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Legions of Peace: UN Peacekeepers from the Global South

The opening chapter is a masterpiece of revisionism, picking apart the traditional understanding of how US nuclear posture evolved from Eisenhower’s commitment to rigidly pre-planned massive nuclear use to Kennedy’s finessed, dextrous concept of ‘flexible response’, a concept that Johnson then tried to entrench within NATO. Gavin’s message is that things did not happen quite that way. In fact, the idea of ‘graduated’ or ‘controlled’ nuclear retaliation ‘was simply not possible during the Kennedy and Johnson periods’. As late as 1969, Nixon’s Pentagon acknowledged that, while the US had the necessary weapons for low-level retaliation, it did not have the ‘planning and command and control capability’ to do anything other than conduct a ‘large, pre-planned nuclear assault’ (p. 34). The issue was buried by Vietnam, and it was not until the mid-1970s that ‘selectivity and flexibility’, including the avoidance of Soviet cities, started to be seen as feasible. Moreover, tactical nuclear weapons – long seen as increasing flexibility – were actually viewed as ‘inimical to the centralization vital to flexible response’ (p. 40; Pakistan: take note), yet their numbers spiralled upwards during the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies. The reason for this was to reassure jumpy European allies (pp. 40–41). In the end, ‘alliance management’ trumped nuclear strategy – much as it does today, with respect to NATO’s continued stationing of non-strategic nuclear weapons on European soil. Two of Gavin’s most important chapters deal with how nuclear non-proliferation was viewed in the past, especially the 1960s and 1970s. Mao’s ‘China was in many ways the original rogue state’ (p. 8), argues Gavin, and fears of a proliferation cascade or a domino reaction of proliferation were widespread (pp. 78–79), resulting in an intense debate as to whether China ought to be cajoled or coerced – and even bombed – into turning back from the bomb. The Johnson administration rejected pre-emption ‘both for China and in general’, and Gavin argues that China, despite Mao’s speeches on surviving and benefiting from a nuclear war, ultimately proved itself neither ‘reckless [nor] undeterrable’ (p. 102). The implication is clear enough. If it was possible to deter China then, it is possible to deter Iran now. That the two cases are cast so differently is a function of time, not facts. Gavin even throws in a mischievous suggestion: ‘Arguably, it has been the United States, more than any other state, that has pursued aggressive strategies by offering extended deterrence, seeking nuclear superiority, eschewing no-firstuse promises, and even making nuclear threats’ (p. 155). Moreover, China’s 1964 nuclear test did not induce a cascade at all. A US government study of the period estimated that eleven nations might follow suit, but within twenty years it was apparent how mistaken this had been: only India had performed a test (in 1974), and numerous other programmes had been abandoned. Gavin draws the lesson that ‘nuclear alarmists exaggerate and oversimplify contemporary nuclear threats while underplaying those of the past’ (p. 155). The present is not some dangerous, new nuclear age. Gavin ends with a finely balanced chapter on the question of ‘global zero’, as endorsed by US President Barack Obama in his famous 2009 speech in Prague. Gavin contends that its proponents ‘discount our ability to manage and control nuclear weapons’ and the dampening effect that such weapons have had on conventional interstate war (p. 163). However, its opponents underplay how nuclear weapons induced and exacerbated various dangerous crises, as well as the innate ‘temptation to do more with nuclear weapons than simply deter attacks on one’s homeland’ (pp. 164–68). Gavin ultimately leans heavily towards the latter side of this argument. However, his more significant point is that getting the history right is a prerequisite for making a judgment. And what history tells us is that ‘the key is not to worry so much about who possesses [nuclear weapons] ... and instead make sure they are never used’ (p. 169).