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.
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.