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Mark Atwood Lawrence, Kristan Stoddart. Losing an Empire and Finding a Role: Britain, the USA, NATO, and Nuclear Weapons, 1964–1970., The American Historical Review, Volume 118, Issue 3, June 2013, Page 825, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/118.3.825
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Extract
The collapse of the communist bloc revolutionized the study of the Cold War by leading governments around the world to open previously top-secret archives. The most spectacular releases undoubtedly have come from formerly communist nations, whose geopolitical decision-making had been almost totally inaccessible to scholars. Western nations have relaxed secrecy rules too, making it possible for historians to appreciate more fully the complexities of policymaking in the United States, Britain, France, and other nations with relatively open archival traditions.
Kristan Stoddart's illuminating Losing an Empire and Finding a Role: Britain, the USA, NATO, and Nuclear Weapons, 1964–1970 is a prime example of the sort of study that is now possible on the Western side. Stoddart draws skillfully on newly declassified British documents to tell the story of nuclear policymaking in Great Britain during the crucial six-year administration of Prime Minister Harold Wilson and his Labour Party.
Although Stoddart emphasizes that the British government has withheld a good deal of material on grounds of protecting national security, he manages to assemble a deeply detailed study that convincingly carries forward a line of research initiated by Richard Moore in Nuclear Illusion, Nuclear Reality: Britain, the United States and Nuclear Weapons, 1958–64 (2010). Moore's book examines British policymaking under the Conservative Party in the first years after Britain acquired nuclear weapons.
