Avoiding Armageddon: Europe, the United States and the Struggle for Nuclear Nonproliferation, 1945-1970 (review)

As an American analyst of nuclear nonproliferation, I found reading Avoiding Armageddon a mind-expanding experience. Susanna Schrafstetter and Stephen Twigge have performed a needed service in analyzing the contributions made by Great Britain, France, and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) in the struggle to control the bomb. These U.S. allies often played an oppositional role during the first decades of the Cold War. If they were cast in a movie, they could easily have slipped into Marlon Brando's role as Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront, which, made in 1954, draws heavily on Cold War themes of power politics, fears of Communist infiltration, and loyalties to ideologies and allies. In the film's famous speech, Brando laments, "I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody." As dockworker Malloy, he takes on the political machine controlling the waterfront shipping industry and the dockworkers. By the end of the movie, he does become somebody by contending against the status quo. Similarly, Britain, France, and West Germany challenged the prevailing bilateral standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union—the superpower political and military machine.

Avoiding Armageddon masterfully "transforms the Europeans from merely bit players lurking in the wings of the Cold War to the center stage of world politics" (p. 13). Schrafstetter and Twigge weave together five major themes: the international option, the commercial option, the moral option, the multilateral option, and the legal option. Each theme represents a chronological stage in the efforts to attain nuclear disarmament and stem further proliferation. The chapter on the international option (1945–1948) examines the attempts to control nuclear weapons through negotiations sponsored by the United Nations (UN); the chapter on the commercial option (1948–1958) focuses on the Eisenhower administration's Atoms for Peace plan and the work of the UN Disarmament Commission; the chapter on the moral option (1954–1963) explores the West European countries' role in shaping the Test Ban Treaty negotiations; the chapter on the multilateral option (1957–1965) shows why the multilateral nuclear force proposal failed and how it helped to spur the legal option (1964–1969), which culminated in the signing of the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT).

Many books have detailed the first three decades of the Cold War, but few have grappled with the differing motivations and intentions of Britain, France, and West Germany and the various ways these countries interacted with both the United States and, to a lesser extent, the Soviet Union. From the outset, the authors clearly show that the three Western European states did not usually act as a monolithic power bloc. Each country sought first and foremost to maximize its national interests and then to serve larger arms control and nonproliferation goals. At times, national interests coincided. For instance, both Britain and France agreed to work together to prevent a nuclear-armed West Germany. An important milestone in achieving that objective occurred in 1954 when West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer renounced the acquisition of nuclear weapons in conjunction with the Paris Treaties that restored the FRG's sovereignty and brought that country into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). However, as Schrafstetter and Twigge show, the West Germans sought to regain equality with Britain and France by seeking to take part in a joint European or NATO nuclear force. The book convincingly "argues that the prospect of a nuclear-armed West Germany was a constant fear in London, Washington, and Moscow and was the primary, if unspoken, driver of nonproliferation policy during this period" (p. 134). Consequently, a major goal of the NPT negotiations was to bring the FRG into the treaty's confines as a non-nuclear weapon state at an early stage.

Britain and France confronted different challenges vis-à-vis the United States. Although the "special relationship" between Britain and the United States and the French visions...