Volume 23, Number 2 · February 19, 1976
The Cold War and Détente
By H. Stuart Hughes
A World Destroyed: The Atomic Bomb and the Grand Alliance
by Martin J. Sherwin
Knopf, 315 pp., $10.00
Special Envoy to Churchill and Stalin 1941-1946
by W. Averell Harriman, by Elie Abel
Random House, 595 pp., $15.00
With the publication of these two books, the debate on the origins of the cold war launched by the 'revisionist' historians of the 1960s has been raised to a new level of courtesy, nuance, and scrupulous documentation. This is not to say that in emphasis and structure Harriman's war memoirs and Sherwin's analysis of atomic grand strategy bear much resemblance. Although they cover an almost identical time span, the overlap in their subject matter is minimal. From an ideological standpoint, if we label Herbert Feis's series of volumes as 'right' and such works as Gar Alperovitz's Atomic Diplomacy and Gabriel Kolko's The Politics of War as 'left,' we may put Sherwin in the left-center and Harriman in the right-center. One stresses the crucial importance of the bomb, the other such political and territorial disputes as the fate of Poland. They differ sharply on the reasons Truman chose the month of July 1945 for the Potsdam Conference. How is it possible, then, to find two such divergent books alike responsible and persuasive?
Review, 4442 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |