Over the years, countless undergraduate students in survey courses and special subjects have been lectured about U.S. President Richard Nixon’s May 1972 visit to Moscow, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty’s (ABMT) signing, and the agreement that concluded the first round of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT). Images of Nixon and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev putting pen to paper in the Kremlin’s grand St. Vladimir Hall will be familiar to hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of students who have studied U.S. and Soviet foreign policy, the Cold War, and the arms race. Yet, this outward appearance of amity and compromise between leaders with their metaphorical fingers on the metaphorical buttons of thousands of nuclear weapons belies the lengthy and, at times, vicious bureaucratic infighting that plagued the SALT and ABMT negotiations. It is this very bureaucratic complexity that the late Patrick J. Garrity (who sadly passed away on May 10, 2021) and Erin R. Mahan seek to address in Averting Doomsday: Arms Control During the Nixon Presidency. Not only do they concern themselves with personal and institutional factors that influenced Nixon’s arms control agenda policies, but they also make a welcome effort to encompass the entirety of arms control. This ambitious aim brings together an assessment not just of strategic nuclear issues, but also of nuclear non-proliferation, nuclear testing, chemical weapons control, and biological weapons control. These areas are frequently left in silos—pun apologetically intended—and treated as distinct issues. Garrity and Mahan are therefore to be praised for such a comprehensive approach.