Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 May 2009
A visitor from another, more advanced, planet would find many extraordinary paradoxes on earth, but surely the most extraordinary would be the fantastic destructive potential of nuclear weapons which contrasts starkly with the primitive and near-impotent institutions of global peacekeeping. He might marvel that a breed capable of producing the wealth for a $185 billion armory of lethal devices, let alone the technology for killing several hundred million humans in a single exchange of nuclear weapons, had not also produced a workable international order capable of regulating such apocalyptic man-made power.
1 World Military Expenditures and Related Data: Calendar Year ig66 and Summary Trends, 1962–1967 (Research Report 68–52) (Washington: Economics Bureau, United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, 12 1968), pp. 1–2.Google Scholar
2 For a detailed analysis of the disarmament diplomacy of the period see Bloomfield, Lincoln P., Clemens, Walter C. Jr, and Griffiths, Franklyn, Khrushchev and the Arms Race: Soviet Interests in Arms Control and Disarmament 1954–1964 (Cambridge, Mass: M.J.T. Press, 1966)Google Scholar.
3 See General Assembly Resolution 2030 (XX), November 29, 1965.
4 See General Assembly Resolution 1962 (XVIII), December 13, 1963.
5 It is, of course, the government of Communist China which possesses a nuclear-weapons capacity, rather than that of the Republic of China (Nationalist China) which represents China in the Council.
6 A third arms control agreement, the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in Latin America, which did not primarily concern the superpowers initially, was debated and endorsed in principle in the Assembly in 1963, negotiated outside the United Nations, and then given UN endorsement.
7 See the McNamara posture statement, The Fiscal Year 1969–73 Defense Program and the 1969 Defense Budget (Washington, 1968), p. 57Google Scholar.
8 In the same speech in which he announced the deployment of the Sentinel system, September 18, 1967. For the text see The New York Times, September 19, 1967.
9 See Bloomfield, Lincoln P., The United Nations and U.S. Foreign Policy: A New Look, at the National Interest (rev. ed.; Boston: Little, Brown, 1967)Google Scholar, Chapter 8, “Disarmament and Arms Control”.
10 See statement by United States representative Adrian Fisher, S. to the ENDC, 04 8, 1969Google Scholar. (The New York Times, April 9, 1969.)
11 Department of State Bulletin, 01 20, 1969 (Vol. 50, No. 1643), PP. 59–60Google ScholarPubMed.
12 See Bloomfield, Lincoln P. and Leiss, Amelia C., “Arms Control and the Developing Countries,” World Politics, 10 1965 (Vol. 18, No. 1), pp. 1–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
13 World Military Expenditures and Related Data, p. 6.
14 From a speech to a joint session of the Irish Parliament, June 28, 1963.