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Swedish Disarmament Policy During the Cold War

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Swedish Disarmament Policy During the Cold War Swedish Disarmament Policy during the Cold War Conference Report, 26 November 2012, Stockholm, Sweden Editors: Thomas Jonter, Professor of International Relations, and Emma Rosengren, PhD Candidate, Department of Economic History, Stockholm University Foreword Ever since Sweden got engaged in the process leading up to the creation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1968, Sweden has been an important player in the international game of disarmament. With committed politicians, skilled diplomats, technical competence and high ambitions, Sweden has become known as an important contributor in international disarmament and arms control efforts. Still, little academic attention has been paid to this field of research. Therefore, the Department of Economic History at Stockholm University invited academics, diplomats and civil society representatives to a conference in 2011, to initiate a broader research project on Sweden’s engagement in international disarmament diplomacy during the cold war. The issue of Swedish disarmament involvement needs to be further explored. Therefore, the Department of Economic History, in cooperation with the Swedish Physicians against Nuclear Weapons, the Swedish Affiliate of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), held a second conference on the 26th of November 2012, this time addressing academics. The Swedish Physicians against Nuclear Weapons funded the conference. The conference served to lay the basis for a joint research project on Swedish disarmament policy and included presentations on three themes: Historical; Theoretical; and Comparative perspectives on disarmament. Dr. Hans Blix, Director- General Emeritus of the IAEA and the Executive Chairman of the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) for Iraq between 2000 and 2003, and chair of the Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission (WMDC) and Robert Kelley, Associate Senior Researcher at SIPRI and former Director of nuclear inspections in Iraq, 1992 and 2001, also addressed the conference with keynote speeches. Hans Blix emphasized that the foundation of SIPRI and the set up of several institutions for research on peace and disarmament are signs of an increased refocus from war to peace and disarmament, something that according to Mr. Blix was at the very heart of important disarmament actors like Alva Myrdal. Mr. Blix also spoke about the challenges that the international community has faced throughout the years, including continued presence of interstate conflicts, increased military spending in developed and developing countries, and the general lack of legally binding and enforceable international laws. Still, Mr. Blix was hopeful about the possibility to change the present state of things, and argued that Mutual Economic Dependence will outgrow Mutually Assured Destruction in the long run. Robert Kelly emphasized that IAEA regularly deals with countries that meet their nuclear safeguards reporting obligations under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). From time-to-time countries emerge that have failed to meet obligations by accident or intentional disregard. When this happens, international safeguards of declared activities turns in a serious nonproliferation investigation in places like Iraq, Iran, Libya, Egypt and Burma. These special cases are interesting to re-visit to see what techniques work and how success can be leveraged. This report includes the research papers presented at the conference. The papers are to be considered as research plans rather than finished products. All views expressed in this report are those of the different authors. As organizers of the conference and editors of this report we express our sincere gratitude to those who contributed to the conference as speakers, discussants and participants. A special thank you goes to the authors who kindly have agreed to have their papers included in this report. Thomas Jonter, Professor of International Relations, and Emma Rosengren, PhD Candidate, Department of Economic History, Stockholm University 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS Foreword 2 Part I. Introduction Introduction 6 Part II. Historical Perspectives on Disarmament Security First: The Swedish Interest in Confidence and Security Building Measures and Questions of Disarmament - Aryo Makko 13 Democracy and Disarmament - Some Notes on Public Opinion, Peace Movements and the Disarmament Process in the early 1980s - Stellan Andersson 23 Naval Arms Control: Positions of Sweden - Jan Prawitz 38 Olof Palme and Nuclear Disarmament: A Work in Progress - Lubna Qureshi 54 Part III. Theoretical Perspectives on Disarmament A feminist reading of nuclear disarmament - Emma Rosengren 60 "A House Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand" - Swedish disarmament policy and weapons exports, investigated from a Large Technical Systems perspective - Lars Ingelstam 68 Political Regimes and the Politics of Peace in Sweden: From “The Fortified Poorhouse” to “The Swedish Quandry” - Jonathan Feldman 77 Disarmament as a humanitarian obligation - Gunnar Westberg 85 Part IV. Comparative Perspectives India and the Atom: Non-alignment, Disarmament and Nuclearity, 1954-1974 and Beyond - Jayita Sarkar 90 Explaining nuclear forbearance: a comparative study on Sweden and Switzerland, 1945-1977 - Thomas Jonter 106 Soviet disarmament policy during the Cold War: the role of the ideological rhetoric - Ekaterina Mikhaylenko 114 Appendix A. Conference program 125 B. List of Participants 126 4 PART I. INTRODUCTION 5 Introduction Swedish disarmament policy – a brief background When Robert Oppenheimer, the leader of the Manhattan Project, witnessed the first successful nuclear test tested on the 16th of July 1945 in Alamogordo, New Mexico, words from the Bhagavad Gita, flashed through his mind: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”.1 Less than a month later, the United States dropped nuclear bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, instantly killing between 110, 000 and 140,000 people, and eventually leaving future generations with radiation-related injuries. At this point, the nuclear arms race between the US and the Soviet Union began, ultimately leading to nuclear proliferation among other states, and worldwide terror.2 Ever since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the international disarmament movement has striven to reduce the number of nuclear warheads in the total world arsenal. Article 26 of the Charter of the United Nations assigned the Security Council the task of promoting arms regulation, and the first resolution adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1946 called for the elimination of nuclear weapons from the world’s military arsenals.3 More than a decade later in 1957, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was founded to promote peaceful use of nuclear energy, and also to prevent the military use of nuclear items by non-nuclear weapon states.4 In 1961, Ireland presented a nuclear non-proliferation resolution to the General Assembly, which aimed to prevent further acquisition of nuclear weapons. Only a year later, the UN Conference of the Committee of Eighteen Nations formalized negotiations of a Partial Test Ban Treaty, which would ban nuclear weapons tests in the atmosphere, in outer space, and underwater. Negotiations soon followed between the US and the United Kingdom on one side, and the Soviet Union on the other. In 1963, the Test Ban Treaty was signed and ratified.5 In the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the US and the USSR also entered into multilateral negotiations for the non-proliferation treaty, which had been initiated by Ireland. The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) was first signed on 1 July 1968, and then entered into force in 1970.6 In the years following the adoption of the NPT, its implementation has been evaluated, and additional protocols have been agreed upon, in four-week long diplomatic Review Conferences (RevCon’s) every five years, and two-week long Preparatory Committee (PrepCom) meetings the years in between, except for the year right after each RevCon. Anti-nuclear groups have used these conferences as focal points for lobbying and protests.7 When the NPT was first signed, between fifteen and twenty countries were 1 Andersson, Stellan, Den första grinden: svensk nedrustningspolitik 1961-1963, Santérus, Stockholm, 2004 p 13 2 Agrell, Wilhelm, Fred och fruktan: Sveriges säkerhetspolitiska historia 1918-2000, Historiska media, Lund, 2000; Andersson (2004); Rublee, Maria Rost, Nonproliferation norms: why states choose nuclear restraint, University of Georgia Press, Athens, 2009 3 The Charter of the United Nations, signed on 26 June 1945, www.un.org/en/documents/charter/ available 20120511; United Nations General Assembly, Establishment of a commission to deal with the problems raised by the discovery of atomic energy, adopted during the first session of the UNGA, 26 January 1946, daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/RESOLUTION/GEN/NR0/032/52/IMG/NR003252.pdf?OpenElement, available 20120516 4 Goldblat, Jozef, Arms control: the new guide to negotiations and agreements, 2nd ed., Sage, London, 2002 p 103 5 Goldblat (2002) p.48; Myral, Alva, Spelet om nedrustningen, Stockholm, 1973, pp 212f 6 Goldblat (2002); Rublee (2009) 7 Rublee (2009) p 38 6 regarded as potential nuclear states.8 Nevertheless, only the US, USSR, the UK, France, and China had developed nuclear weapons, and the Non-Proliferation Treaty exclusively recognized and authorized these five countries were nuclear weapon states. Articles I, II, and III of the
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