Averting Doomsday: Arms Control During the Nixon Presidency by Patrick J. Garrity and Erin R. Mahan

Abstract

The story of arms control's heyday has been told numerous times before. Indeed, there is no shortage of 1960s–70s arms control lore to be found throughout innumerable memoires and journalistic accounts. Its retelling in Averting Doomsday, by Patrick J. Garrity and Erin R. Mahan, takes a unique approach, looking exclusively at the vast array of arms control accomplishments that occurred under Nixon's watch—what Kenneth Waltz might have called a “first image” account, among the three possible images of man, the state, and war. The book also serves as a kind of intellectual history of Nixon and his ideas and beliefs about weapons of mass destruction, evolving those beliefs as he was confronted with political exigencies they presented. In this account, Nixon plays the antihero, tacitly tasked with averting doomsday, fears of which rear their head on his watch during his presidency—this time including biological and chemical weapons, in addition to nuclear. The rub is this: while more arms control agreements were inked during Nixon's presidency than any other U.S. president, the man himself was unequivocally not pro-arms control. The authors look at arms control through the lens of Nixon's presidency, with a focus on his political ambitions. Culling from a wide array of primary sources, including Nixon's White House recordings and recently declassified primary source documents, the authors craft an image of a deeply political being, whose ambitions collided with a bevy of weapons of mass destruction concerns during his presidency. While John Newhouse famously told the tale of SALT I journalistically in his book Cold Dawn, in which he faithfully chronicled the trials and tribulations of the negotiation process in painstaking detail, Garrity and Mahan leave that aside and tell the story of SALT I and its accompanying Antiballistic Missile Treaty through the lens of Nixon's yearning for political success, his political viability, and his electability. Similarly, pertinent personalities like Nixon's national security advisor Henry Kissinger are described as a function of their proximity to and favor with the president. The timing of the publication of Averting Doomsday is fortuitous; it comes at a moment when the world could use a reminder of not only the prolonged and arduous efforts that went into the crafting of multiple arms control treaties but also the value of their complementarity. The chapter in the book that speaks to design and redesign of SALT II is particularly illuminating in this regard. SALT II had multiple functions: it was meant to shore up gaps that remained upon SALT I's inking, and create greater symmetry in limitations for the United States and Soviet Union. In addition, SALT II negotiations also addressed the idea of making SALT I a permanent agreement in order to solidify the progress the United States and Soviet Union had made in creating some semblance of stability and thwarting the nuclear arms race. Today, we tend to consider each agreement in isolation when discussing its merits and deficiencies, but the origins of nuclear arms control were designed and effectuated in a systemic approach. While the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty limited the number of nuclear weapons states, among other aims, the Nuclear Suppliers Group and IAEA Trigger List were then created to close proliferation gaps from nuclear materials, for example, that could contribute to proliferation and nuclear breakout. Similarly, SALT I was meant to be the beginning of a process of restraint. Whether we will ever get to the end goal of stability at low numbers now remains to be seen. Notably, it was as difficult during Nixon's presidency to negotiate away a missile-related arms race as it appears today.