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410 Shorter Book Reviews Between 1970 and 1989, was Canada's federal government really "anglophone-controlled" (94)? How many would agree that "Canada is clearly handling the strains of a multicultural society better than the United States" (218)? Should the section on Jews not have compared their political influence in the two countries (177-179)? Despite these caveats, Continental Divide will long remain required reading for anyone who wants to understand similarities and differences between Canadians and Americans. Graeme Mount Department of History Laurentian University Richard G. Hewlett and Jack M. Holl. Atoms for Peace and War, 1953-1961: Eisenhower and the Atomic Energy Commission. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. xxix + 696 pp. Illus. With this book, the third volume in the official history of the United States atomic program, Hewlett and Holl bring the story of American nuclear policy down through the Eisenhower years and into the missile gap. There is an irony here. In 1953,when Hewlett and Holl take up their burden, the United States Atomic Energy Commission was on the technological frontier, with its billion-dollar facilities, acres of state-of-the-art factories, thousands of scientists and, above all, its dazzling national security rationale that underpinned both its budget and its political prestige. By 1989, when this book appeared, many of those same facilities, Hanford, Fernald, Savannah River, were regarded as dilapidated if not dangerous hangovers of a bygone age. The bill to clean them up, it seems, may well surpass what it cost to put them up. The low estate of atomic energy in the 1990s would have seemed incredible in the 1950s,when the United States was the unquestioned leader in the race for atomic power. Yet as Holl and Hewlett demonstrate, some of the origins of the nuclear industry's present scarcity ·1urkin that age of multibillion -dollar plenty. That, as they note, was not for lack of imaginative and sensitive leadership. As the authors are at pains to point out, their book fits well into the current rehabilitation of Eisenhower's political and administrative reputation. They have much to cover: Eisenhower's atoms for peace proposals and their international fall-out, the fostering of civilian Shorter Book Reviews 411 nuclear power, nuclear tests, and the beginnings of acute public concern about radiation hazards. All find their niche in what is, broadly, a thorough and highly professional example of political history. Hewlett and Hall have had to cope with a vast residue of documentation, with which they have dealt through a variety of team history; indeed, they assert that proper histories of large modern bureaucracies can only be undertaken in this way. It is hard not to sympathize with them. On the grounds of bulk alone, the history of American atomic policy must call forth the efforts of numbers of skilled researchers. Such research consumes money and time: seventeen years have elapsed between the second volume and this one. But while one cannot complain of the volume of research, one must observe that it is nevertheless too limited in scope, and that too much time has elapsed since the last volume appeared. There are doubtless good bureaucratic reasons for both phenomena. U.S. civil servants have problems travelling outside the country, except at their own expense; and it is a fair guess that the budget for this historical enterprise has been sometimes under threat. In this book it is purely American documents that are under scrutiny, despite the declassification of relevant British material. (Given the view of Canadian insignificance that prevails in the United States, it would be churlish to complain that the Americans have not taken advantage of Canadian declassification, but as the reader would expect, so it is.) This limits the authors' accounts of such phenomena as the International Atomic Energy Agency; and it also means that they do not deal with variant descriptions of the origins of such items as the Geneva conference on atomic energy in 1955. Anglo-American nuclear discussions are not covered in their entirety and, to my mind at least, rather more remains to be said about Eisenhower's discussions with Churchill and Eden on the subject--even granted that the British seem to...

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