Opening Up Arms Control Silos

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.

Averting Doomsday forms part of a rich and vibrant new generation of scholarship on U.S. nuclear history that has emerged in the last decade or so. Scholars such as James Cameron, Francis J. Gavin, Shane J. Maddock, and Or Rabinowitz have all explored different facets of policy, bureaucracy, and ideology.¹ Works by these scholars all draw connections between nuclear strategy and other domestic and foreign issues. Garrity and Mahan make these connections, primarily with Nixon’s well-known intertwining of electoral politics and success in foreign relations, but do so in a way that draws together strands that are frequently viewed in isolation.

After setting the context of Nixon’s arms control inheritance and his overall arms control and national security agendas, the book dives first into the world of biological and chemical weapons control (B/CWC). Here, it is made clear that while important, B/CWC never had the impact on Nixon and Henry Kissinger that nuclear weapons did. This was despite the specter of the war in Vietnam and domestic and international condemnation of U.S. use of chemical weapons in that conflict. Vietnam became coupled to high profile chemical weapons incidents within the United States, a coupling that provoked action on these issues. However, for a foreign policy duo who emphasized linkage, Nixon and Kissinger never substantively did so with biological and chemical weapons, despite the fact that the Soviet leadership appeared willing to link B/CWC with wider matters of concern. Biological weapons and toxins came to the fore, though, as a sop to the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) who wished to retain the potential for chemical weapons use in Southeast Asia. Nixon and Kissinger’s relative lack of interest and involvement in these issues contrast markedly with their persistent and overarching involvement in the nuclear realm.

The majority of Averting Doomsday is therefore focused on nuclear issues, whether that be SALT, ABMT, ratification of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), or nuclear testing during detente. Chapters four and six focus on SALT, both in terms of the SALT1 agreement and the “unfinished business” of SALT2. It is within these chapters (and chapter five on the NPT ratification process), that the collision of internecine warfare within the administration, Nixon and Kissinger’s mode of centralizing control over foreign policy, and Nixon’s overwhelming desire to receive credit for any and all success emerges most forcefully. Likewise, the Nixon-Kissinger belief that nuclear arms control was simply a means to an end rather than an end in and of itself is also clearly apparent. None of this is particularly new, but there is a clarity here to the fights that took place between the White House, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the JCS, and the National Security Council. The clashes are persuasively drawn, but, at times, more could have been said about the people behind them. The Nixon administration was full of what could charitably be described as “big personalities” and a little more biographical detail about what motivated many of their positions (particularly during the turbulent time of Watergate) would have added even more welcome color to the story.

In their effort to provide a holistic assessment of arms control, most broadly defined, Garrity and Mahan also cover non-proliferation issues and nuclear testing. In particular, they address the Nixonian apathy (sometimes antipathy) towards NPT ratification and the ways in which inter-allied nuclear bargaining selectively undermined the NPT’s core tenets. There are points here where the authors’ arguments are themselves slightly undermined by a lack of attention to some recent scholarship. There is a significant and ever-expanding body of work on post-NPT U.S. non-proliferation policy, U.S.-UK non-proliferation relations (including this author’s own 2017 monograph), and on U.S.-Japanese nuclear relations.² In trying to encompass the totality of Nixon-era non-proliferation policy and action, there is a necessary sparseness to the detail and depth compared to the granular approach to the inter-departmental SALT conflicts. Likewise, the section on approaches could have benefitted from expansion, particularly in regard to the ways in which administrations such as Nixon’s used testing thresholds as a means to attempt to restrain potentially nuclear capable allies.³

Averting Doomsday is ambitious, readable, and admirably broad in its scope and coverage. While the promise of assessing biological, chemical, and nuclear arms control, non-proliferation, and testing strategies in one relatively brief volume is never quite met, this is still a fine piece of work and one that will interest scholars in many fields and sub-fields. It is a fitting tribute to the late Patrick J. Garrity, commendably brought to final fruition by his distinguished co-author.

Footnotes