The arming of Europe and the making of the First World War. By David G. Herrmann. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. Pp. xiii+307. ISBN 0-691-03374-9. £29.50.

Armaments and the coming of war: Europe 1904–1914. By David Stevenson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Pp. xi+463. ISBN 0-19-820208-3. £48.00.

Authority, identity and the social history of the Great War. Edited by Frans Coetzee and Marilyn Shevin-Coetzee. Providence and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1995. Pp. xxii+362. ISBN 1-57181-017-X. £40.

Dismembering the male: men's bodies, Britain and the Great War. By Joanna Bourke. London: Reaktion Books, 1996. Pp. 336. ISBN 0-948462825. £19.95.

Passchendaele: the untold story. By Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996. Pp. xv+237. ISBN 0-300-066292-9. £19.95.

Battle tactics of the western front: the British army's art of attack, 1916–1918. By Paddy Griffith. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996 (paperback edition). Pp. xvi+286. ISBN 0-300-06663-5. No price given.

Government and the armed forces in Britain, 1856–1990. Edited by Paul Smith. London, Hambledon Press, 1996. Pp. xviii+324. ISBN 1-85285-144-9. £35.

Whether or not arms races cause wars was a historiographical preoccupation of the Cold War era. The issue was then of more than academic concern. Those opposed to the proliferation of nuclear weapons saw previous arms races as having destabilized the international system at best and as having led ineluctably to war at worst. Their critics countered that arms races possessed the capacity to increase terror and so promote more effective deterrence.