy-making processes in the US, France, West Germany, Canada, Britain, and Australia, they address such issues as the balancing of export earnings against security risks, the impact of shrinking domestic markets, and the different roles assumed in the making of export policy.

The Dragon, the Lion, and the Eagle: Chinese-British-American Relations, 1949-1958

The establishment of the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) in 1949 and the subsequent conclusion of the Sino-Soviet Alliance Treaty destroyed the old balance of power in East Asia and introduced new forces into the international system. These developments had important implications for Great Britain and the United States, both of which possessed significant interests in the region. Drawing on previously classified British and American documents and private papers, Qiang Zhai compares the respective policies toward the recognition of China and that countrys representation in the United Nations; Chinas entry into the Korean War; the Geneva Conference of 1954; the Quemoy-Matsu crises of 1954-55 and 1958; and Chinese threats to Taiwan and Tibet. He carefully analyzes the objective of dividing the Sino-Soviet alliance as a goal of Anglo-American policies and uses recently available Chinese Communist materials - including inner-party documents, diaries, memoirs, and biographies by and about former Chinese leaders, generals, and diplomats - to reconstruct Chinese foreign policy initiatives and responses to Western challenges. With its unique international and comparative dimensions, this study allows the first clear view of early Cold War history from the Chinese as well as Western perspectives. Washington and London differed widely in their assessments of Beijings intentions and capabilities, as reflected in their respective policies toward recognition and containment of China. Zhai examines the mutual influences and constraints - distinct strategic concerns, divergences in political structures, public opinion, interest groups, and diplomatic traditions, as well as the perceptions andidiosyncrasies of the top policymakers - that affected Anglo-American relations and shows how consideration of each others reactions further complicated their policy decisions. This study in international history and comparative analysis avoids the tunnel vision so common in explorat

Regime-making and the Limits of Consensus

Nuclear export policy does not spring untainted from theoretical analyses of the nature of the problem of nuclear weapons proliferation. Such evaluations are certainly a part of the multiplicity of factors lying behind the formulation of policy, but, in this field perhaps more than in others, analyses can also be self-serving and the criteria of political acceptability of technical arguments may shift according to circumstance, interest, opportunity and the real or anticipated actions of others. Yet on the other hand, this is also a policy area in which states have periodically been tempted to launch crusading endeavours in the name of peace and to accept, indeed, substantial costs in terms of lost commercial deals and the erosion of diplomatic capital in order to do so. Given competition between national nuclear industries, the prospects of growing overseas sales laced occasionally with multi-billion dollar contracts, uncertainties and declines in the domestic nuclear power programmes of western countries generally, the high political character of many of the issues involved and the consequent minimal authority of international agencies, the identification of national programmes with national prestige and of certain parts of the nuclear fuel cycle with national survival — given these and other factors, supplier consensus becomes not so much an elusive ideal as an analytical conundrum: puzzling when it happens and, for some on the receiving end of nuclear supply decisions, perturbing.

Nuclear Export Policies and the Non-proliferation Regime

Few technologies have promised the extremes of danger and benefit, or generated the fear and the enthusiasm, presented by and associated with nuclear power. Domestically, the hope for cheap, abundant energy has been set against environmental and safety concerns. Internationally, nuclear power as an instrument of economic growth and of energy independence has been set against the memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the fear of nuclear weapons proliferation. In the last decade, the unfavourable aspects of this duality have been strengthened. Domestic opposition to nuclear power development, reinforced by the potent symbol of Three Mile Island, has had devastating results in some countries, while the economic virtues of nuclear power have been rendered ambiguous at best by inflation and stricter regulation. And India’s test of a nuclear explosive device in May 1974 signalled — though it did not of itself cause entirely — the start of a period of increasing doubt about the effectiveness of the nonproliferation regime. Nuclear exporters, individually and collectively, began to reconsider their policies — a process which created tension not only among suppliers but also between nuclear haves and have-nots. The prospects of increasing use of nuclear power, of growing stockpiles of plutonium, and of the development of national enrichment capabilities raised fears that weapons-usable material would be more readily available and less easily controlled than formerly.