The emerging threat of a militarily powerful Soviet Union after the Second World War caused the United States to rearm and look to the defence of its northern approaches against a possible Soviet bomber attack. The Canadian government, although less apprehensive about this military threat than the American, realized the necessity of accommodating its neighbour's urgent desire for security and ought to avoid a US-Canada bilateral pact by a multilateral defence treaty and organization linking the democracies of Western Europe and North America.

The fourth volume of James Earys' highly acclaimed history of Canadian defence and external affairs studies the government's role in forming the North Atlantic Treaty Organization; its attempts, partly successful, to give the alliance the functions and authority it considered suited to Canadian interests and those of the Western democracies; and the problems it tried to deal with as a member of the Alliance - problems mobilizing the deterrent, of sharing the burden, and of explanding membership to include Greece, Turkey, and Western Germany. These decisions, made some thirty years ago, have shaped the course of Canadian foreign policy ever since, and continue to have ramifications for Canadian life today.

James Eayrs is a former professor in the Department of Political Economy at the University of Toronto and a professor emeritus at Dalhousie University. He received the Governor General's Award for Non-Fiction in 1965 for the first two volumes of In Defence of Canada. Among his other books are The Art of the Possible and Diplomacy and its Discontents.

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"James Eayrs has done it again! The third volume of his innovating history of Canadian external policy and defence, covering the period from the final years of the Second World War to the beginnings of the Cold War, not only maintains but surpasses the high standard set by its predecessors ... Among political scientists, Eayrs is pre-eminently the best stylist."

Vancouver Sun

"This is an absorbingly written, balanced, humane, clearly-argued study which any contemporary historian would give his right arm to have writ-ten. And its theme and implications involve a great deal more than matters of purely Canadian interest ... Here is to' be found a case-study in minia-ture of the debates over air-power vs. sea-power, of the case for a central Ministry of Defence, and of the effects ofunrestricted budgetary domi-nance of defence expenditure which must have familiar echoes to all students of national defence poJicies ... here documented with a detail. which other case studies can hardly match. From every point of view, this is an outstanding book."

Journal of Commonwealth Political Studies

"There could not be any more important reading for anyone trying to apprehend the tenacious traditions underlying our present position in world affairs."

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