Today’s the day: it’s the official release date for my book!
Euromissiles: The Nuclear Weapons That Nearly Destroyed NATO tells the history of an arms race in Cold War Europe, that over the theater nuclear forces or intermediate-range nuclear forces that dominated much of the politics of the 1970s and 1980s. I tell that history by putting NATO at the center of the story. I blend arms control talks and superpower relations with debates over nuclear strategy, intra-alliance decisionmaking, and antinuclear activism to illustrate the far-reaching consequences of the debates over the Euromissiles. Bringing those various strands together, I highlight the fundamental fragility of NATO as the Euromissiles repeatedly exposed the fault lines of the transatlantic bargain and took the alliance to the brink.
It’s a story about the past, but one that speaks to challenges still with us in the present, not least the uncomfortable realities of navigating a world with nuclear weapons.
Enough about what’s in the book. You can read it if that’s your thing! You can also buy a copy to put on your shelf and never read if that’s your thing! I won’t judge.
More interesting, at least for some historian types, is how I came to write this book in the first place. Bottom line up front: it was not exactly a linear journey. So, to celebrate the launch of Euromissiles, may I present some thoughts on the writing process and the weirdness that is the first book…
Unlike most first books, this is not my doctoral dissertation in some revised form. Sure, there are pieces and particular episodes that came out of dissertation work, but the size, scope, and animating questions of the book are all different.
I wrote a dissertation about NATO’s strategic debates in the nebulous middle phase of the Cold War, bridging from 1967 (when the allies released a report laying out NATO’s broad aims) to 1984 (when the allies, after a lot of arguments, reaffirmed that those earlier principles were still sound). It was a good dissertation by the standards of the genre. It had interesting research and used recently released archival materials to revisit key episodes in transatlantic relations. In other words, it did the things that most dissertations in international history do these days.
But when I got to the end of writing, editing, and defending, I had a hunch that it wasn’t a book, at least not the kind of book I wanted to write.
In part, that was a product of the dismal academic job market. There aren’t a lot of stable jobs for international historians out there and there were some obvious constraints that I already knew would limit my chances at a tenure-track job even further. By that point, I knew that I had some security for the next two years in the form of a postdoc at Yale’s International Security Studies program. I had no clue what might come after that.
And so, I wanted to write a book that people outside the academy might read. It was entirely possible that I would only have the chance to write one book. I wanted to make it count.
That explains some things, but doesn’t explain why the Euromissiles.
There, the reason was simple. In writing the dissertation, there were two books I really wished were out there, but for some reason didn’t exist yet. One was a single volume, narrative history of the Euromissiles from start to finish. The other was an up-to-date and well-written book about NATO’s Cold War. The choice was pretty easy from there, as I knew Tim Sayle’s Enduring Alliance was in the works and would be fantastic. (I was not wrong on that. It has become an instant classic in my opinion.) As for the Euromissiles, there were a few great edited volumes — The Euromissile Crisis and the End of the Cold War springs to mind — but nothing that told the story at a macro level in one narrative.
I decided I could do that.
I spent the next two years doing a lot more research, a lot more writing, and figuring out how to wrangle what seemed like an ever-expanding story into a single narrative. It took a few iterations to get that balance right. At one point, I resorted to putting a Post-It note on my computer monitor with a much-needed reminder: “you aren’t writing an encyclopedia.” I owe my editor at Cornell, Michael McGandy, a big thank you on that front. I’m not sure he realizes just how much his reactions to an earlier version of the manuscript helped me rethink nearly everything about the book’s structure and flow.
Over the course of writing and publishing this book, it has (depressingly) become more and more relevant. In the spring of 2018, when I decided the book would be a transatlantic history of the Euromissiles, the INF Treaty — the 1987 agreement that did away with the Euromissiles — had been on the rocks for a few years over violations, both real and alleged, but it was still in tact. That fall, Donald Trump pulled out of the agreement. The collapse of the INF Treaty triggered a wave of nostalgia for the salad days of arms control and a bunch of think pieces that applied the history of the Euromissiles in service of calls for new deployments, often in Asia to counter a rising threat from the People’s Republic of China. Both of these cottage industries made me nervous. They diverged in critical ways, but they all seemed too confident that the history of the Euromissiles was somehow destined to turn out the way that it did. I have no doubt that this frustration informed some of the choices I made about how to frame the book and what I hoped readers would take away from reading it.
If what I was writing seemed relevant in 2018, that feeling is about tenfold in 2022. Thanks Vladimir Putin!
Many of the basic dilemmas and difficulties I write about in the book sound all too familiar today. Russia’s full-scale offensive against Ukraine, expanding the war first launched in 2014, has brought back old questions about the foundations of our security. Are our alliances the best way to provide the kind of security we want? How do we know if nuclear weapons make us safer? How do we know if deterrence will work?