In December of 1994, Ukraine notoriously surrendered its nuclear arsenal* under the Budapest Memorandum, in exchange for two pinky promises: a non-aggression pact with Russia and security assurances by the US (and other, less powerful states).
We're in the fifth year of the full-scale invasion, and the lesson the whole world has learned by now is: guarantees by world powers are worthless unless you have nukes, and threats by world powers are worthless if you do (see North Korea). This is a serious deterioration compared to the geopolitical climate in the 90s.
Each geopolitical player, when on their own, has an incentive to gain nuclear deterrence (and thus, territorial integrity) for the price of increasing collective existential risk. The only way out of this dynamic is to create trust -- and that means costly signals. I guess what I'm saying is that the treaties are hard already but the real challenge is to sustainably back them up. I have tremendous respect for people who choose careers in international relations.
*) It's worth noting that just keeping the bombs would not immediately have implied nuclear capabilities and posed challenges of its own.
Picture this: the world’s top scientists are all telling the US government that a brand new technology is an existential threat to humanity. The president listens, and even agrees. The American government, currently a few years ahead of its rivals, proposes a plan at the United Nations that would place this technology under international authority and institute strict controls on its further development. But America’s biggest rival, fearful of losing its own chance at acquiring the technology in question, shoots the proposal down in the UN security council.
This isn’t a hypothetical about an AI pause. This is the story of the Baruch Plan.
Some quick background: The USA created the first atomic bomb via the Manhattan Project during World War Two, culminating in the July 1945 Trinity nuclear test, followed by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6th and 9th. Japan surrenders on August 15th, following both the atomic bombings and a declaration of war by the USSR. World War Two is officially over, and the Atomic Age has just begun.
When the UN General Assembly first met in January 1946, these three were humanity’s only nuclear explosions. One test, two attacks, all under the authority of the US military. The 51 founding UN member states were tired of war, and ready to cooperate. With their very first resolution on January 24th, they establish the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission, asking for detailed proposals for four goals:
(a) for extending between all nations the exchange of basic scientific information for peaceful ends;
(b) for control of atomic energy to the extent necessary to ensure its use only for peaceful purposes;
(c) for the elimination from national armaments of atomic weapons and of all other major weapons adaptable to mass destruction;
(d) for effective safeguards by way of inspection and other means to protect complying States against the hazards of violations and evasions.
A few weeks earlier, President Truman had asked for a draft of exactly such a plan. The two main authors were Dean Acheson (future Secretary of State) and David Lilienthal (future chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission), but there were others involved, too – notably J. Robert Oppenheimer. The result was the Report on the International Control of Atomic Energy, or the “Acheson-Lilienthal Report”, presented to the state department on March 16, 1946 and released to the public on March 28th.
The report concluded that normal inspections and policing operations wouldn’t be enough to control the spread of nuclear weapons. Instead, an international agency, the Atomic Development Authority, should take control of the world’s entire supply of Uranium and Thorium, from mining to post-production. Once the controls were established, the US would give up its own atomic weapons.
Truman appointed financier and statesman Bernard Baruch to create a version of the plan and sell it to the UN. His address to the UN was frank:
“We are here to make a choice between the quick and the dead. That is our business. Behind the black portent of the new atomic age lies a hope which, seized upon with faith, can work our salvation. If we fail, then we have damned every man to be the slave of fear. Let us not deceive ourselves; we must elect world peace or (elect) world destruction.”
But even though the USSR had previously signaled openness to international control of nuclear weapons, they refused to commit to the Baruch Plan as proposed. The plan would sidestep any future Soviet veto in the UN Security Council, deprive the USSR of the chance to build their own nuclear weapons, and require intrusive international inspections, all for a pinky promise that the USA would eventually give up its own nuclear weapons. The Soviets demanded a rewrite, and the ensuing diplomatic haggling lasted until 1949, when the USSR detonated its own atomic bomb – effectively closing the window for a central atomic authority. The UN Atomic Energy Commission would be dissolved in 1952. A much weaker International Atomic Energy Agency in 1957 implemented a series of “partial measures” to control proliferation.
Now, humanity is again facing a technological crossroads, this time from superintelligent AI. Some of us want to keep racing ahead, some are looking to pause, and some are looking for partial measures in between. I’m not entirely sure what lessons from the Baruch plan are most important, but here are a few takeaways.
Further reading:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/23627716