Allen Lane £20 pp347

Everyone’s favourite film on the cold war in the 1960s was Dr Strangelove. The American president and the Soviet party secretary were portrayed as irresponsible incompetents. One was a strutting nincompoop, the other a drink-soaked ignoramus. Both blundered about as others plunged the world into conflict. The plot had it that the people who really determined events were a rogue air-force colonel and a crazed scientist. Politicians appeared out of their depth.

As John Lewis Gaddis shows in his magisterial account, the reality was different. Political leaders on both sides learned from the scientists that a few atomic explosions would render the earth uninhabitable; and they kept the commanders under strict control. For the first time in history a superior weapon had been invented that none of its possessors dared to use. “Mutually assured destruction” was a concept that discouraged aggression in Washington and Moscow. Mao Tse-tung and Fidel Castro told the Kremlin leaders they were pusillanimous for not using their missiles. Fortunately, their advice was rejected. Peaceful co-existence, later re-designated as détente, was proclaimed. There was a series of summit meetings. Limitations were introduced on the testing and proliferation of nuclear bombs. Hotlines were installed for the rival leaders to talk during emergencies.

Stalin’s successor Nikita Khrushchev, though, took dangerous gambles. In 1962 he arranged to install missiles with nuclear warheads on the Cuban coast. President Kennedy threatened to take military action unless Khrushchev ordered back the ships bearing missiles across the Atlantic Khrushchev gave way and the world breathed again. A less publicised emergency occurred in 1983 when Soviet leader Yuri Andropov received intelligence advice that America could be planning a nuclear attack under cover of annual military manoeuvres. President Reagan, who regarded the Soviet Union as the world’s evil empire, rushed to calm the Kremlin’s nerves. The world slumbered on, unaware of the gravity of the situation.

Gaddis has harvested a basketful of recent literature and boiled it down to a valuable compote. In fact the bulk of the text is devoted to the Truman-Stalin and Reagan-Gorbachev relationships. This indicates where his personal interests lie: the focus is on why the cold war began and why it ended.

On Truman and Stalin he knows his stuff; and although he relies chiefly on English-language material, this hardly matters because so much has been translated from Russian. The gist of his argument is that Stalin and his regime needed by their nature to strike terror into the hearts of internal and external enemies. The breakdown of the alliance with America was all but inevitable after the second world war. Perhaps, though, Gaddis understates the contribution to the cold war’s outbreak made by the Americans. Truman, intent on global freedom for American interests, set up a worldwide web of military bases. In 1947 he also offered financial aid to the countries in Eastern Europe in the Soviet Union’s grasp. Stalin reacted by ordering the full communisation of the region, and the cold war began in earnest.

Truman justifiably claimed that he had aimed to save those countries from totalitarian despotism. But fear of the consequences of a hot war stopped him going further; and containment of world communism rather than its military overthrow became official strategy. By the mid-1970s, President Richard Nixon and his secretary of state Henry Kissinger were treating the USSR as worthy of sharing a global condominium. Even though pressure continued to be exerted on the Kremlin, nothing was allowed to jeopardise the working of détente.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 changed all that. Gaddis gives chapter and verse on how Reagan, entering the White House in 1980, increased his military budget so as to induce the Soviet leadership to wreck its economy in its effort to maintain nuclear weapons parity. This served to annoy the Kremlin without cracking its political will. Reagan was in a quandary about what else he could do. At bottom, as Gaddis points out, the American president was a nuclear abolitionist. He genuinely wanted not just to limit the number of atomic bombs but rather to secure their eventual elimination. In 1985 he got lucky. Gorbachev, the newly appointed Soviet party secretary, was of like mind about the cold war. He, too, wanted to bring it to a close. The two men found they could do business.

Reagan emerges as the hero of Gaddis’s story and the “malleable” Gorbachev the lesser figure. This understates the Soviet leader’s part in initiating and deepening the process. In the mid-1980s the Kremlin could have decided to raise its budgetary commitment to the arms race. Soviet leaders would not necessarily have blenched at lowering their own people’s standard of living and reinforcing political repression. But Gorbachev crashed down the obstacles to reform. His agenda had its own dynamism: he pursued the democratising objectives promoted by communist dissenters since the 1970s. And his attachment to the agenda was not simply the result of American economic pressure.

Two decades ago, when nuclear forces faced each other across Europe, it seemed unimaginable that we would soon be able to treat the cold war as history. Yet this is exactly what happened, and Dr Strangelove can now inspire laughs without the original degree of disquiet.

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