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THE GREAT COLD WAR

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments....................................ixPrologue...........................................1Why DID IT START?From Russian River to the Elbe1 Soaring Eagles...................................112 Face-to-Face.....................................25Sizing Each Other Up3 A World Transformed..............................374 Getting Colder...................................505 Becoming More Military...........................576 Korean Blunders..................................65WHY DID IT LAST SO LONG?Atoms for War7 Easing Tensions..................................818 Living with the Bomb.............................919 The Spirit of Geneva.............................10110 Into the Missile Age............................111Crisis Management11 Khrushchev's Gauntlet...........................12112 Showdown in Berlin..............................12913 At the Cuban Precipice..........................138The Rise of Dtente14 One Bed, Two Dreams.............................15115 Trying to Make Dtente Work.....................16116 A Balancing Act.................................17217 Expletives & Ambitions..........................18418 The Mastery of Europe...........................193The Fall of Dtente19 The Twilight Zone...............................20520 Battle of the Strategies........................21221 The Death of Dtente............................219WHY DID IT END THE WAY IT DID?Drastic Reappraisals22 The Correlation of Forces.......................24323 American "New Thinking".........................25024 Soviet "New Thinking"...........................25825 The Reagan Challenge............................26326 Vulnerability...................................27727 Changing Tack...................................28528 War Scare?......................................297Trying to End the Cold War29 The Gorbachev Response..........................31330 Getting to Know you.............................32131 Progress & Crumbling............................32932 Checkmate.......................................337Closure33 Accelerating & Braking..........................34734 Maltese Breakthrough............................35435 Riding the Tiger................................36336 Looking Back....................................372LESSONSLast Reflections37 Reading Their Mail..............................37938 how Did It help?................................38939 Looking Forward.................................401Notes..............................................413Sources............................................451Index..............................................459

Chapter One

Worlds apart

Because the rivalry between Russia and America became clear long before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, it is useful to look back a little further into each country's history in order to see the origins of the tension.

Russia had been built up by autocratic tsars, who ruled through a highly centralized regime backed by the Orthodox Church. Since the collapse of Byzantium in 1453, Moscow believed it had become the "Third Rome," with a Godgiven destiny to gather the peoples of the world to the Orthodox faith.

The national symbol was the double-headed eagle of Byzantium, with one head supposedly looking back to ancient Rome and the other looking forward from the new one. At the end of the 15th century, Italian engineers were to strengthen the fortifications of the Kremlin and to build the Faceted hall, which was modeled on one of the most admired Italian palaces of the day-the Palazzo Diamante in Ferrara.

At the end of the 17th century, Peter the Great set about modernizing Russia with extraordinary determination. He created St. Petersburg, his splendid new capital on the shores of the Baltic, to symbolize Russia's growing involvement in Europe. By 1758, there had been the first clash of arms in centuries between the Russians and the Germans, with Russian troops advancing close to Berlin; twelve years later, Catherine the Great ordered the most dramatic military move Russia had yet made-sending its navy into the Mediterranean to destroy the Turkish fleet.

At the turn of the century, the Russians moved much farther westwards, battling against the armies of revolutionary France in Italy and Switzerland. The biggest battle began in 1812, when Napoleon invaded Russia, and within a year he had lost most of his massive army of half a million men. In 1814, Tsar Alexander I led his victorious troops through Paris, along with those of his Prussian and Austrian allies. While Alexander went on to London, where he was treated as the hero who had liberated Europe, his troops made their way home.

After Napoleon's final defeat at Waterloo in 1815, Tsar Alexander had a major voice at the Congress of Vienna, which shaped the political geography of Europe for the next hundred years. After the trauma of the Napoleonic wars, Alexander hoped it would be possible to create a new Russian identity that would enable the country to have a greater say in European affairs through the establishment of a European confederation, without undermining the stability of Russia itself. Alexander failed to achieve that goal, but he did gain control over much more of Poland, which he believed would provide a forward line of defense in central Europe.

As the 19th century progressed, Russia's former allies began to fear its imperial ambitions. To the south, the Russians were pushing the Ottoman Turks back through the Balkans in the hope of gaining control of the Turkish Straits, which linked the Black Sea with the Mediterranean. At the same time, their advances into Central Asia alarmed the British, who believed that the Russians were intent on gaining a warm-water port on the Indian Ocean. They jostled with the British for influence in Afghanistan, whose king was given a truly imperial welcome to St. Petersburg in 1905.

All the while America, too, was developing its own distinctive identity. The Puritans who arrived in Massachusetts Bay in the early 17th century brought with them a revolutionary mix of ardent beliefs, not simply about religion, but about politics, economics and society as well. They believed their task was to create a New Jerusalem and then take their "shining example" to the rest of the world.

By the end of the next century, through the War of Independence with Britain and much heated debate over the drafting of the Constitution, the Americans had accomplished the first great political revolution of the modern age. They had paved the way for the establishment of a new political system based on the aspirations of freedom and liberty.

The new republic expanded westwards with remarkable speed and under its emblem of the bald eagle, whose great strength was seen as symbolizing the American ideal of freedom. Unfortunately, the Founding Fathers and many other members of the political elite owned cotton and sugar plantations, which were the major source of their wealth. Although slavery was legally abolished in 1865, after a bloody Civil War, problems over racial equality would continue to blight America's reputation for well over another century.

Getting Closer

A century after Russia's intrepid explorers reached the Pacific in 1647, they laid claim to Alaska. Then, in the 18th century, the Russians...