Sarkar Publishes Article in Journal of Cold War Studies
Jayita Sarkar, Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, recently published a single-authored peer-reviewed article in the Journal of Cold War Studies.
The article, entitled “U.S. Policy to Curb West European Nuclear Exports, 1974–1978,” is based on Sarkar’s second book project. It demonstrates the nature and character of transatlantic tensions over nuclear exports in the fraught landscape of the 1970s global atomic marketplace. It studies United States response to French and West German nuclear exports to Pakistan and India respectively, and highlights the intersections of commercial interests and Cold War geopolitics after the 1973 oil price shock.
The abstract of the article is below, and the full PDF can be found here:
After India’s 1974 nuclear explosion publicly demonstrated the proliferation risks from nuclear assistance, the United States government increased its efforts to control nuclear exports worldwide. In doing so, U.S. policymakers faced challenges from two of its major West European allies, France and West Germany, who pursued their commercial interests through nuclear exports to countries like Pakistan, Brazil, Iran and India, among others. Despite multilateral efforts like the formation of the Nuclear Suppliers Group and bilateral negotiations with the supplier countries’ governments, the administrations of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter only obtained partial success. Commercial interests of the firms, influence of pro-exports coalitions inside the supplier countries, and the emerging importance of the Soviet Union and countries of the Eastern bloc as alternative suppliers influenced the outcome. The United States was, however, relatively more successful with respect to Paris through a series of quid pro quo but far less effective vis-à-vis Bonn. Using newly declassified archival documents, this research sheds new light on U.S. nonproliferation policy in the aftermath of the 1973 oil price shock.
Jayita Sarkar, an historian by training, is Assistant Professor of International Relations at Boston University’s Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies. Her expertise is in the history of U.S. foreign policy, nuclear proliferation, the global Cold War, South Asia and Western Europe. Her research has appeared or is forthcoming in the Journal of Cold War Studies, Journal of Strategic Studies, Cold War History, International History Review, and elsewhere. Dr. Sarkar has held fellowships at MIT, Harvard, Columbia and Yale universities, and obtained a doctorate in International History from the Graduate Institute Geneva in Switzerland.