For an analysis of the AI race, this is unusually broad-context and big-picture. There’s a lot to digest.
My main thoughts for now, are that I disagree with two aspects of your historical narrative. I’m not sure they matter that much to the conclusions, but I’ll state them.
First idea that I disagree with: the idea that nuclear proliferation was largely a matter of America deciding who it would share the technology with, on the basis of religious affinity. Once World War II was over, the US didn’t want to share nuclear weapons with anyone, not even Britain. The initial proliferation that occurred was much more a matter of states independently reaching the scientific and industrial level needed to develop nuclear weapons on their own, and America being unable to stop them. The first states across the threshold were disproportionately Judeo-Christian because nuclear knowledge was most advanced in that civilization, but it didn’t take many years for the rest of the world to catch up.
At that point, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, who had a privileged status within the world system set up after World War II, now had a common interest in curtailing proliferation, and the NNPT was engineered in a way that reflects that. Between the lines, the NNPT says that within the parts of the world that have accepted the treaty, only those five states are allowed to have nuclear weapons. Oh yes, they commit to helping everyone else with civilian nuclear programs, and working towards nuclear disarmament in the long term; but in the short term, the meaning of the NNPT was that only the big five “should” have nuclear weapons. In practice, the big five have gone on to engage in covert acts of proliferation for strategic reasons, as well as developing policies to deal with the reality of nuclear weapons states outside the treaty system, but formally the ideal has been that, in the short term, only the big five should have nukes, and in the long term, no one should.
The idea that the US was an all-powerful gatekeeper of nuclear proliferation that chose to let it happen only within the Judeo-Christian sphere, I think is a perspective distorted by how the world looks now, compared to how it was 80 years ago. Back then, Britain and France weren’t just American allies of the European region, they were at the head of international empires. They conceived themselves to be independent great powers who had made a strategic choice to work with the US… You may have run across the idea that historically, Europe has been united far less often than, say, China. The present situation of a quasi-federal Europe under American tutelage is not the norm, and did not yet exist at the dawn of the nuclear age.
Second idea that I disagree with: the associated idea that during the Cold War, world economic development proceeded along the same lines of civilizational/religious affinity, as in your hypothesis about nuclear proliferation.
I would roughly view the history as follows. Before the industrial revolution, you could indeed view world history in terms of competing cultures, religions, or civilizations. At that time, the whole world was poor by modern standards. Then, the industrial revolution happened within parts of Europe and created a new kind of society with a potential for an unprecedented standard of living.
Some of those societies were thereby empowered to create worldwide empires that combined industrial capitalism at home with old-fashioned imperial resource extraction abroad. From the perspective of competition among civilizations, this looked like the worldwide triumph of Christian European civilization. However, it was really the triumph of a new kind of society and culture (“modernity”) that clashed with many aspects of European tradition (see: Nietzsche and the death of God), and components of which could be mastered by other civilizations (see: Imperial Japan and every decolonization movement).
By the time you get to the cold war and the atomic age, those European empires are already disintegrating, as you now have elites outside the West who wish to do as Japan did, and develop their own version of modernity. Part of the competition between the two new superpowers, America and Russia, was to promote their own social ideology as the key to sovereign economic development. They both tried and failed to be hegemonic within their spheres of influence (China complained of “social imperialism” from Russia, India was non-aligned), but we were not yet fully back in the world where it was an old-fashioned competition between traditional civilizations. It was a transitional period in which two secular universalisms—capitalist democracy and socialist revolution—competed to be the template of modernization.
When Russia abandoned its ideology, there were two interpretations proposed by American political scientists. Fukuyama proposed that the liberal-democratic version of modernity would now be universal. From this perspective, the entire Cold War was a factional fight among Hegelians as to the climactic form of modernity. Hegel had a model of historical progress in the form of broadening empowerment, from absolutism, to aristocracy, and finally to a democratic republic with a concept of citizenship. The Left Hegelian, Marx, proposed one more dialectical stage in the form of communism. The Right Hegelians thought this was a mistake, and Fukuyama declared them the winners.
In the 1990s, this vision looked plausible. Everything was about markets and the spread of democracy. Ideological dissent was limited to small “rogue states”. But in the 2000s, the US found itself fighting jihadis with a very different civilizational vision; in the 2010s, world economic management required giving BRICS a seat at the table alongside the G-7; and in the 2020s, the US is governed by a movement (MAGA) that openly affiliates itself specifically with the West, rather than with the world as a whole. All this conforms to the predictions of Fukuyama’s rival Huntington, who predicted that the postmodern future would see a modernized version of the “clash of civilizations” already seen in the preindustrial past.
Summary. What I’m proposing is that your analytic framework, when it comes to nuclear proliferation and economic development during the Cold War, is the wrong one. To a great extent it does apply within the post-1990s world, but the Cold War was organized around competing secular modernities, not (e.g.) “Christianity versus Atheism”.
Thank you for taking the time to write this detailed reply.
. Once World War II was over, the US didn’t want to share nuclear weapons with anyone, not even Britain. The initial proliferation that occurred was much more a matter of states independently reaching the scientific and industrial level needed to develop nuclear weapons on their own, and America being unable to stop them.
I think my main disagreement with this is that after the use of nukes on Japan, a lot of people including Leslie Groves, John von Neumann, various people in intelligence, etc proposed to Truman that they nuke Russia pre-emptively, build monitoring capacity worldwide and establish a nuclear monopoly worldwide. Truman considered this but then vetoed it, I don’t know why. If the US govt actually wanted, they could have done this to Russia and they could have done the exact same thing to Britain. Nobody ever proposed threatening to nuke Britain or building nuclear monitoring capacity in Britain against the will of the British govt.
Back then, Britain and France weren’t just American allies of the European region, they were at the head of international empires. They conceived themselves to be independent great powers who had made a strategic choice to work with the US… You may have run across the idea that historically, Europe has been united far less often than, say, China. The present situation of a quasi-federal Europe under American tutelage is not the norm, and did not yet exist at the dawn of the nuclear age.
I am aware! Both Britain and France had been economically weakened by the war though, and were multiple years behind the US to build their own nukes. US had a decisive advantage after building nukes which they did not have before.
Part of the competition between the two new superpowers, America and Russia, was to promote their own social ideology as the key to sovereign economic development.
Yes, the problem with this is that AFAIK countries made the choice of economic system less based on which economic system they believed was likely to work, but more based on which superpower they wanted to align with. Obtaining longterm military security (by aligning with a superpower) was more important than economic growth to many countries, and it makes intuitive sense to me why you would prioritise that.
It was taken for granted in many countries (including European countries) that if there was a democratic party and a communist party running, these were both proxies for foreign superpowers to influence their elections.
So if a country like South Korea managed to do exceptionally well, it is not because leaders there actually understood the benefits of capitalism but that leaders there chose to stay allied with US, and vice versa leaders in US were willing to ally with them. Same way if India chose to run a socialist state-regulated economy, a major factor there was that Nehru wanted India to be non-aligned with either superpower militarily, and the economic benefits of capitalism versus communism were only a secondary consideration.
For an analysis of the AI race, this is unusually broad-context and big-picture. There’s a lot to digest.
My main thoughts for now, are that I disagree with two aspects of your historical narrative. I’m not sure they matter that much to the conclusions, but I’ll state them.
First idea that I disagree with: the idea that nuclear proliferation was largely a matter of America deciding who it would share the technology with, on the basis of religious affinity. Once World War II was over, the US didn’t want to share nuclear weapons with anyone, not even Britain. The initial proliferation that occurred was much more a matter of states independently reaching the scientific and industrial level needed to develop nuclear weapons on their own, and America being unable to stop them. The first states across the threshold were disproportionately Judeo-Christian because nuclear knowledge was most advanced in that civilization, but it didn’t take many years for the rest of the world to catch up.
At that point, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, who had a privileged status within the world system set up after World War II, now had a common interest in curtailing proliferation, and the NNPT was engineered in a way that reflects that. Between the lines, the NNPT says that within the parts of the world that have accepted the treaty, only those five states are allowed to have nuclear weapons. Oh yes, they commit to helping everyone else with civilian nuclear programs, and working towards nuclear disarmament in the long term; but in the short term, the meaning of the NNPT was that only the big five “should” have nuclear weapons. In practice, the big five have gone on to engage in covert acts of proliferation for strategic reasons, as well as developing policies to deal with the reality of nuclear weapons states outside the treaty system, but formally the ideal has been that, in the short term, only the big five should have nukes, and in the long term, no one should.
The idea that the US was an all-powerful gatekeeper of nuclear proliferation that chose to let it happen only within the Judeo-Christian sphere, I think is a perspective distorted by how the world looks now, compared to how it was 80 years ago. Back then, Britain and France weren’t just American allies of the European region, they were at the head of international empires. They conceived themselves to be independent great powers who had made a strategic choice to work with the US… You may have run across the idea that historically, Europe has been united far less often than, say, China. The present situation of a quasi-federal Europe under American tutelage is not the norm, and did not yet exist at the dawn of the nuclear age.
Second idea that I disagree with: the associated idea that during the Cold War, world economic development proceeded along the same lines of civilizational/religious affinity, as in your hypothesis about nuclear proliferation.
I would roughly view the history as follows. Before the industrial revolution, you could indeed view world history in terms of competing cultures, religions, or civilizations. At that time, the whole world was poor by modern standards. Then, the industrial revolution happened within parts of Europe and created a new kind of society with a potential for an unprecedented standard of living.
Some of those societies were thereby empowered to create worldwide empires that combined industrial capitalism at home with old-fashioned imperial resource extraction abroad. From the perspective of competition among civilizations, this looked like the worldwide triumph of Christian European civilization. However, it was really the triumph of a new kind of society and culture (“modernity”) that clashed with many aspects of European tradition (see: Nietzsche and the death of God), and components of which could be mastered by other civilizations (see: Imperial Japan and every decolonization movement).
By the time you get to the cold war and the atomic age, those European empires are already disintegrating, as you now have elites outside the West who wish to do as Japan did, and develop their own version of modernity. Part of the competition between the two new superpowers, America and Russia, was to promote their own social ideology as the key to sovereign economic development. They both tried and failed to be hegemonic within their spheres of influence (China complained of “social imperialism” from Russia, India was non-aligned), but we were not yet fully back in the world where it was an old-fashioned competition between traditional civilizations. It was a transitional period in which two secular universalisms—capitalist democracy and socialist revolution—competed to be the template of modernization.
When Russia abandoned its ideology, there were two interpretations proposed by American political scientists. Fukuyama proposed that the liberal-democratic version of modernity would now be universal. From this perspective, the entire Cold War was a factional fight among Hegelians as to the climactic form of modernity. Hegel had a model of historical progress in the form of broadening empowerment, from absolutism, to aristocracy, and finally to a democratic republic with a concept of citizenship. The Left Hegelian, Marx, proposed one more dialectical stage in the form of communism. The Right Hegelians thought this was a mistake, and Fukuyama declared them the winners.
In the 1990s, this vision looked plausible. Everything was about markets and the spread of democracy. Ideological dissent was limited to small “rogue states”. But in the 2000s, the US found itself fighting jihadis with a very different civilizational vision; in the 2010s, world economic management required giving BRICS a seat at the table alongside the G-7; and in the 2020s, the US is governed by a movement (MAGA) that openly affiliates itself specifically with the West, rather than with the world as a whole. All this conforms to the predictions of Fukuyama’s rival Huntington, who predicted that the postmodern future would see a modernized version of the “clash of civilizations” already seen in the preindustrial past.
Summary. What I’m proposing is that your analytic framework, when it comes to nuclear proliferation and economic development during the Cold War, is the wrong one. To a great extent it does apply within the post-1990s world, but the Cold War was organized around competing secular modernities, not (e.g.) “Christianity versus Atheism”.
Thank you for taking the time to write this detailed reply.
I think my main disagreement with this is that after the use of nukes on Japan, a lot of people including Leslie Groves, John von Neumann, various people in intelligence, etc proposed to Truman that they nuke Russia pre-emptively, build monitoring capacity worldwide and establish a nuclear monopoly worldwide. Truman considered this but then vetoed it, I don’t know why. If the US govt actually wanted, they could have done this to Russia and they could have done the exact same thing to Britain. Nobody ever proposed threatening to nuke Britain or building nuclear monitoring capacity in Britain against the will of the British govt.
I am aware! Both Britain and France had been economically weakened by the war though, and were multiple years behind the US to build their own nukes. US had a decisive advantage after building nukes which they did not have before.
Yes, the problem with this is that AFAIK countries made the choice of economic system less based on which economic system they believed was likely to work, but more based on which superpower they wanted to align with. Obtaining longterm military security (by aligning with a superpower) was more important than economic growth to many countries, and it makes intuitive sense to me why you would prioritise that.
It was taken for granted in many countries (including European countries) that if there was a democratic party and a communist party running, these were both proxies for foreign superpowers to influence their elections.
So if a country like South Korea managed to do exceptionally well, it is not because leaders there actually understood the benefits of capitalism but that leaders there chose to stay allied with US, and vice versa leaders in US were willing to ally with them. Same way if India chose to run a socialist state-regulated economy, a major factor there was that Nehru wanted India to be non-aligned with either superpower militarily, and the economic benefits of capitalism versus communism were only a secondary consideration.