establish effective safeguards by way of inspection and other means to protect complying States against the hazards of violations and evasions
Reaction
The US agreed to turn over all of its weapons on the condition that all other countries pledge not to produce them and agree to an adequate system of inspection. The Soviets rejected this plan on the grounds that the United Nations was dominated by the United States and its allies in Western Europe, and could therefore not be trusted to exercise authority over atomic weaponry in an evenhanded manner. The USSR insisted that America eliminate its own nuclear weapons before considering proposals for a system of controls and inspections. Although the Soviets showed increased interest in the cause of arms control after they became a nuclear power in 1949, and particularly after the death of Stalin in 1953, the issue of the Soviet Union submitting to international inspection was always a thorny one upon which many attempts at nuclear arms control were stalled. Crucially, the Baruch Plan suggested that none of the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council would be able to veto a decision to punish culprits. In presenting his plan to the United Nations, Baruch stated: The Baruch Plan was not agreed to by the Soviet Union, and though debate on the matter continued until 1948, it was not seriously advanced later than the end of 1947. The USSR was, at the time of the negotiations, pursuing their own atomic bomb project, and the United States was continuing its own weapons development and production. With the failure of the plan, both nations embarked on programs of weapons development, innovation, production, and testing as part of the overall nuclear arms race of the Cold War. Bertrand Russell urged control of nuclear weapons in the 1940s and early 1950s to avoid the likelihood of a general nuclear war, and felt hopeful when the Baruch Proposal was made. In late 1948 he suggested that "the remedy might be the threat of immediate war by the United States on Russia for the purpose of forcing nuclear disarmament on her." Later he thought less well of the Baruch Proposal as "Congress insisted upon the insertion of clauses which it was known that the Russians would not accept." In his 1961 book Has Man a Future?, Russell described the Baruch plan as follows: The Baruch Plan is often questioned by scholars on whether it was a legitimate effort to achieve global cooperation on nuclear control. The Baruch Plan is often cited in works promoting nuclear power or revisiting nuclear arms control. In philosopher Nick Bostrom's 2014 work, he cited the Baruch Plan as part of an argument that a future power possessing superintelligence that obtained a sufficient strategic advantage would employ it to establish a benign 'singleton' or form of global unity: "If this were done with the intention to benefit everybody, for instance by replacing national rivalries and arms races with a fair, representative, and effective world government, it is not clear that there would be even a cogent moral objection to the leveraging of a temporary strategic advantage into a permanent singleton.":89
