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Romania’s nuclear negotiations

Few people are aware that Romania had a nuclear weapons program in the late 1970s and 1980s. Even fewer know how the communist leadership managed to persuade its international partners to grant Romania the dual-use technology it needed for both a civilian and a military nuclear program. In this article, I will examine Romania‟s nuclear technology acquisition techniques in the light of several historical episodes. Romania‟s nuclear cooperation with the Soviet Union, and the dynamics of Romania‟s negotiations with Western countries for nuclear technology will be looked at through the lens of Romania‟s role as a communication channel between the United States and North Vietnam.

Romania‟s nuclear acquisition strategy represents an understudied dimension in its foreign policy. The pursuit of nuclear technology anchored Romania into the arena of global politics, which underlines the significance of nuclear proliferation for Cold War international history.

Studying Romania‟s Cold War nuclear program offers the researcher the opportunity to add empirical depth to the literature by integrating newly published documents and recently declassified materials from archives in Romania, the US, Canada, the UK, and France, as well as open source materials in Russian. Until recently, access to Romanian archives was restricted, leaving scholars to rely on propaganda materials such as the Romanian Communist Party (RCP) newspapers, and official statements. Even after the declassification of RCP documents, Romania‟s foreign relations have rarely been studied through the prism of multi-archival research, limiting the extent to which the literature on communist Romania could be integrated into Cold War international history.

The historiography about the role Bucharest played in the Cold War revolves around the notion of „independence.‟ Romania is portrayed either as a „maverick satellite‟ or as a „Trojan Horse‟ for the Soviet Union. The proponents of the „maverick satellite‟ narrative explain Bucharest‟s foreign policy initiatives with reference to the Romanian-Soviet split.² Cold War historians like Mark Kramer, John  Lewis Gaddis, Melvyn Leffler, and Vladimir Zubok, mention Romania‟s role as that of a counter-force within the Eastern bloc, balancing against the Soviet Union through its warm relations with the West. The supporters of the „Trojan Horse‟ argument assert that Romania‟s independent foreign policy was essentially one of deceit. They portray the Secretary General of the Romanian Communist Party, Nicolae Ceaușescu, as Moscow‟s most faithful servant, funneling all the intelligence and technology he acquired from the West to the Soviet Union, thus working to undermine the capitalist bloc.³

In this article, I suggest that these two narratives offer too narrow an interpretation of Romanian foreign policy. The „maverick satellite‟ theory cannot explain instances where Romania and the Soviet Union cooperated, while the Trojan Horse argument cannot account for Romania‟s occasional unwillingness to play Moscow‟s game. Moreover, these two theories cannot account for why cooperation or confrontation in Romania‟s relations with the uperpowers occurred when they did. A few renowned scholars challenge the conventional narrative. Vladimir Tismăneanu, for instance, argues that „for Ceaușescu, Brezhnev was quite a comfortable partner; although there were crises in Romanian-Soviet relations, they never reached the point of an open clash.‟⁴ Dennis Deletant, starting from the extent of Soviet pressures on Bucharest, proposes a more refined view of Romania‟s position within the Warsaw Pact, namely one of „limited autonomy.‟ ⁵ This article seeks to elucidate the connection between Bucharest‟s nuclear negotiations with the West and the reasons behind their timing, by bringing in global Cold War issues like the technology transfers between developed and developing countries, East-West trade and nuclear proliferation.

By investigating this possible link between Romania‟s nuclear ambitions and its conflict mediations we can connect the historiography on Ceaușescu‟s Romania with that on the global Cold War. My research builds on the definition of the global Cold War offered by Odd Arne Westad, one of the leading exponents of the New Cold War History. For Westad, the term „global‟ can be used with reference to „processes that took place on or toward different continents at roughly the same time.‟⁶ Westad focuses on the Cold War as it was fought by the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. Yet, increasingly, scholars have also emphasized the role of smaller powers in global affairs during the period of détente, including nuclear proliferation.⁷

Globalization blurred the boundaries of the superpowers‟ spheres of influence and changed the relations between centres and their satellites, even in closed systems like the Eastern bloc. During the globalizing world of the 1960s and 1970s, both the US and the USSR could build bridges to satellites which formally belonged to their opponent‟s camp, without triggering a Third World War. Small powers could pursue multiple non-mutually exclusive alignments, expanding the geographical coverage of their foreign policy and having a more active role in international politics. For small powers like Romania, among others, these multiple alignments entailed great risks and overwhelming constrains, but also enticing benefits.⁸

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