We all lost the Cold War

Drawing on recently declassified documents and extensive interviews with Soviet and American policymakers, 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 several confrontations arising out of the Arab-Israeli war of 1973.

In sharp contrast to the conventional wisdom, they conclude that the strategy of deterrence prolonged rather than ended the conflict between the superpowers. In the case of Cuba, deterrence was a principal cause of the crisis; eleven years later, it provided the umbrella under which both the United States and the Soviet Union pursued unilateral advantage, undermining the fragile foundations of their recent detente. In the 1980s, Soviet evidence suggests, the Reagan arms buildup delayed rather than hastened the accommodation Gorbachev desired for internal political reasons.

Both nations, the authors argue, expended lives and resources out of all reasonable proportion to their legitimate security interests, with destabilizing consequences that persist today.

We All Lost the Cold War portrays the American-Soviet rivalry as a contest between insecure and domestically pressured leaders acting on divergent perceptions of national interest. While the danger of nuclear war is now much reduced with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the underlying dynamics of the Cold War continue to drive many of the conflicts that have emerged, or remain acute, in its aftermath.

The lessons Lebow and Stein derive from the 1962 and 1973 cases are of abiding relevance in the post-Cold War era.