In a well-articulated, arresting argument, Lebow (Political
Science/Pittsburgh) and Stein (Political Science/Toronto) assert
that the conventional wisdom that the West won the cold war is
mistaken, and that military spending and geopolitical rivalry have
exhausted the US and the countries of the former USSR, with
implications that continue to haunt us today. Lebow and Stein make
their case by examining two crises of the cold war: the 1962 Cuban
missile crisis and 1973 the Arab-Israeli War. In both cases, the
authors persuasively argue, the crisis was caused by politicians
playing the game of "deterrence." In Cuba, the American threat to
use nuclear weapons was an escalation of the crisis; once the
superpowers confronted each other, they needed to compromise in
order to resolve the impasse (the problem was resolved when both
governments agreed to remove missiles). In 1973, the US tried to
prevent the Soviet Union from intervening in the Arab-Israeli War
by alerting its strategic and conventional forces worldwide. Here,
the crisis was resolved when the Soviet Union declined to respond
to the alert. The authors argue, based on newly available evidence,
that far from deterring the Soviet Union, the US worldwide alert
actually might have escalated the crisis; the Soviet Union never
had any intention of actually intervening, and a large group in the
Kremlin argued that the it should respond by alerting its own
forces. After examining how compromise and moderation resolved
crises caused by deterrence theorists, Lebow and Stein contend that
the nuclear arms race, far from preventing WW III, actually
exacerbated superpower tensions and review evidence that Reagan's
expansion of defense spending after 1981 delayed rather than
accelerated the process of reform in the Soviet Union, which
occurred for reasons largely unrelated to the superpower rivalry,
and wasted resources urgently needed for domestic purposes. The
authors conclude that deterrence prolonged rather than ended the
cold war. An intelligent and provocative examination of the legacy
of the cold war. (Kirkus Reviews)
Drawing on recently declassified documents and extensive
interviews with Soviet and American policy-makers, among them
several important figures speaking for public record for the first
time, Ned Lebow and Janice Stein cast new light on the effect of
nuclear threats in two of the tensest moments of the Cold War: the
Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and the confrontations arising out of
the Arab-Israeli war of 1973. They conclude that the strategy of
deterrence prolonged rather than ended the conflict between the
superpowers.
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