bout de papier, Vol. 11, No. 2 (1994) — Summer 1994 // Été 1994, pp. 51–52
PEARSON AND CANADA’S ROLE IN
NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT AND ARMS
CONTROL NEGOTIATIONS, 1945-1957 by
Joseph Levitt, McGill-Queen’s University
Press, 1993, 336 pp., $39.95 Cdn.
Reviewed by Greg Donaghy
Commentators on postwar Canadian diplomacy have frequently explored their subject through interpretative syntheses that cut broad swaths through the events of the late 1940s and the 1950s. Designed as contributions to the perpetual national debate on Canada’s place in the international system and Ottawa’s ability to pursue an independent foreign policy, such studies have put the cart before the horse. Too often they substitute generalizations about Canada the responsible middle power — or Canada, the American satellite — for the kind of detailed historical research that is the vital foundation of true synthesis. Joseph Levitt’s most recent work, Pearson and Canada’s Role in Nuclear Disarmament and Arms Control Negotiations, 1945-1957, represents the kind of exacting case study that Canadian diplomatic history urgently needs.
Diving into the tangled mass of files on the first decade of cold war disarmament negotiations, Levitt has emerged with a well-organized and comprehensible text. While capturing enough detail to convey the complex and convoluted course of these recurring talks, Levitt refuses to become bogged down in minutiae and deftly illuminates the central issues defining each succeeding round of negotiations. The result is a work that responds to the needs of both the interested generalist and the specialist. General readers in particular will welcome Levitt’s two opening chapters: helpfully, he begins with a brief overview of the strategic considerations that governed the positions of the two Cold War superpowers and that had so great an impact on the negotiations. In a second introductory chapter, Levitt provides the reader with a thumbnail sketch of Lester B. Pearson, who played a pivotal role in determining Canadian policy, first as Under-Secretary and then as Secretary of State for External Affairs.
Pearson’s importance as the architect of Canadian policy is clearly demonstrated in Levitt’s discussion of the first round of the interminable negotiations that begin, as far as the western powers were concerned, in the fall of 1945. During the 1945 Anglo- American-Canadian talks in Washington, he argues, the Canadian Under-Secretary of State was instrumental in promoting the view that atomic energy should be subject to international control. Pearson’s success, which Levitt might have usefully documented more fully through research in Washington and London, was short-lived. In the charged atmosphere of the burgeoning Cold War, serious negotiations in the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission quickly gave way to an unrelenting struggle by each side to secure the support of world opinion. During the following three years, Canada assumed a prominent role in the western effort to win this important battle.
Ottawa’s recurring desire to score points at Moscow’s expense conflicted with its more reasoned belief in the necessity and desirability of maintaining a dialogue with the Soviet Union. Levitt avoids wrestling with the implications of the resulting ambiguity. Instead, eager to move the story along, he focuses on the more sharply defined, and perhaps more positive, aspects of Canadian policy. Thus, Canada’s helpful efforts to have the General Assembly establish the Disarmament Commission in the fall of 1951 as a forum for real negotiation provide Levitt with the opportunity to illuminate a second characteristic of Canadian policy: a determination to encourage the United States and the Soviet Union to continue their talks. Despite Ottawa’s desire to promote this east-west exchange, the large and unwieldy Disarmament Commission proved an inhospitable environment and the talks quickly degenerated into empty posturing.
During the course of 1953, with the inauguration of President Eisenhower and the death of Stalin, the cold war thawed slightly and progress seemed again possible. In response, the Disarmament Commission established a more private and restricted sub-committee — United Kingdom, France, USA, USSR and Canada — to explore the prospects for progress. In this new arena, contends Levitt, Canada assumed two new roles. As Washington began to abandon its unrealistic plans for “complete and general disarmament” in favour of more limited arms control measures, the United States found itself separated from its French and British allies, who preferred to seek a more complete ban on nuclear weapons. Increasingly, Canada used its technical competence and diplomatic skills to draw its North Atlantic partners together. Similarly, Canada sought to bridge the growing gap between the Western allies and the growing non-aligned world, where exposure to the harmful effects of radiation fall-out from testing piqued interest in nuclear disarmament. Canada was particularly quick to respond to Afro- Asian concerns with a proposal to limit nuclear testing, a Canadian preoccupation whose origins in 1956 are documented by Levitt.
Levitt’s central conclusions are safe and predictable. Canada, he demonstrates convincingly, enjoyed considerable success in fulfilling a variety of unessential but useful roles that encouraged the western powers to advance together towards serious negotiations. Distressed by the arid results of the talks and disappointed that Canada played so small a role in promoting the disarmament cause, Levitt allows his impatience with the slow and repetitive nature of these negotiations to creep into his prose. The conflict between Levitt’s heartfelt desire to have Canada assume the prophet’s mantle and his reasoned recognition of the limits placed on Ottawa’s policy options adds a sense of ambiguity to Pearson and Canada’s Role in Nuclear Disarmament. Levitt’s failure to resolve this ambiguity, and to impart to his task a sharper sense of direction, is perhaps this work’s most serious problem.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 11, No. 2 (1994) — Summer 1994 // Été 1994, pp. 51–52. Read the rest of this issue →
