"Commander Michael MccGwire, who has died aged 91, was a midshipman during the Second World War who became an authority on Cold War geopolitics. In 1967 MccGwire surprised his colleagues by giving up his promising naval career to study international politics and economics at Aberystwyth. There he founded the Interstate Journal of International Affairs, wrote a book on the Soviet navy, spoke at numerous specialist conferences, and in spite of his relative maturity, he easily slipped into college life as a popular, if slightly formidable undergraduate. Thwarted by the introduction of national quotas in his ambition to join the UN, MccGwire became Professor of Maritime and Strategic Studies at Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, where he founded the modern study of Soviet armed forces, instituted a series of international conferences, and edited the proceedings. In 1979 the Brookings Institution in Washington, impressed by MccGwire’s unconventional ideas on foreign policy and defence issues, recruited him as a senior fellow. There he wrote Military Objectives in Soviet Foreign Policy (1987), an important work based on extensive study of Soviet sources. Instead of analysing Russian policy from the point of view of Western interests and vulnerabilities, the book assumed a Soviet viewpoint. Published in the same month as a speech by Mikhail Gorbachev setting out his policy of glasnost and perestroika, MccGwire’s book was able to explain the causes of this reorientation of Soviet policy. A year after the Berlin Wall came down, Brookings published MccGwire’s follow-up book, Perestroika and Soviet National Security (1991), in which he argued that Reagan-Thatcher politics had delayed the process rather than brought it about. His ideas became known as the “MccGwire thesis”, which despite strong evidence and advocacy, was rejected by official thinking during the Cold War, but has since gained more respectability. Returning to England, in the 1990s MccGwire became a visiting professor at Cambridge, where he assisted in its global security programme, broadening the subject to include economic and social development, environmental sustainability, and nuclear deterrence. He continued to publish and comment on world affairs, and by 2006 was one of the leading academic critics of the theory of nuclear deterrence and an opponent of the renewal of Trident. Michael Kane MccGwire (known in his family as “Punch” because his sister was called Judy) was born on December 9 1924 in Madras, where his father worked for Burmah Oil before the family moved to Switzerland and then to Swanage in Dorset, where they settled. An impetuous and overactive boy, at the age of 13 Michael was sent by his father to Dartmouth, where he won the King’s Dirk. MccGwire’s view of the Navy was that “if you didn’t know what you wanted to do, the Navy was an excellent place to do it”. His first ship was the battleship Rodney, in which he took part in Operation Pedestal, the relief of the Siege of Malta, and the Allied landings in North Africa, Sicily and Normandy. In 1944 he joined coastal forces and was first lieutenant of an MTB 479 of the 30th Motor Torpedo Boat Flotilla. The nine MTBs of the 30th flotilla sank six German vessels and damaged another 12 in the Narrow Seas off France, Belgium and Holland. The MTB crew were a close-knit group of men who stayed in touch until the end of their lives." http://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2016/05/19/commander-michael-mccgwire--obituary/
