Tag Archives: Book review

Arts, Books, History, NATO, Society, United States

Book review: Deterring Armageddon

LITERARY REVIEW: A BIOGRAPHY OF NATO

Intro: NATO’s modus operandi is centred around the pledge that an attack on one member is an attack on all. In a provocative new book, however, the author asks: would any nation today really put itself in the firing line to protect another?

DURING the depths of the Cold War, 40 years ago, there were undoubtedly gullible victims in Britain of Moscow propaganda.

Paradoxically, many of these people have now become warmongering Blairites, keen advocates in bombing distant countries. But back in the 1980s, they detested NATO with every human fibre. Houses were plastered with peacenik posters; many camped out at the U.S. Air Force base at Greenham Common, protesting against the presence of American cruise missiles; others still chained themselves to fences and blocked roads leading into the Naval base at Faslane; the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) was rampant among the militants who were disruptive in their aims and actions.

Many of these people were perceived as being deluded as they actively wanted the former Soviet Union to dominate all of Europe. They failed, yes, but actually, only by a narrow margin.

They failed because NATO held together under very great pressure from the Kremlin and from the European Left. The Communist Empire had exhausted itself in one last failed attempt to destroy the Free West, and the Soviet Union sickened and eventually perished.

Many things contributed to that demise, but many military commentators and analysts believe that the battle over cruise missiles, and the resolve of NATO, were decisive.

The NATO alliance, set up in 1949 specifically to prevent a Soviet takeover of Western Europe, still exists almost 33 years after the collapse of the Soviet empire. Yet, an oddity is at play. The alliance was created to deal with that particular menace, which still exists long after that threat melted away.

Even more surprising, NATO has actually got bigger since its arch enemy vanished. An explanation is more than overdue.

We should therefore be very grateful to Peter Apps, a British Army reservist, and Reuters columnist, for writing a comprehensive and full history of NATO since its inception in 1949 to today.

The workings of this book started life under the rather exalted working title “Sacred Obligation”. But are we looking at an organisation that has become the world’s most successful bluff?

Mr Apps spends a great deal of his time chronicling the endless unresolved tension between the mighty, rich, and powerful U.S., NATO’s backbone and muscle, and Europe, its vulnerable and pitifully weak underbelly. It was of course this tension which the USSR ceaselessly sought to exploit.

NATO’s historic and famous promise, that an attack on one would be an attack on all, was and remains a very precarious gamble. History features sad examples of security pacts being called out and exposed as bluffs.

The normally pugnacious Lord Palmerston wriggled out of Britain’s 1860s pledge to defend Denmark against Prussia – when he realised it would get us into a war we would lose.

Neville Chamberlain’s 1939 guarantee to protect Poland from Germany failed to deter Hitler from invading. Even worse, when the invasion came, Britain did nothing.

And we shouldn’t forget, either, how fiercely determined America was in 1939, and for years afterwards, in staying out of European quarrels. Donald Trump means what he says, too.

Washington only went to war against Berlin after Hitler declared war on America, not the other way round. Any careful and studious reader of this book will begin to wonder whether NATO, far from being an enshrined promise of aid in time of trouble, is in fact a good way of avoiding any real obligation to fight.

The much-touted Article 5 of NATO’s charter is not quite the magnificent guarantee of armed support from the strong to the weak that it appears to be. Members of the alliance pledge to assist an attacked nation “by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force”.

Read carefully. This means that if a NATO member does not “deem” armed force to be necessary, it can send a note of protest instead, or make a fierce and angry speech at the United Nations.

America would never have signed or ratified a treaty which obliged it to go to war, which is why the clause is so weak.

All the small, poor ill-armed countries on NATO’s eastern edge would be well advised to take note of that. During its 40-year life cycle, NATO has shown how cautious, limited, and risk-averse it has been. Its recent reinvention as a kind of mini-United Nations task force has been mainly outside its original operational area, in former Yugoslavia, Libya, and Afghanistan.

Its founding membership was carefully restricted to countries already well outside the Soviet sphere of influence.

It stood aside when Russian tanks crushed the 1953 East Berlin rising, the 1956 Budapest revolt, and the 1968 Prague Spring.

It did precious little when Moscow ordered Poland’s Communist rulers to curtail a democratic and Christian rebellion by imposing brutal martial law there from 1981 to 1983.

Where the West did stand up to Soviet power in Europe, mainly in West Berlin, it tended to be the U.S. which did most of the heavy lifting. We should suspect it is still much the same. In an enlightening passage, Apps describes a recent scene at NATO’s Joint Force Command in the Dutch town of Brunssum.  

He writes: “Officials in its 24-hour operations room described their main role as stopping the Ukraine war spreading to alliance territory”. Well, quite. For who knows what stress would be placed on NATO if, thanks to some rash incursion or off-course missile, it faced a direct war with Russia?

As it happens, the task of avoiding the spread of war into NATO territory would be much easier if NATO had not expanded so far east in the past 30 years. Its leaders had been warned.

In 1997, the greatest and toughest anti-Soviet U.S. diplomat of modern times, George Kennan, said shortly before he died: “Expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.”

Recalling his generation’s successful handling of Soviet power, he sighed: “This has been my life, and it pains me to see it so screwed up in the end.”

– Deterring Armageddon: A Biography of NATO by Peter Apps is published by Wildfire, 624pp

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Arts, Books, History, Maritime

Book Review: A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks

LITERARY REVIEW

STARING across the Solent in 1545, Henry VIII was appalled when he witnessed the sinking of his warship, the Mary Rose.

The Holy Roman Emperor’s ambassador of Charles V wrote: “Through misfortune and carelessness… the ship foundered, and all hands-on-board, to the number of about 500, were drowned, with the exception of about five and twenty or thirty servants, sailors and the like.”

More than 400 years later, the Mary Rose was raised from the seas. Its resurrection is one of the most significant achievements of maritime archaeology that is celebrated in this engrossing book by David Gibbins.

Gibbins is the ideal person to tell the story of shipwrecks. He is a distinguished underwater archaeologist, veteran of thousands of dives, and a best-selling novelist whose narrative skills are more harnessed to fact rather than fiction.

His earliest wreck is the Bronze Age boat discovered in 1992, its timbers miraculously preserved in the oxygen-free mud at the bed of the river that ran through Dover in prehistoric times. The Dover Boat was probably constructed some time between 1575 and 1520 BC. It would have been able to cross the Channel and make extended coastal journeys, possibly as far as the Baltic Sea northwards and the Bay of Biscay to the south.

The most recent wreck is the SS Gairsoppa, sunk by a U-boat during the Battle of the Atlantic in 1941. It had been carrying 17 tons of silver bullion. Some of this was recovered and the Royal Mint garnered some 20,000 coins from it.

Between the Dover Boat and the Gairsoppa, Gibbins highlights ten other wrecks. The Bronze Age ship found off the Turkish coast in 1982 was carrying an “astonishing diversity” of goods, from pottery to weaponry. It also had enough metal on board to make 5,000 swords. Another, more unorthodox find, was a folding writing tablet which some history scholars have described as “the world’s oldest book”.

A Greek ship from the 5th century BC, also located off the coast of Turkey, had a cargo that consisted mainly of wine. Letters stamped on the amphoras, huge jars, showed that it came from Erythrae, a place renowned for drink.

A scalpel handle found on a 2nd century AD Roman wreck revealed the probable presence of a skilled eye surgeon on board. It was most likely used in cataract operations.

What wrecks often show are patterns of trade. The discovery of a 9th century ship off an Indonesian island provided evidence of goods passing between Tang dynasty China and Persia. The huge cargo included more than 50,000 bowls, candlesticks, incense burners, and mirrors.  One of the items was already an antique when it sank beneath the waves.

More recently discovered wrecks have shed light on British and global history of the past 300 years. The Royal Anne Galley went down off the Cornish coast in 1721. Only three out of the 210 individuals on board survived.

Among those drowned was Lord Belhaven, sailing to Barbados to serve as the colony’s governor. Reportedly, the day before its departure, he was warned of his fate by “a mysterious woman in a mantle and hood”, but misguidedly chose to ignore her. Had the ship made it to the West Indies, it would have ben used to hunt down the buccaneer “Black Bart Roberts”.

Gibbins is a careful and sensitive narrator; he never loses sight of the reality that wrecks represent the tragic loss of human lives. However, he also knows they can open up “many fascinating byways of history to those willing to be fully immersed”.

– A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks by David Gibbins is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 304pp

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Arts, Books, History, Science

Book Review: Our Moon

LITERARY REVIEW

ACCORDING to astronaut Buzz Aldrin, the moon is mostly composed of greyish dust that smells of extinguished pyrotechnics which makes your eyes water.

Hardly an attractive environment, but we shouldn’t be fooled by first impressions. Were it not for the Moon, there would be no planet Earth. Or to be more precise, we wouldn’t even exist.

In exact and poetic prose, science writer and journalist Rebecca Boyle explains how many millennia ago – the timescale is still approximate – just how the Moon was formed from the same cosmic debris that made our world. Due to its gravitational impact, the Moon was responsible for pulling early fish-like creatures out of the Earth’s oceans and on to the shore.

It was from these that every creeping, crawling thing that inhabits our planet, including ourselves, developed. It is enough to give most of us nightmares.

The Moon is also Earth’s timekeeper. It continues to give us not only our days, but our months, seasons, and years. You may have thought that the Sun was in charge but, as the author explains, it is the pull of the Moon’s gravity on the Earth that holds our planet in place.

Without the Moon stabilising our tilt, at 23.4 degrees, we would wobble wildly and erratically, dramatically affecting our seasons and climate. In such a scenario, our planet would move from no tilt (meaning no seasons) to a large tilt (extreme weather and even ice ages). It is thanks to the Moon that the Earth remains a place that is more or less habitable – at least for now.

Prehistoric people weren’t aware of what went on in outer space, but they had worked out that the lunar cycle – the length of time it takes for the Moon to circle the Earth – governed not only their days but the seasons, too.

One of the most exciting passages in Rebecca Boyle’s book concerns the fairly recent discovery of 10,000-year-old pits dug near Crathes Castle, Aberdeenshire, in Scotland.

They are a sort of inverted or upside-down version of Stonehenge (but 5,000 years older), a Mesolithic lunar timepiece that allowed hunter-gatherers to work out which week in any year the salmon would be leaping in the River Dee, or when red deer might trot over the horizon.

And that’s not forgetting the influence on the regular arrival of new Mesolithic babies to be nurtured into a new generation of hunter-gatherers. Though more research needs to be done, it also looks that where there was not much natural daylight in communities in Northern Scotland, women tended to begin their menstrual cycles at the Full Moon.

This meant that they were most fertile at the New Moon, that dark time of the month when early man was less likely to be out hunting and gathering, and more likely to be at home making Stone Age love.

For those interested in testing this phenomenon, it just so happens that yesterday was a New Moon. Even now, in our age of electric light pollution, there is some evidence to suggest that women are still more likely to begin their monthly cycle at the Full Moon.

Boyle also investigates the old story about the links between the full moon and madness – the so-called “lunatic” effect. It turns out there is something in it: a 1990s survey reported that 81 per cent of mental health practitioners have observed a direct correlation between odd behaviour and certain times of the month.

At the very least, many of us find it hard to sleep when there is a full moon, which may well result in the kind of risky behaviour – driving too fast, drinking too much, yelling at annoying strangers – that lands many of us in A & E.

There is also emerging evidence that aneurysms are more likely to pop at either the Full or new Moon, thanks to the fact that it is at these points in its 29-day cycle that the Moon is most closely aligned with the Sun, which means that it exerts its strongest gravitational pull.

Given the extraordinary power that the Moon has on our everyday experience here on Earth, it is no wonder that earlier civilisations treated it not as a “withered, sun-seared peach pit”, to quote one early Apollo astronaut who orbited without landing, but as nothing less than a full-blown deity.

Particularly fascinating is the tale of Enheduanna, the Bronze Age high priestess, who used hymns to the Moon gods to bind the city-states of Sumeria into the world’s first empire.

There have been many books written about the Moon, but Rebecca Boyle’s feels especially timely. As the geo-political balance of our world shifts, the “space race” is being re-run with new players including Japan and India. This time around, however, the aim is not so much patriotic flag planting on the lunar surface, but economic advantage.

The Moon’s soil contains oxygen, silicon, aluminium, and iron, all of which can be refined into valuable things such as fuel, building materials and, ironically, solar panels.

Whichever nation manages to extract and exploit these first, will hold the balance of power in what is shaping up to be the next Cold War.

– Our Moon: A Human History by Rebecca Boyle is published by Sceptre, 336pp

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