Arms Race/Atomic Weapons

Arms Race/Atomic Weapons

Atomic weapons and the arms race were inseparable from the inception of the former: Developments in physics in the 1930s led physicists to believe that nuclear fission could be used as a weapon, and when World War II began, scientists stopped publishing on the topic of fission in order to avoid sharing information with the enemy.

No one was yet sure what form a fissionbased weapon would take, but the Allied nations were concerned that Nazi Germany would develop it first. In the United States the Manhattan Project was supported by enormous resources beginning in 1942.

Research occurred at various sites across North America and was overseen and organized at Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the desert provided safe sites for weapons testing. Though British scientists participated, as did many European exiles, the Soviet Union was not included in the project.


Not until after Germany’s surrender did the Manhattan Project finish its work. The first test, code-named Trinity, was conducted on July 16, 1945. The first nuclear explosive, a nondeployable bomb nicknamed the Gadget, was a sphere of high explosive covered with surface detonators that directed the explosion inward, compressing a plutonium core in order to start a nuclear chain reaction that grew at an exponential rate. The Gadget exploded with a blast equal in force to about 18 thousand tons of TNT—tonnage of TNT became the standard measure of nuclear bombs thenceforth.

The test was a success. Aural and visual evidence of the explosion reached as far as 200 miles away. Almost immediately two bombs were prepared for the ongoing war in the Pacific: Fat Man, a plutonium bomb like the Gadget, was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9; three days earlier at Hiroshima, Little Boy, a uranium “gun-type” bomb that worked by shooting one piece of uranium into another to start the chain reaction, had been dropped.

Little Boy was the first gun-type nuclear bomb used, and while it seemed likely to work, it was at that time untested. Hundreds of thousands died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, prompting a Japanese surrender a week later.

Future warfare would have to acknowledge the existence of nuclear weapons. Though the Soviets had been left out of the Manhattan Project and the United States was the only country with the capability to produce nuclear arms, the Soviet Union had been receiving information about the project throughout its duration thanks to its espionage efforts.

Development of Soviet nuclear weapons had to be conducted without the extraordinary brain trust of Los Alamos, but had the advantage of requiring less innovation. Penal mining provided uranium, and on August 29, 1949, the Soviets successfully detonated First Lightning, a 22 kiloton Fat Man–style fission bomb. Four years after the start of the “Atomic Age,” and years before U.S. military intelligence had predicted the Soviets would succeed, the nuclear arms race was under way.

In the aftermath of World War II the United States and the Soviet Union became the most significant and resourceful superpowers. New international alliances like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Warsaw Pact transpired along ideological lines as much as geographical ones.

The arms race was, on one level, simple one-upmanship: a competition through which tensions could be worked out, as they were in the Olympics and the space race. Though both the United States and the Soviet Union quickly acquired the necessary means to do significant and catastrophic damage to their opponents, escalation continued as the arms race drove them both.

The United States countered the Soviet acquisition of “the bomb” by developing the hydrogen bomb—also called the fusion bomb or the thermonuclear bomb. While the first generation of nuclear weapons used fission, the hydrogen bomb relied on nuclear fusion: the process of nuclei fusing into a larger nucleus and releasing energy as a by-product, the same process that fuels the Sun.


On May 9, 1951, in the United States, Operation Greenhouse detonated a thermonuclear device codenamed George, with an explosive yield of 225 kilotons. Like the Gadget, George was a nondeployable device used to test the basic principles that would be involved in the design of its successors; a year later, Ivy Mike was detonated with a yield of 10.4 megatons (10,000 kilotons), and the hydrogen bomb officially became part of the United States nuclear arsenal. The Soviets kept pace, detonating a preliminary fusion device in the summer of 1953 and a fullscale thermonuclear bomb in 1954.

The destructive force of these new bombs was commonly measured in megatons, making the first atomic bombs seem almost trivial in comparison. A Fat Man–type bomb could eliminate a smaller city like Nagasaki; a hydrogen bomb could eliminate a major city and its infrastructure and produce considerably more fallout.

Secrecy was part of the world of nuclear weaponry from the start. In the cold war years, new policies regulated information relevant to the design of nuclear arms: The 1946 Atomic Energy Act put nuclear technology under civilian control and banned the divulging of information related to such to any foreign nation.

Eight years later a new act went substantially further: All nuclear technology was “born secret,” which is to say that it was automatically classified without need for evaluation. Nuclear technology was deemed to be a matter of national security. It is widely speculated that the born secret policy is unconstitutional, but the Supreme Court has yet to hear a case pertaining to it.

Throughout the 1950s much of the innovation of the arms race was concerned with methods of deployment. The B-47 Stratojet and B-52 Stratofortress—strategic United States bomber jets designed to penetrate Soviet borders— and interceptor aircraft designed to intercept and eliminate bombers were early examples of such innovations.

Bomb deployment was also made more user-friendly, requiring fewer specialists and bringing the utility of nuclear weapons closer to that of conventional explosives, which required limited instruction on the part of the soldiers deploying them.

Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) allowed rival nations to deploy nuclear payloads without needing a pilot at all, and the United States proceeded to build missile installations throughout Europe, while the threat of Soviet missiles in Cuba sparked the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.

Some attention, of course, was paid to defense against nuclear attacks, not only the fallout shelters and cautionary films that became prevalent in the 1950s, but also antiballistic missiles to shoot down ICBMs before they struck their target, anti-aircraft artillery and fighter jets to intercept bombers, and increasingly sophisticated radar systems to detect incoming attacks.

These preventative measures could not keep up with the offensive capabilities of a nuclear arsenal, though, and the development of nuclear submarines, which could launch a missile from the ocean—far from tactical targets—provided each side in the cold war with second-strike capability: the ability to ensure a retaliatory attack in the event of the other side’s first strike.

Given the destructiveness of megaton bombs and the amount of fallout that would result from their wide-scale implementation, second-strike capability led to a state of what was called mutually assured destruction (MAD).

As a defense strategy, MAD calls for the development and stockpiling of weapons of mass destruction in order to force a situation in which it is infeasible for either side to attack, because of the certainty of devastating retaliation. What may have at first seemed counterintuitive was nevertheless a critical component of cold war thinking that led to the détente, or eased tensions, of the 1970s.

Meanwhile, as the United States and the Soviet Union remained dominant in the nuclear field, other nations developed programs of their own: Among the NATO allies, the United Kingdom and France both became nuclear powers by the end of 1960, while the People’s Republic of China followed suit in 1964, at a time when Sino-Soviet relations were at enough of an ebb that China was a potential threat to either the United States or the Soviet Union.

During détente, the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NNPT) was signed by by a number of states, though it was not until 1992 that France and the People’s Republic of China signed. The NNPT limited the spread of nuclear capability by permitting only those five states then possessing them—which also happened to be the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council—to own nuclear weapons.

It further permitted the use of nuclear power by other states, but only under conditions that would limit their ability to manufacture nuclear weapons. Any states not explicitly granted rights under this treaty would have to apply to the International Atomic Energy Agency, a regulatory branch of the United Nations, to pursue any nuclear technology activity.

The easing of tensions also led to armament control treaties in the late 1960s and early 1970s. SALT I (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks), held in Helsinki, Finland, between the Soviet Union and the United States, restricted the production of strategic ballistic missile launchers and submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and further treaties limited nuclear testing and forbade nuclear weapons in space. Détente ended when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979. When Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980 he returned anti-Soviet rhetoric to pre-détente levels, calling for massive escalations in order to force the Soviet Union into economic collapse as a result of defense spending.

One of his initiatives threatened the balance of MAD: The Strategic Defense Initiative, nicknamed Star Wars, would employ a space-based system to deflect missiles en route to the United States, thus limiting the Soviet second-strike capability. Though the system was never fully developed or employed, aspects of it were adopted by every subsequent administration, even after the cold war ended.

The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties (START) further limited nuclear arms, and periodic treaties continue to reduce the number of nuclear warheads in operation. The arms race effectively ended when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

Though no one possesses the resources of the cold war superpowers, the rest of the world has begun to catch up to the nuclear states: In the post– cold war years India, Pakistan, and North Korea have all tested nuclear devices (North Korea withdrew from the NNPT in 2003; India and Pakistan never signed), and more are sure to follow. The International Atomic Energy Agency estimates that, as of 2006, 40 nonnuclear countries possessed the capability to manufacture nuclear weapons if they desired to.

Asian Development Bank

Asian Development Bank

The Asian Development Bank (ADB), a nongovernmental organization headquartered in Manila, the Philippines, was founded to provide aid, funding, and various forms of financial and technical support to countries in Asia and the Pacific. The ADB started operations in 1966 and initially represented a group of 31 states. As of 2006 it had grown to have 66 members. This included 47 states from inside the zone and 19 countries elsewhere.

The bank’s stated goal is to improve the lives of the peoples of the region by helping them develop economically and socially. This is a major task given the depths of poverty encountered in some regions. Many area peoples live on less than $2.00 per day. The bank has a specific commitment to helping less-developed and poorer Asian countries to advance economically. This help can take several forms and affect regional, subregional, and local projects and programs.

The goals of the ADB are varied and include developments to foster economic growth and projects to reduce poverty. The organization also attempts to assist in the improvement of conditions that affect women and children as well as to implement strategies that encourage human resource development and to promote environmentally friendly strategies for growth.


The total lending volume is around $6 billion in the early 2000s, with technical assistance programs totalling $180 million a year. These financial programs can involve both public and private investments. In terms of economic development, the bank evaluates requests for help and then determines where its assistance is most appropriate.

It favors proposals that offer a combination of social and economic development. It hopes that at least 50 percent of the projects will produce social or environmental benefits. Its other priorities are geared to economic growth and development. The bank also attempts to match its lending with governmental contributions.

The ADB’s work encompasses many different activities and embraces many diverse areas. For example, the bank’s efforts affect agriculture and resources, finance, transport and communications, economic and social infrastructure, industrial investment, and mineral extraction projects.

The ADB receives numerous proposals from its members for particular projects, which it assesses to determine their relative merits. It analyses the viability, value for money, economic and social impact, technical realities, provisions for accounting oversight, and contract and bidding implementation as well as openness and overall development priorities.

After a thorough review and analysis—which can include review by outside agencies and consultants—worthy projects receive the bank’s approval, and a schedule for completion is determined that also details performance guidelines and expectations.

The ADB is directed by a board of governors with one representative drawn from each member country. This board then elects a 12-member board of directors, with eight of the 12 coming from Asian-Pacific countries. The governors also elect a bank president, who acts as chairperson for the board of directors and whose term is five years, with the possibility of reelection. Traditionally the president has been a Japanese.

This choice reflects Japan’s heavy investment in the bank of approximately 13 percent of its shares, a figure matched only by United States investment. Countries that withdraw from the organization have their investment reimbursed.

In 2006 there were projects and feasibility studies in areas such as road development in Afghanistan, infrastructure and transport strategies for India, telecommunications investment in Cambodia, road improvements in the Solomon Islands, water management programs in China, and regional efforts in energy-related areas.

In recent years the bank has developed anticorruption initiatives. As in related institutions such as the World Bank, corruption can work against the developmental interests of poor countries. In theory, all projects must undergo regular and intensive ADB audits, yet issues still remain as to the misuse or misappropriation of funds and the wasteful use of project money. There are also concerns that there have been projects approved that do not help the poor as they should.

Cold War

Cold War

The cold war was the decade-long conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, especially characterized by its constant tensions, arms escalation, and lack of direct warfare. First coined by author George Orwell to describe a state of permanent and unresolvable war, cold war was applied to the U.S.-Soviet conflict in 1947 by Bernard Baruch, the U.S. representative to the UN Atomic Energy Commission and influential adviser to both Franklin Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.

Both sides often phrased the conflict as one between capitalism and communism, not simply between two states. Picking its endpoints requires some arbitrary choices, but it essentially lasted from shortly after World War II to the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Long before even the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, there were significant differences between Russia and the West—Russia was a latecomer to capitalism, abolishing serfdom only in 1861—and the transition was an awkward one that created enough ill will to make a radical revolution appealing.


Before the 20th century, Russia’s imperial designs threatened those of Great Britain—a maritime rival—and Spain, which encouraged settlement in California out of fear that Russian colonists would settle the west coast traveling south from Alaska.

In both cases the Western nations may have been exaggerating or misperceiving the extent of Russia’s expansionist interests—just as was likely the case with Western perceptions of the Soviet Union during the cold war.

In the 20th century, the old European empires had lost their power, and the most powerful countries were the ideologically opposed Soviet Union and the United States, with its close ally the United Kingdom.

These were the two world leaders that developing nations would be shaped by and recovering nations would have to ally themselves with. Given the size and power of the countries—with perhaps as an additional factor the youth of their governments, relative to those of old Europe—some historians consider the conflict inevitable.

World War II had broken the faith that the Soviet Union had in the rest of the world’s willingness to leave communist states alone, and so Stalin sought to spread communism to neighboring countries in eastern Europe—Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, and Poland—but remained uninvolved with communist interests in Finland, Greece, and Czechoslovakia, at least directly.

Winston Churchill was the first to refer to this band of communist countries as the “Iron Curtain,” referring not only to the fortified borders between the capitalist and communist nations of Europe but to the Soviet Union’s protective layer of communist states shielding it from capitalist Europe.

Meanwhile, communism grew in popularity in China, France, India, Italy, Japan, and Vietnam. Very quickly the West began to perceive communist victories as Soviet victories, and communist nations as Soviet satellites, officially or otherwise.

The United Kingdom could no longer afford to govern overseas and in the 1947 partition of India had granted independence to that holding, which led to the formation of the states of India and Pakistan. The United States began increasing its overseas influence as that of the British waned.


For the first few decades after World War II, the dominant focus of U.S. foreign policy was that of “containment”; the U.S. took pains to limit communist and Soviet influence to the states where it was already present and to prevent its “leaking out” to others.

Many believed that, so contained, communist governments would wither and die—in contrast, the domino theory proclaimed that if one capitalist government fell, its neighbors would be next, a proposition that motivated U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, which was proclaimed a war not just over Vietnam but over all of Southeast Asia, which notably included former British and French holdings.

When civil war broke out in China, the Soviet Union aided the Communists, and the United States armed and funded the Nationalists. The new People’s Republic of China, formed on October 1, 1949, became a valuable Soviet ally, while the Nationalists took control of the island of Taiwan, from where they retained their seat in the United Nations.

The Soviets boycotted the United Nations Security Council as a result, and so were unable to veto Truman’s request for UN aid in prosecuting an attack on the Soviet-supported North Korean forces invading U.S.-supported South Korea. The Korean War that followed lasted three years, ending in a stalemate; into the 21st century no peace treaty had been formed between the two Koreas.

As the lines between the two sides became more clearly drawn, 12 nations formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)—Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

In response to this and the rearmament of West Germany, Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, formed a similar alliance of eastern European states called the Warsaw Pact: Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and the Soviet Union.

Eisenhower to Reagan

From President Eisenhower in the 1950s to President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s the guiding light of military spending was deterrence theory, ensuring that retaliation would be swift and extraordinary. The specter of nuclear warfare dominated U.S. consciousness in these decades.

In the 1950s fallout shelters were built in many towns and private homes, and educational film shorts shown in schools included the famous “Duck and Cover,” in which a talking turtle advises children to seek shelter in the event of nuclear war. Many schools and town governments held duck-and-cover drills, which likely served no real purpose except to heighten fears.

Eisenhower openly worried about the inertia of the military-industrial complex as well as escalating military spending. Perhaps seeking to avoid future military conflicts, he was the first to use the CIA to overthrow governments in developing or less powerful nations that were unfriendly to U.S. policy, replacing them with nominally democratic ones.

Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America became more important to the cold war than Europe. In Latin America, the United States had been involved in national politics since the 19th century, but the cold war gave a new lift to foreign policy.

As the increasingly powerful lower classes in many Latin American countries gave rise to a strong left wing and socialist concerns, the United States targeted revolutions and instigated coups against left-leaning governments.

Fidel Castro led the communist revolution in Cuba, only miles from the U.S. coast. The United States responded by dispatching a group of CIA-trained Cuban expatriates to land at Cuba’s Bay of Pigs and attempt to oust Castro from power.

The invasion was a significant failure and provided the Soviets with a further excuse to install nuclear missiles in Cuba—balancing out those the United States had installed in Turkey and western Europe.

Only when President Kennedy promised not to invade Cuba and to remove missiles from Turkey—close to the USSR—did the Soviets back down. It is still considered the moment when the two nations came closest to direct warfare.

Berlin Wall

In 1961 the Berlin Wall was built and quickly became the most vivid symbol of the cold war: The 28 miles of wall, barbed wire, and minefields separated Soviet-controlled East Berlin from U.S.-supported West Berlin. Passage across the border was heavily restricted.

Families were divided, and some East Berliners were no longer able to commute to work. About 200 people died trying to cross into West Berlin; some 5,000 more succeeded. It would be nearly 30 years before the wall came down.

By the end of the 1960s the prevalence of deterrence theory had led to a state of “mutually assured destruction” (MAD), in which an attack by either side would result in the destruction of both sides. Theoretically such assurance prevents that first strike, which was the logic behind limiting antiballistic missiles.

Talks and, later, agreements on strategic nuclear arms (SALT I and SALT II) began in 1969. President Reagan’s SDI program in the early 1980s would be a significant step away from the MAD model toward the goal of a winnable nuclear war.

The word détente—“warming”—is often used to describe the improvements in Soviet-U.S. relations from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, a time when military parity between the two had all but been achieved. Both nations’ economies suffered—the United States from the expense of the Vietnam War, and the Soviets from that of catching up to the United States in the nuclear arms race. In order to encourage Soviet reforms, U.S. president Gerald Ford signed into law the Jackson-Vanik Amendment in 1975, which tied U.S.-Soviet trade relations to the conditions of Soviet human rights.

The Soviets had lost their alliance with China because they had failed to strongly support China during border disputes with India and the invasion of Tibet. The prospect of facing a Chinese-U.S. alliance—however unlikely it may have seemed to Americans—discouraged the Soviets as much as MAD did, and contributed to their willingness to participate in summits such as those that resulted in the Outer Space Treaty, banning the presence of nuclear weapons in space.

As they recovered from World War II, western Europe and Japan became more relevant again to the international scene, as did Communist China. Especially from the 1970s on, the U.S.-Soviet domination of international affairs eroded. The United States began to come under more frequent and serious criticism for the choices it had made in its opposition to communism, especially for its support of dictatorial or oppressive right-wing governments.

Meanwhile, throughout the 1960s and 1970s, more and more developing nations adopted the policy of nonalignment. The Middle Eastern nations, their influence bolstered by oil and the increasing consumption thereof, became a particular factor, and the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), which increased oil prices in 1973 by 400 percent, was a leading player in the West’s economic troubles. As more countries joined the United Nations, the Western majority was broken.

In 1979 the secular democratic regime of the shah in Iran—supported by the United States and restored in 1953 with the CIA’s help—fell to an alliance of liberal and religious rebels, who installed the religious leader the Ayatollah Khomeini as the new head of state. Outraged at the involvement of the United States in Iranian affairs, a group of Iranian students held 66 Americans hostage for 14 months, until 20 minutes after President Reagan’s inauguration.

Détente ended as the 1980s began, with the Iran hostage crisis and the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Hard-line right-wingers had been elected in both the United Kingdom (Margaret Thatcher) and the United States (Reagan in 1981), and many neoconservatives characterized the détente of the previous decade as too permissive, and too soft on communism.

Just as the United States had come under criticism for its support of certain governments, the Soviets lost a good deal of international respect not only over Afghanistan but also when they shot down a Korean commercial airliner (Korean Air Flight 007, in 1983) that passed into Soviet airspace. The first years of the 1980s saw an escalation in the arms race for the first time since the SALT talks began.

The Strategic Defense Initiative, proposed by the Reagan administration in 1983, was a space- and ground-based antimissile defense system that would have completely abandoned the MAD model. Significant work went into it, seeking a winnable nuclear war, unthinkable in previous decades.

Mikhail Gorbachev

In 1985 the Soviet Politburo elected reformist Mikhail Gorbachev, the leader of a generation who had grown up not under Stalin but under the more reform-minded Khrushchev. Gorbachev was savvy, sharp, and politically aware in a way many Soviet politicians were not. The keystones of his reforms were glasnost and perestroika, policies almost encapsulated by catchphrases widely repeated both in the Soviet Union and in Western newspapers.

Glasnost, a policy instituted in 1985, simply meant “openness,” but referred not just to freedom of speech and the press but to making the mechanics of government visible and open to question by the public. Perestroika, which began in 1987, meant “restructuring.” Perestroika consisted of major economic reforms, significant shifts away from pure communism, allowing private ownership of businesses and much wider foreign trade.

Two years after the start of perestroika, eastern European communism began to collapse under protests and uprisings, culminating in reformist revolutions in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, German Democratic Republic (East Germany), Hungary, Poland, and Romania. Several Soviet states sought independence from the Soviet Union, and Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania declared independence. The period culminated in the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989.

After years of public pressure, East Germany finally agreed to lift the restrictions on border traffic for those with proper visas. East Germany had little choice but to abandon the wall. They did nothing to stop the Mauerspechte (“wall chippers”) who arrived with sledgehammers to demolish the wall and claim souvenirs from it, and began the rehabilitation of the roads that the wall’s construction had destroyed. By the end of the year free travel was allowed throughout the city, without need of visas or paperwork. A year later East and West Germany reunified.

In 1991 radical communists in the Soviet Union seized power for three days in August, while Gorbachev was on vacation. Boris Yeltsin, the president of Russia, denounced the coup loudly and visibly—standing on a tank and addressing the public with a megaphone.

The majority of the military quickly sided with him and the other opponents of the coup, which ended with little violence. But it was clear that the Soviet Union would not last—it was soon dissolved, becoming 15 independent states.

With the dissolution of the Soviet Union the cold war was technically over, effective immediately, but a “cold war mentality” continued. The United States continued to involve itself in international affairs in similar ways, sometimes being accused of acting like a world policeman—a role the United Kingdom had enjoyed before the world wars.

The apparatus of espionage found new subjects, with the ECHELON system of signals intelligence—monitoring telephone and electronic communication—eventually repurposed for the war on terror following the 9/11 attacks in 2001. Contrary to every expectation, the cold war ended without direct warfare and without the use of nuclear weapons.

Comecon

The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon) was established in January 1949 by the Soviet Union. It was an organization designed to economically unite all the communist states in the eastern bloc of Europe.

The founding member nations were the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria. Albania joined in February 1949, the German Democratic Republic in 1950, Yugoslavia in 1956, and Mongolia in 1962.

Several other communist states—such as China, North Korea, and North Vietnam—were official Comecon observers. Other countries gained membership or observer status in the Comecon. Council sessions were held regularly, and the leaders of member states usually met at least once each year.


Economic policies for all member states were debated and determined at the council sessions. These policies were then implemented through Comecon directives. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Comecon was formally dissolved in June of that year.

The initial charter of the organization stated three main goals to provide broader economic cooperation: “exchanging economic experience,” rendering “technical assistance,” and providing “mutual aid” to all member countries.

The original goal of the Comecon was to establish stronger ties and greater cooperation between the command economies of the Soviet Union and the Eastern-bloc states. The Comecon provided Stalin with yet another way to strengthen his control over the eastern European allies by linking their economic vitality, production, and trade directly to the Soviet Union.

Comecon map

The early years of the organization provided only modest results, such as bilateral trade agreements and sharing of technology between member states. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev attempted to strengthen the organization by proposing that all member states join a centrally planned socialist commonwealth to be run from Moscow.

Smaller member states with less-developed economies and those relying more heavily on agriculture disagreed with this plan for a centralized commonwealth. However, upon his ouster from power in 1964, his attempted centralization of the Comecon and most of his other policies were abandoned.

Leonid Brezhnev and the Soviet leadership in the 1960s and 1970s recognized the need for economic acceleration and further industrial and technological development in the Soviet Union and Comecon member countries. The economic and technological gaps between countries in western Europe and those in the Comecon were becoming more evident.


Therefore, the Comecon adopted a new plan in 1971 called the Comprehensive Programme for the Further Extension and Improvement of Cooperation and the Development of Socialist Economic Integration. The basic goal of this program was to emphasize long-term planning and investments in industrial development of all member states.

The Comecon dissolved in 1991. Throughout its four decades of existence, the organization encountered many problems. The dependence of all member states on the economy of the Soviet Union created an unstable and impractical system. The planned economies of the member states did not rely on normal market forces and prices; therefore, the mechanism created a false and inflated economic situation.

When the countries traded and dealt with other states outside of the Comecon, the weakness of their economies became evident. The Comecon never completely fulfilled its objectives because of the difficulties presented when attempting to integrate multiple states’ economies.

Commonwealth of Nations

The Commonwealth of Nations, formerly the British Commonwealth, is a loose cultural and political alliance of former British Empire territories. The idea of the commonwealth continually evolved after its origins in the mid- to late 19th century. The term referred to the settler colonies: Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Ireland, Newfoundland, and South Africa.

But in the 1920s the settler colonies and Britain began to meet in Imperial Conferences, which provided the structure for the later Commonwealth of Nations. The commonwealth shifted from a community of British-populated independent nations to a proposed economic bloc, and finally to a multicultural community of nations.

The concept of commonwealth described the unique constitutional relationship between Great Britain and the settler colonies; Parliament and the Foreign Office presided over foreign affairs that involved the colonies, but the colonial parliaments controlled their own internal affairs. In the 1926 Imperial Conference, the Balfour Declaration acknowledged that Britain and the settler dominions were “equal in status” to Britain.


After the Statute of Westminster in 1931—which gave the dominions of Canada, Newfoundland, South Africa, and Ireland legislative independence—the commonwealth officially became a political organization consisting of the United Kingdom along with its former colonies.

The British tried to make the commonwealth work as a large trading bloc, with trade preferences between the former colonies as well as the formal colonies. Britain’s imports and exports to and from the colonies never amounted to more than a third of Britain’s trade. Also, such countries as Australia, New Zealand, and Canada became more dependent upon the United States for trade, especially after World War II.

Commonwealth map

The sudden decolonization of the British colonies in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s created the foundations for the current commonwealth. India’s decision to stay in the commonwealth in 1949 provided a precedence for later nonsettler colonies to join the commonwealth after independence.

In order to keep its political sovereignty while still allowing for cultural ties, India accepted the king of England as the symbolic head of the commonwealth. In 1949, when India accepted the king as the symbolic head of the commonwealth, the British Commonwealth of Nations changed its name to the Commonwealth of Nations, so as not to imply that its peoples were all of British ethnicity.

As a number of newly independent countries applied to join the commonwealth after they gained independence, the composition of the commonwealth shifted from a meeting of predominantly white countries to a multicultural organization.


At the Heads of Governments Conferences in Singapore in 1971 and in Ottawa in 1973, the general consensus was that the commonwealth should be a loose political association of the former British Empire. The Commonwealth of Nations continued to uphold these principals into the 21st century.

As of 2006 Queen Elizabeth II, the queen of England, held the title head of commonwealth. The commonwealth heads of government decide who will be the next commonwealth secretary-general, the official who leads the Commonwealth Secretariat, the decision-making body of the Commonwealth of Nations. Every five years the heads of government elect a new secretary-general at the Commonwealth Secretariat meeting.

Members as of 2006 included Antigua and Barbuda, Australia, the Bahamas, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belize, Botswana, Brunei Darussalam, Cameroon, Canada, Cyprus, Dominica, Fiji, Gambia, Ghana, Grenada, Guyana, India, Jamaica, Kenya, Kiribati, Lesotho, Malawi, Malaysia, Maldives, Malta, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Nauru, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Samoa, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Solomon Islands, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Swaziland, Tanzania, Tonga, Trinidad and Tobago, Tuvalu, Uganda, United Kingdom, Trinidad and Tobago, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.