Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty

Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (1963).The advent of the hydrogen bomb in the mid‐1950s led to a worldwide outcry over the deadly radioactive fallout from American and Soviet nuclear tests. As protests mounted, American leaders from Dwight D. Eisenhower to John F. Kennedy sought a test ban not only to stop this global fallout but also to limit the spread of nuclear weapons to other countries.

When negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union over a comprehensive nuclear test ban failed in 1958, Eisenhower and the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev agreed to a voluntary moratorium on testing. In September 1961, the Soviet Union resumed atmospheric tests; President Kennedy immediately authorized American testing, at first only underground, and then in the atmosphere in April 1962.

After the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy and Khrushchev resumed the quest for a comprehensive test ban, but Soviet opposition to on‐site inspection doomed this effort. In July 1963, special envoy W. Averell Harriman (1891–1986) secured Khrushchev's agreement to a treaty to outlaw nuclear tests in the atmosphere, outer space, and underwater. Kennedy succeeded in winning Senate approval for this limited nuclear test ban in September 1963 by pledging to continue U.S. underground testing indefinitely.

The limited test ban treaty succeeded in allaying public concern over global fallout, but it had little impact on the nuclear arms race. Countries such as China, which refused to sign, perfected their own nuclear weapons through extensive testing, and the superpowers continued to build ever larger and more deadly arsenals of destruction. The 1963 treaty was but a halting first step toward genuine nuclear disarmament.
See also Cold War; Nuclear Arms Control Treaties; Nuclear Weapons.

Bibliography

Robert A. Divine , Blowing on the Wind: The Nuclear Test Ban Debate, 1978.
Glenn T. Seaborg , Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Test Ban, 1981.

Robert A. Divine