The story of arms control's heyday has been told numerous times before. Indeed, there is no shortage of 1960s–70s arms control lore to be found throughout innumerable memoires and journalistic accounts. Its retelling in Averting Doomsday, by Patrick J. Garrity and Erin R. Mahan, takes a unique approach, looking exclusively at the vast array of arms control accomplishments that occurred under Nixon's watch—what Kenneth Waltz might have called a “first image” account, among the three possible images of man, the state, and war. The book also serves as a kind of intellectual history of Nixon and his ideas and beliefs about weapons of mass destruction, evolving those beliefs as he was confronted with political exigencies they presented. In this account, Nixon plays the antihero, tacitly tasked with averting doomsday, fears of which rear their head on his watch during his presidency—this time including biological and chemical weapons, in addition to nuclear. The rub is this: while more arms control agreements were inked during Nixon's presidency than any other U.S. president, the man himself was unequivocally not pro-arms control. The authors look at arms control through the lens of Nixon's presidency, with a focus on his political ambitions. Culling from a wide array of primary sources, including Nixon's White House re