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In Euromissile s, Susan Colbourn tells the story of the height of nuclear crisis and the remarkable waning of the fear that gripped the globe. In the Cold War conflict that pitted nuclear superpowers against one another, Europe was the principal battleground. Washington and Moscow had troops on the ground and missiles in the fields of their respective allies, the NATO nations and the states of the Warsaw Pact. Euromissiles-intermediate-range nuclear weapons to be used exclusively in the regional theater of war-highlighted how the peoples of Europe were dangerously placed between hammer and anvil. That made European leaders uncomfortable and pushed fearful masses into the streets demanding peace in their time. At the center of the story is NATO. Colbourn highlights the weakness of the alliance seen by many as the most effective bulwark against Soviet aggression. Divided among themselves and uncertain about the depth of US support, the member states were riven by the missile issue. This strategic crisis was, as much as any summit meeting between US president Ronald Reagan and Soviet general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, the hinge on which the Cold War turned. Euromissiles is a history of diplomacy and alliances, social movements and strategy, nuclear weapons and nagging fears, and politics. To tell that history, Colbourn takes a long view of the strategic crisis-from the emerging dilemmas of allied defense in the early 1950s through the aftermath of the INF Treaty thirty-five years later. The result is a dramatic and sweeping tale that changes the way we think about the Cold War and its culmination.

NATO’s ongoing relevance as a political alliance appeared time and again in the debates of the 1990s, as the Western allies struggled to adapt their old institutions to the challenges of a new world, one without the Cold War. This article explores continuities in allied thinking pointing to concerns and considerations that remained no less relevant with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the splintering of the Warsaw Pact, and the unraveling of the Soviet Union. It focuses on the popular notion that NATO represented a political alliance, not merely a military one, showing how Canadian policymakers advocated for NATO enlargement on the basis of the Atlantic alliance’s political credentials. In so doing, this article suggests new avenues to examine and reevaluate the process of NATO enlargement by incorporating the perspectives—and increasingly available archival records—of often neglected members of the alliance.

For much of 1982, NATO was seen as an alliance in crisis once more. The introduction of martial law in Poland and the subsequent US decision to introduce sanctions created a considerable rift, as many of Washington’s partners resented the measures and the threat that these sanctions posed to the construct of a natural gas pipeline connecting Siberian energy reserves to consumers in Western Europe. Beset by problems, two of the Alliance’s members, the UK and Canada, saw a possible role as an intermediary between the two sides of the intra-alliance dispute. Both British and Canadian efforts to mediate the problem faced clear obstacles, but the fact that officials in London and in Ottawa saw a role for themselves as an interpreter sheds new light on the common assertion that the Siberian pipeline question divided the USA from its Western European allies. British and Canadian thinking reflected a paradox that, at once, viewed the transatlantic rift as one between the USA and the rest of the allies, while also seeing themselves as distinct from that binary.