1. The charges against Churchill

Did Mr Churchill, Britain's wartime Prime Minister, display ‘cavalier behaviour5 towards his Cabinet over The Atlantic Charter9 of 1941? Having decided ‘to ignore’ their views, did he somehow seek to ensure, ‘rather ineptly’, that crucial telegrams should conceal his deviousness?

Dr A. P. Dobson makes these accusations in this Review in April 1984,] They relate to ‘RIVIERA’, Churchill’s first wartime meeting with President Roosevelt, between 9 and 12 August 1941 in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland. Concerned primarily with wartime collaboration, though the United States was not yet formally a belligerent, the two leaders outlined peace aims in a hastily drafted joint declaration, promptly named ‘The Atlantic Charter’. Their fierce debate over its fourth economic ‘Point’ reflected American pressure to secure advantage from assistance, under the Lend-Lease Act of March 1941, to Britain's war effort.

The Economic and Social Research Council recently published a Report commissioned from a committee chaired by Professor Edwards, a psychiatrist, so that the Council, and the social science community in general, might know what was good and bad in British social sciences, and where the promising future research opportunities lie over the next decade. Boldly called ‘Horizons and Opportunities in the Social Sciences’, the Report condensed the wisdom of social scientists, both British and foreign, and concludes with a broadly but not uncritically favourable picture of the British scene.

Discussions of the likelihood of nuclear conflict often encounter an argument which this writer first heard expounded in 1972 by the eminent economist and conflict researcher Kenneth Boulding. The admission that the likelihood of a major nuclear exchange cannot be absolutely excluded requires, according to this argument, the formal assignment of a positive probability, however small, to such an event. This, in turn, appears to constitute a de facto acceptance of the ultimate inevitability of such a catastrophe, at some time and under some conditions. This argument is often deployed as one among a number of points used in support of strenuous efforts to secure international agreements on nuclear arms limitation, reduction or abolition.

These last ten years have witnessed a remarkable development of Chinese academic writing on International Relations. The late Premier Zhou Enlai had recommended the expansion of such studies in 1964 on his return from a tour of Africa after having found the relevant Chinese expertise weak and ill-informed. But the Cultural Revolution of 1966–1976 not only prevented that development, but along with most other intellectuals those few scholars engaged in the subject were humiliated and persecuted. Since 1977, in common with the other social sciences, International Relations has begun to flourish. Although it is a fairly new independent subject of study more than five hundred scholars are engaged in a variety of research institutes and several universities offer courses in it. As in the other social sciences, research in International Relations is carried out under the general guidelines of serving China's long term policies of modernization and the open door.

The 'special relationship', wrapped in politically relevant fact and myth, in nostalgia and irritation, can still raise emotions. Books and essays about it bring on their trans-Atlantic and domestic controversies; it remains a case of reviewer beware.

Publishers' lists and new acquisition shelves reveal a profligacy of writing on strategy. Moreover, this vast quantity covers a rich variety of approaches to the subject, such as case studies, policy oriented studies, narrative histories, behavioural analyses, thinking on the 'big' questions of war, peace and security, and thinking about thinkers. This article reviews books covering three very different approaches to strategy, two traditional and one highly original. Of the three only the last explicitly considers method, yet the three reveal very different methodological concerns which have perhaps received too little attention in the study of strategy.

International relations scholars have long enjoyed an uncomfortable relationship with the concept of sovereignty. It has appeared as conceptually forbidding territory, journeys into which are likely to yield only a formalistic or unduly legalistic understanding of international relations, too close to the dignified trappings, and too remote from the efficient workings, of the international system.

Most early attempts to assess Soviet behaviour in the defence and foreign policy fields perforce used historical methods, perhaps better known to political scientists under the title of the 'rational actor model', or assumed implicitly or explicitly a 'balance of power' framework, or imposed a 'world domination' totalitarian scenario for Soviet decision-making and setting of national goals.

Conflict analysis has been making steady strides over the last decade. Admittedly it is not easy to define 'conflict analysis', 'conflict studies', or any of the other phrases used as near synonyms. 'Conflict and co-operation' subsumes virtually all social interactions. Roughly it can be said to be characterized by two themes: first, that conflict is a generic phenomenon which appears at all levels of social system from the interpersonal to the inter-national; second, that social phenomena can be analysed by the methods of the classical social sciences which primarily means the formulation of testable theoretical generalizations and their testing.

It is not surprising that international crises have become a subject of intensive study in the nuclear age. The example of Sarajevo stands as an awesome warning of the repercussions which can flow from an apparently minor incident. The Cuban missile crisis seemed for a time to suggest guidelines by which crises could be successfully 'managed', but the dangers of generalizing from an optimistic reading of that unique case have come to be widely appreciated.

These five volumes are indicative of the current diversity of the literature of arms control. Although they can all be pigeon-holed as being about arms control they approach the subject from a variety of perspectives.