Was the Baruch Plan a Proposal of World Government?

Abstract

Bernard baruch's introduction of the US plan for the international control of atomic energy in the UN Atomic Energy Commission [UNAEC] on 14 June 1946, which promised to prevent a nuclear arms race and to avoid what in another year would be called the Cold War, has justifiably earned the closest scrutiny by recent historians. Why did the plan fail? And what are the lessons for the future? A developing consensus holds that Americans were as insincere in their proposal as the Russians were obdurate in their rejection of it. Larry Gerber, who has most recently surveyed the sources and literature, concludes that Baruch's 'realism' about US national security as a world power, combined with his 'Wilsonian internationalism' aimed at a liberal capitalist world order, and supported by similar attitudes and assumptions of other American policymakers, 'prevented them from considering the possibility of agreement on anything but American terms'.1 Gregg Herken has found that belief in the atomic bomb as the 'winning weapon' in the war with Japan, and then in the diplomatic conflict with the Soviet Union, undermined the reluctant conviction among American policymakers, including Baruch, that control of atomic energy should be surrendered to an impartial international authority. But reliance on the bomb, because it ushered in the nuclear arms race, produced not victory, but the 'illusion of security'.2 Joseph Lieberman called the Baruch Plan 'a disastrous failure in statecraft', the guilt and responsibility for which he saw shared by both the United States and the Soviet Union, though he particularly blamed American ignorance of Russian history and post-war defence interests. Failure was consequence and cause of the Cold War;

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