Dismantling The Cold War

A comprehensive reassessment of the military-industrial complex. Based on extensive interviews with defence industry executives, Pentagon officials and community and union leaders, this book shows in detail how Cold War technologies have distorted and drained the economy.

The Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) program has since authorized more than $1.5 billion for a wide array of weapons destruction, demilitarization, nuclear security, and nonproliferation activities in the Newly Independent States (NIS) of the former Soviet Union.

Nuclear arms reduction agreements and parallel commitments since 1987 will remove from active deployment about 27,000 former Soviet Union bombs and warheads. When START I and II are fully implemented, Russia will have eliminated 1,000 strategic delivery vehicles and removed from active deployment 4,500 strategic warheads. Ukraine will give up 176 SS-19s and -24s and 1,240 strategic warheads as well as cruise missile warheads. Kazakhstan will relinquish 104 SS-18s and 1,040 strategic warheads. The 81 SS-25 single-warhead missiles placed in Belarus by the Soviet Union will be withdrawn and probably redeployed on Russian territory. The United States will eliminate over 1,300 strategic delivery vehicles under the START agreements, and will remove from active deployment more than 6,000 strategic warheads. These reductions, in terms of systems scheduled for elimination and the destructive potential they represent, amount to the greatest program of disarmament in human history. The process also signals a change in relations between Washington and Moscow, if only by dramatically reversing the trend to increase nuclear weapons targeted against each other's homeland.

In keeping with Robert J. McMahon's series Issues in the History of American Foreign Relations, Jussi M. Hanhimäki offers students and scholars a survey of the evolution of American foreign policy during a key period in recent history, the era of superpower détente and global transformation in the 1960s and 1970s. Describing détente as not only an era but also a strategy of waging the Cold War, the author examines the reasons that led to the rise of détente, explores the highlights of the era's reduced East-West tensions, and explains the causes of détente's demise. Hanhimäki addresses many questions: What were the long-term and short-term causes of détente? Was it a policy "invented" in the United States or adopted under pressure from abroad? Did it represent a radical break with the past—a move from idealism to realism—or was it simply an attempt to prolong the Cold War bipolarity within the international system? Was détente a policy that grew from weakness and doubt (caused particularly by the Vietnam War)? What were its main achievements and shortcomings? What led to its end? In conclusion, he evaluates the role of détente in the dismantling of the Cold War international system.

This book, first published in 1997, examines the forced merger between national security interests and environmental policy makers arising from the Chemical Weapons Convention and its requirement to safely dismantle the world’s chemical weapons stockpiles. The two groups had to find a way to intersect and work together, and this book analyses the problems and politics involved.

How and why did the Cold War begin? How and why did it end? What will its end mean for international relations?

De-Centering Cold War History challenges the Cold War master narratives that focus on super-power politics by shifting our analytical perspective to include local-level experiences and regional initiatives that were crucial to the making of a Cold War world. Cold War histories are often told as stories of national leaders, state policies and the global confrontation that pitted a Communist Eastern Bloc against a Capitalist West. Taking a new analytical approach this book reveals unexpected complexities in the historical trajectory of the Cold War. Contributions from an international group of scholars take a fresh look at historical agency in different places across the world, including Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas. This collaborative effort shapes a street-level history of the global Cold War era, one that uses the analysis of the 'local' to rethink and reframe the wider picture of the 'global', connecting the political negotiations of individuals and communities at the intersection of places and of meeting points between 'ordinary' people and political elites to the Cold War at large. Essential reading for all students of Cold War history.