Recent books about ...

... the Anglo-American relationshipfrom the mid-20th century onwards

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Kennedy, Macmillan, and the Nuclear Test-Ban Debate, 1961–63. By Kendrick Oliver. (New York: St. Martin's, 1998. x, 252 pp. $65.00, isbn 0-312-17599-X.)

The conclusion of a limited nuclear test ban (LTB) treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union in the summer of 1963, which banned signatories from conducting atmospheric and above-ground nuclear explosions, is increasingly recognized as a turning point in the Cold War. After dangerous confrontations over Berlin and Cuba, the accord seemed to symbolize the superpowers' mutual recognition of the need to channel their ongoing rivalry in a more predictable and controllable direction. As Marc Trachtenberg argues in his A Contructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 1945–1963 (1999), the treaty marked the emergence of a "relatively stable system," and the Cold War itself became "a different kind of conflict, more subdued, more modulated, more artificial, and, above all, less terrifying." Often lost or obscured, however, in many accounts that focus on the treaty as the culmination of the "crisis years" diplomacy between Washington and Moscow and the tense duels between John F. Kennedy and Nikita S. Khrushchev, is the role played by the third major actor in this drama (and signatory of the treaty), Britain and its prime minister, Harold Macmillan.

Kennedy, Macmillan, and Nuclear Weapons. By Donette Murray. (New York: St. Martin's, 2000. x, 220 pp. $65.00, ISBN 0-312-22221-1.)

British scholars continue to find Anglo-American relations a compelling topic and persevere in the quest to uncover the true nature of the special relationship. Some have celebrated it, some have questioned its very existence, but, whatever the perspective, it continues to provide the main intellectual framework for British studies of issues and events in relations between Britain and the United States since 1940. This study continues in that tradition. Donette Murray sets out to analyze the relations between the two countries over nuclear weapons between 1960 and 1963 or, more specifically, over the British nuclear deterrent. She finds those relations to deteriorate in late 1962 into their worst crisis since the conflict over the Suez Canal in 1956. At this point Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's cost-effectiveness approach led to the cancellation of the Skybolt air-to-ground missile. Skybolt had been promised to Britain in 1960 to extend the life-span of its strategic V-bomber force. It had become the centerpiece of the Macmillan government's defense strategy and the test of the credibility of the government itself. Murray depicts this in dramatic terms as a disastrous breakdown in Anglo-American relations, as the cherished multiple channels of intimate communication suddenly dried up in November and December 1962, and as President John F. Kennedy, McNamara, and their advisers showed no awareness of the problems cancellation would cause to Prime Minister Harold Macmillan.

 

Anglo-American Strategic Relations and the French Problem, 1960–1963: A Troubled Partnership. By Constantine A. Pagedas. (London: Cass, 2000. xviii, 308 pp. $59.50, ISBN 0-7146-5002-1.)

At Nassau in the Bahamas, from December 18 to 21, 1962, President John F. Kennedy met the United States' "obligation to the British." Harold Macmillan, the British prime minister, asked for Polaris as a substitute for the Skybolt missile that the Americans had canceled. Despite the opposition of advisers, Kennedy gave Britain Polaris at low cost and helped to preserve the independent British nuclear deterrent for the following three decades.

The Origins of the Eisenhower Doctrine: The US, Britain, and Nasser's Egypt, 1953–57. By Ray Takeyh. (New York: St. Martin's, 2000. xx, 216 pp. $65.00, ISBN 0-312-23085-0.)

This is a study of five years of dramatic political events in the Middle East. The overriding problem is how the Eisenhower administration tried but failed to guide and influence Egyptian foreign policy into embracing American containment policy. Ray Takeyh briefly reviews a number of complex issues in connection to this theme. After introducing the Middle East in American Cold War policy, Takeyh retells the history of the 1954 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty resulting in a possible situation of cooperative United States–Egyptian relations. Next the American thinking on a defense line along the Northern Tier and the Alpha plan (an attempt to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict) is outlined. The results of those policies, the Israeli Gaza raid in February 1955 and the Egyptian arms deal with the Soviet Union in September, are considered in the fourth chapter. The next two chapters present Operation Omega, which aimed to reorient or marginalize Egyptian policy by exerting increasing economical and political pressure, and the Suez crisis. The seventh chapter considers how the failure of previous policies led to a more active policy of American intervention in regional politics, the Eisenhower Doctrine. The doctrine is thus placed within the framework of American policy since 1953.