The bibliographical essays in the three volumes of the Cambridge History of the Cold War aim at being selective and critical overviews of the literature available in each subfield of historical investigation. The entries are written by the authors of the chapters in the main text, with additions, deletions, and crossreferences suggested by the editors. Readers may want to look at the bibliographic entries in more than one volume to get an overview of the literature on a particular issue or region.

The Cold War and the intellectual history of the late twentieth century

There exists no single volume on the intellectual history of the last third of the twentieth century, or even one that would convincingly cover the postwar period in Western Europe or the United States. A useful collection of essays on political thought in the twentieth century as a whole is Terence Ball and Richard Bellamy (eds.), The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); also still useful is Karl Dietrich Bracher, The Age of Ideologies: A History of Political Thought in the Twentieth Century (New York: St. Martin’s, 1984). Books that successfully weave together accounts of European political history and judgments on some of the major developments in European political thought are Tony Judt’s Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (London: Penguin, 2005) and Mark Mazower’s Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (London: Penguin, 1998); still useful is George Lichtheim, Europe in the Twentieth Century (London: Phoenix, 2000).

The Cold War profoundly affected the fate of many states; Iran and Afghanistan were two which particularly felt its effects. Their domestic and foreign-policy settings were influenced by the onset of the Cold War in ways that produced contrasting outcomes for the two countries, helping eventually to open space for the rise of radical Islamism in their politics, with impacts well beyond their boundaries. The Iranian revolution of 1978/79 resulted in the overthrow of the US-backed regime of Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi and its replacement with the anti-US Islamic government of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. In contrast, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late December 1979 followed the seizure of power in Kabul by a cluster of pro-Soviet Communists twenty months earlier. However, both events were considerably grounded in the US–Soviet Cold War rivalry. Similarly, political Islam, or Islamism, which had a major effect on the Muslim world and its relations with the United States and its allies in the wake of the Iranian revolution and Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, arose in interaction with the dynamics of the Cold War, although it was also embedded in older schools of thinking amongst Muslim scholars. Arguably, if it had not been for the US policy of containment of the Soviet Union and the Soviet responses to it, Iran might not have moved so clearly into the American orbit and Afghanistan might not have fallen under Soviet influence. By the same token, the grounds might not have emerged in the late 1970s for the radical forces of political Islam to become increasingly assertive in their quest to redefine Muslim politics, with an anti-US posture.

During the years after the Cuban missile crisis, both superpowers treaded more warily to avoid direct confrontations, but traditional Cold War concerns kept them expanding their nuclear arsenals and preparing for the possibility of World War III. Motivated by fear and suspicion, but also by diplomatic and political purposes, both Moscow and Washington invested huge sums in thousands of nuclear weapons and intercontinental delivery systems. During the 1960s, the United States deployed over a thousand intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM), hundreds of submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), and took the arms race in a new qualitative direction by developing accurate multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles (MIRVs). The Soviets, determined never to be outmatched again in a crisis, began to field a formidable ICBM force. Before Moscow reached strategic parity with Washington, and ended US nuclear supremacy, however, a stalemate had emerged, where neither side could launch a preemptive strike to gain a military advantage without incurring horrific losses. While the leaders of the superpowers recognized that nuclear weapons were militarily unusable, except in the most extreme circumstances, they nevertheless wanted them for deterrence and for diplomatic leverage.

In Europe, the cockpit of Cold War rivalries, apprehensions about military force imbalances and fears of nuclear blackmail and first strikes gave nuclear weapons a central role in alliance policies and politics. To validate security guarantees and to deter political and military threats, both the Soviet Union and the United States stockpiled thousands of tactical nuclear weapons on European soil.

During the period following Iosif Stalin’s death, the fate of the East Central European region was determined by, on the one hand, the political status quo worked out at Yalta in 1945, and on the other hand, by the unstable and undefined New Course in Soviet policy under the dictator’s successors.

The framework for ensuing developments in Eastern Europe was established at the end of World War II. Both superpowers attributed a pivotal importance to the tacit agreements reached by the Allies at the end of the war to recognize each other’s spheres of interest. This mutual consent came to function as an automatic rule of thumb even in the chilliest years of the Cold War era, and in the coming decades it was to be demonstrated by the West’s continuous inaction whenever the Soviets suppressed sporadic internal conflicts within their bloc. After Stalin’s death, preserving the status quo remained a top priority for Moscow. Even though the incoming administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower launched a propaganda campaign for the “liberation of the captive nations,” the new Soviet leaders never contemplated the surrender of the East Central European Communist states.

The two main elements of the post-Stalin New Course were a strategy of peaceful coexistence and some modification of the Soviet model. The former meant a more fiexible foreign policy and the deepening of political and, especially, economic cooperation with the West, with the aim of improving the Soviet Union’s chances of surviving the intensifying competition between the two blocs. At the same time, in addition to fostering East–West rapprochement, Moscow made efforts to penetrate the Third World and to restore the unity of the Soviet bloc by working toward a reconciliation with Yugoslavia. Within this post-Stalinist vision of a new international order, Moscow endeavored to create a special role for its European allies in which they would act as emancipated and sovereign actors that the West — especially Western Europe — and the Third World could accept as legitimate partners.

A three-volume history is an impressive monument to Cold War studies. But could it one day be seen as a tombstone? The grave danger inherent in superpower relations might appear to provide enduring reasons to continue studying them indefinitely. A different outcome, after all, could have changed everything. Yet this argument would base the importance of the Cold War on shifting ground: something that might have happened. Only a handful of crises had truly catastrophic potential, and treating them to ever more fine-grained analyses yields diminishing returns. As the Cold War continues to recede into history, scholars will therefore have to work harder to explain its importance to future generations.

If one instead turns to the history of populations and public health – the kind of “structural” history favored by the followers of Fernand Braudel – the period coinciding with the Cold War can be shown to have witnessed changes that were comparable to the impact of global nuclear war, only these changes unfolded over decades and had nearly the opposite demographic effects. The number of people living on earth more than doubled between 1945 and 1989. By the time Germans were living under one government again, world population was growing by the number of people in the reunited nation – more than 80 million – each and every year. The overwhelming majority of them were being born in Asia and Africa. For the largely Russian leadership of the USSR, the higher fertility of Central Asians appeared to pose an existential threat.

Nuclear weapons are so central to the history of the Cold War that it can be dificult to disentangle the two. Did nuclear weapons cause the Cold War? Did they contribute to its escalation? Did they help to keep the Cold War “cold”? We should also ask how the Cold War shaped the development of atomic energy. Was the nuclear-arms race a product of Cold War tension rather than its cause?

The atomic bomb and the origins of the Cold War

The nuclear age began before the Cold War. During World War II, three countries decided to build the atomic bomb: Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union. Britain put its own work aside and joined the Manhattan Project as a junior partner in 1943. The Soviet effort was small before August 1945. The British and American projects were driven by the fear of a German atomic bomb, but Germany decided in 1942 not to make a serious effort to build the bomb. In an extraordinary display of scientific and industrial might, the United States made two bombs ready for use by August 1945. Germany was defeated by then, but President Harry S. Truman decided to use the bomb against Japan.

The decision to use the atomic bomb has been a matter of intense controversy. Did Truman decide to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order, as he claimed, to end the war with Japan without further loss of American lives? Or did he drop the bombs in order to intimidate the Soviet Union, without really needing them to bring the war to an end? His primary purpose was surely to force Japan to surrender, but he also believed that the bomb would help him in his dealings with Iosif V. Stalin. That latter consideration was secondary, but it confirmed his decision. Whatever Truman’s motives, Stalin regarded the use of the bomb as an anti-Soviet move, designed to deprive the Soviet Union of strategic gains in the Far East and more generally to give the United States the upper hand in defining the postwar settlement. On August 20, 1945, two weeks to the day after Hiroshima, Stalin signed a decree setting up a Special Committee on the Atomic Bomb, under the chairmanship of Lavrentii P. Beriia. The Soviet project was now a crash program.

Behind the Roman de la Rose lies a tradition of philosophical allegory. The Rose in turn inspired a tradition of secular allegory, in narrative and lyric forms, across Europe. This essay will focus on French poetry of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, and the extension of these poetic conventions into England. Both Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, the authors of the two parts of the Rose, experiment with the claims of philosophical truth in poetry. In their hands, vernacular poetry rose to new heights of ambition: the Rose combines classical myth with philosophical reflection, dream vision with allegorical interpretation, and erotic story with cosmological themes. Their experiments provoked innovative responses in the vernacular secular allegory produced for the aristocratic milieus of France and England. One key element that distinguishes this new vernacular tradition from earlier Latin allegory is the role of its singular first-person voice. In the Roman de la Rose and the allegories that followed it, this voice is identified with the historical writer, not only narrating as writer but acting as a character, participating in the drama that structures the narrative. While these writers are interested in the experience of love and desire, they increasingly focus on love for its relation to artistic production or as a pretext for evaluating other forms of worldly or spiritual wisdom, as an opening for ethical, philosophical, or political debate. Not only the beginning of love but its ending, through age or loss of the beloved, becomes a subject for figuration.

So much has been written about Shakespeare since Robert Greene's first dismissive reference to that 'upstart crow' in 1592 that it may seem perverse to deploy the trope of absence or loss to try to make sense of the volume of commentary. Shakespeare's critical reception seems marked by the phenomenon of too much, rather than too little. But Shakespeare studies is littered with much-missed absences: Love's Labours Won (the mysterious play named in Francis Meres' Palladis Tamia of 1598), Shakespeare's private letters or diary, satisfactory drawings of the Globe or of any of Shakespeare's plays in contemporary performance, the records for the grammar school in Stratford for the relevant period, the holograph manuscript of Hamlet or indeed any of the plays or poems, the identity of Mr W. H., the dedicatee of the Sonnets published in 1609, the meaning of 'scamels', Caliban's unglossable word in The Tempest (2.2.17). These literal unknowns mark the critical enterprise with the signs of loss. In the intervening centuries since Shakespeare, the critical tradition has tried to address this loss through literary tactics that closely resemble those of two familiar literary genres: the elegy, through which the lost is mourned and commemorated, and the detective story, by which the lost is reconstructed through the painstaking reading of evidence. Shakespeare studies has toggled between the detective and the elegiac as the most appropriate genres for its retrieval and construction of the lost object.

Prudentius' Psychomachia, Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun's Roman de la Rose, Dante's Divina Commedia, and Petrarch's Trionfi invest combats, triumphs, dances, and other festive and dramatic forms with allegorical significance. But the costumes they describe, the personifications they introduce, and the mystical visions in which they culminate appear only in the mind's eye. In allegorical dramas, on the other hand, actors change their costumes in order to make the states of their characters' souls visible; they perform stage business like hiding a board beneath the earth to discourage Mankind's labors; and they descend from the heavens in machines. The symbolic loci that so often stand out from narrative allegories and ask to be mapped in the imagination are actually arranged in the space of the playing area, which may oppose the mansion of the World to the Heavenly Paradise or may use platforms and scaffolds to create different planes of action proper to demons, mortals, and heavenly spirits. In some cases, allegorical plays turn the conditions of their own performance into an extended metaphor. In El Gran Teatro del Mundo (The Great Theatre of the World) (c. 1640-45), for example, Calderón de la Barca presents life as a play in which Men are the actors, the World is in charge of the properties and the stage, and the producer is God: the actors are assigned parts, but they must perform them without a script and without rehearsal.

The international order in East Asia changed dramatically following the conclusion of the Sino-Japanese War in 1945; the two most consequential events of this period were the birth of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) on October 1, 1949, and, one year later, the PRC’s entry into a three-year military contest against the United States in the Korean War, 1950–53. These developments confirmed the spread of the Cold War to East Asia and determined the long-term pattern of confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union in the region. For China, the decision to ally with the USSR and enter the Korean War meant that there was no alternative but to man Asia’s Cold War frontier against US encroachment. All developments accompanying the birth of the PRC and its choice of foreign policies — especially the decision to enter the Korean War — were deeply rooted in China’s domestic politics, and it can be safely concluded that the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) made coherent choices when confronted with international crises. Yet the contest between the United States and the Soviet Union rapidly grew into the most significant characteristic of the postwar international system, and greatly infiuenced the future of China. From 1945, it was the interaction between four actors — the United States, the USSR, the Guomindang (GMD), and the CCP — that constituted the fundamental interface between Chinese domestic politics and the international system. It was also this dynamic that pushed China into deeper and deeper involvement in the Cold War.

The bibliographical essays in the three volumes of the Cambridge History of the Cold War aim at being selective and critical overviews of the literature available in each subfield of historical investigation. The entries are written by the authors of the chapters in the main text, with additions, deletions, and cross-references suggested by the editors. Readers may want to look at the bibliographical entries in more than one volume to get an overview of the literature on a particular issue or region.

Grand strategies in the Cold War

The best edition of Thucydides is Robert B. Strassler (ed.), The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War, revised edition of the Richard Crawley translation (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). For modern accounts, see Donald Kagan, The Peloponnesian War (New York: Viking, 2003), and Victor Davis Hanson, A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and the Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War (New York: Random House, 2005). Louis J. Halle, in his The Cold War as History (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), was one of the first Cold War historians to draw on ancient analogies, including Thucydides.

A theatre-goer who had seen 1 Henry IV when it first appeared on the stage in London might subsequently have ventured to the area around St Paul's Churchyard - at the time the centre of the English book trade - in search of a copy of the play. The printed text on offer there would have been strikingly different from its modern counterpart. For one thing, the title would not have been our compact 1 Henry IV but rather the more elaborated The History of Henry the Fourth; With the battle at Shrewsbury, between the King and Lord Henry Percy, surnamed Henry Hotspur of the North. With the humorous conceits of Sir John Falstaff. This title serves not just to identify the play, but also acts as a kind of 'teaser', flagging up the exciting content of the book. An even more striking aspect of the original edition of the play, from a modern perspective, would be the fact that nowhere in the book is Shakespeare identified as the author. Like many other plays published in the closing years of the sixteenth century, 1 Henry IV appeared without any indication of who had written it.

The title page of the first edition of 1 Henry IV alerts us to the fact that the Renaissance was a period of cultural transition in England. The London theatre scene was an adventurous innovation, and it was not entirely clear whether the products of this new commercial venture should even be considered worthy of being preserved in print, a medium which had hitherto in large measure been used to disseminate works of a devotional or practical nature.

For many years the historiography of Cold War culture was dominated by two rather parochial clichés. The first held that studying the Cold War and culture meant discussing the impact of the McCarthy-era purges on cultural production in the United States; the second, that it meant the study of films or literature with explicit Cold War content. Recent scholarship has taken a much broader approach. Within the United States, the Cold War has provided the dominant framework for thinking about culture in the 1950s. President Harry S. Truman’s notion of containment is now as readily applied to the lives of American women of the era as to their government’s relations with the Soviet Union. Beyond this, the cultural Cold War has emerged as a major concern of international history. The literature, film, and broadcasting of the Cold War period is at last being understood by historians, as it was by protagonists, not only as a product of the politics of the era but also as a front in the Cold War as real as that which divided Berlin, bisected Korea, or ran through the straits of Miami. With this in mind, this chapter will consider, first, how the governments of East and West shaped culture during the Cold War and, then, how writers, filmmakers, and broadcasters responded to the conflict. The analysis will focus on the middle years of the conflict, but the conclusion will examine the ways in which these influences played out in the 1980s.

Since the seminal work of Charles Singleton in the 1950s, the subject of allegory has been at the controversial heart of Dante scholarship. The debate focuses on the Commedia and in particular on the question of whether Dante is there writing an allegory “of theologians,” that is, an imitation of the fourfold model of Scriptural signification, or not. Around this central question several others are arrayed. Is the “letter” of the “holy poem” to be taken as “true” like that of the Bible or as a “beautiful lie”? If the Commedia is modeled on the Bible, does it include all or some of the three allegorical senses (allegorical or Christological; moral or tropological; anagogical or eschatological) attributed to Scripture in the exegetical tradition? Is it more appropriate to talk about the Commedia in terms of allegory per se or rather in those of the typological ordering of God's two books - the Bible and creation as a whole - sub specie aeternitatis, which provides the ontological and epistemological basis out of which the fourfold scheme is developed? Most of what has been written - far more than can be summarized here - has been aimed at determining the Commedia's intrinsic mode of signification and has consistently begged the question of how Dante might have come to displace into the domain of lay vernacular poetry an exegetical practice designed for exclusive application to Holy Scripture, and what might the wider significance of such an extraordinary displacement have been.

In October 1974, Henry A. Kissinger, the US secretary of state, met with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev in Moscow to discuss unresolved arms-control matters before the upcoming US–Soviet summit in Vladivostok. They made progress but still noted that détente – the finely calibrated reduction of US–Soviet tensions that their two governments had presided over in the previous few years – was in fact “hanging by a thread.” Both men knew only too well what the alternative would be. As the recently resigned US president, Richard M. Nixon, had warned Brezhnev a few months earlier: “if détente unravels in America, the hawks will take over, not the doves.”

Eventually they did. By the end of 1980, US–Soviet relations were freezing, with few economic transactions, daily exchanges of hostile words, and growing concerns among American and Soviet citizens about their countries’ military competition. Since détente was motivated by a desire to stabilize the nuclear arms race, enhance bilateral cooperation, and decrease the ideological and geopolitical rivalry between the superpowers, its fate was increasingly apparent.

The collapse of superpower détente did not happen overnight. Nor was it caused by a single, overwhelming destructive force, like an earthquake or tsunami. Rather, it was a slow, eroding process, in which multiple events and forces added strength to one another and gradually tore apart the delicate fabric of lofty ideas, pragmatic assumptions, and half-sincere obligations associated with détente.

The main purpose of this chapter is to argue that European détente was, first and foremost, a European project. While there is no denying the significance of the United States and the Soviet Union in the shaping of Europe’s fortunes in the 1960s and 1970s, détente actually began (and continued far longer) in Europe. In some ways this should be no surprise to any student of the Cold War: after all, the Cold War had commenced to a large extent in the Old World and would, in the late 1980s, wither away there as well. So, why should the “middle cold war” have been any different? In fact, one can push the argument slightly further: while the division of Germany lay at the heart of the Cold War division of Europe and the unification of that country marked the end of that era, then something profound took place in the status of Germany as a result of the Ostpolitik practiced, in particular, by West German chancellor Willy Brandt (1969–74). It was ultimately his policy of multiple “openings” – most significantly to the USSR, Poland, and East Germany – that ushered in an era of détente in Europe.

More precisely, the basic argument in this chapter is that the relaxation of East–West tensions in Europe was a result of a European challenge to the excesses of bipolarity. Some of these challenges came in the form of nationalistic needs – be it Charles de Gaulle’s effort to lift France’s international status or, most significantly, Willy Brandt’s pursuit of Ostpolitik. There was, as Henry Kissinger observed, no obvious unity among Europeans beyond their general resentment of being treated as pawns by the United States and the Soviet Union in a game of global geopolitics. Yet, as such agreements as the Harmel Report of 1967 and the Davignon Report of 1970 would indicate, most Europeans agreed with each other on the general need for improved East–West relations and better interallied cooperation. The most evident culmination of the new era in European politics during the period discussed in this volume was the conclusion of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) in 1975. It was there that Europe’s postwar erafinally came to an end.

Control of strategic raw materials played a key role in the origins and outcome of World War II and continued to be a source of power and policy during the Cold War. Modern warfare generated an unprecedented demand for oil and other resources, and modern industrial society consumed massive amounts of energy and raw materials. The United States and the Soviet Union were continent-spanning countries rich in oil and strategic minerals, and their control of these resources helped underpin their power. Both also sought to gain access to resources outside their borders. The United States possessed the military and economic capability to look all over the world, especially to the Third World, for resources for itself and its allies. Lacking comparable power projection and economic capabilities, the Soviet Union was forced to look to its sphere of influence in Eastern Europe to meet its needs.

British, French, and Dutch colonies in Southeast Asia possessed tin, rubber, tungsten, and oil, and European colonies in Africa contained several strategic minerals, including copper, cobalt, manganese, chrome, uranium, and industrial diamonds. Raw materials were an important source of dollar income for most European colonial powers, and the profits British oil companies made in the Middle East were essential to Britain’s balance of payments and its ability to continue to maintain military forces in the region. Latin America was also rich in strategic raw materials, including petroleum, copper, manganese, nickel, tin, tungsten, and bauxite. Revolutionary nationalism in the Third World threatened Western access to vital raw materials, disrupted plans to draw on Third World resources to rebuild the economies of Western Europe and Japan, and weakened the overall Western position in the Cold War.

US objectives during the Cold War were to prevent Soviet attacks on the United States and its allies and to prevent the spread of Communism as a political and economic system to other countries, whether by force or by threat, subversion, persuasion, or bribery. The principal instrument to prevent attack was an extensive build-up of defensive and retaliatory military forces, combined with political and military alliances that extended US protection to other countries in exchange for their engagement and support. The principal instruments for preventing the spread of Communism by nonmilitary means involved building an international economic system conducive to economic prosperity; engaging in persuasion, providing incentives, and occasionally imposing economic sanctions; and, not least, promoting a robust US economy that could serve as a stimulant to others and as a beacon for the benefits of a free, enterprise-based, market-oriented economy.

This chapter will examine the second set of instruments, usually neglected by historians of the Cold War in favor of a focus on the actual or threatened military actions and the diplomacy associated with them. Following some introductory remarks, the chapter will discuss developments in the world economy and will highlight the comparative economic performance between Communist countries and what was called the “free world.” I will then analyze the actions taken by the United States, including public expenditures on national security and international affairs that were motivated, at least in part, by their international implications.

The question for this chapter is how Soviet and American national identities shaped and were shaped by the Cold War. Defining identity is not easy, however. Is it the same as self-image or self-perception? How does it relate to ideology and political culture? Can we treat national identity as singular in the face of internal differences? What evidence can establish the content or even the existence of identities, and how do we go about determining their causes and effects?

Although in the end perhaps we have to settle for the Potter Stewart definition of knowing it when we see it, more formally national identity can be seen as the set of values, attributes, and practices that members believe characterize the country and set it off from others. Identity is the (shared) answer to central if vague questions: Who are we? What are we like? Who are we similar to and different from? Identity is at work when people say “We must act in a way that is true to what we are,” as Jimmy Carter did in his 1978 state of the union address when he declared that “the very heart of our identity as a nation is our from commitment to human rights.” Identities thus carry heavy affective weight, and this helps explain why scholarly arguments about the Cold War are often very bitter because the stakes include what the Soviet Union and the United States are like or should be like.

The thirteenth-century French verse Roman de la Rose involves striking new developments in the deployment of various allegorical constructs and procedures, within the context of a self-conscious and innovative expansion of dominant vernacular literary discourses, both lyric and narrative. It is necessary to stress at the outset the Rose's unique status in the medieval French literary corpus - in terms of authority, of prestige, and of influence. Not only does it exist in a greater number of manuscripts (nearly three hundred) than any other single work from this corpus, but it generated a remarkable number of poetic, philosophical, theological and political responses in a variety of key European cultural contexts: Italian, English, and Dutch, as well as French. In all of these contexts, it is particularly significant that the Rose is a work by two authors: the “courtly” Guillaume de Lorris, whose romance (of about 4,000 lines, apparently incomplete) dates from c. 1225-30; and the “clerkly” Jean de Meun, who self-consciously continued and completed his predecessor's kernel text between c. 1270 and 1280 with an additional 18,000 lines. It was only the conjoined Rose text of which Jean was the architect that succeeded so spectacularly (and so quickly) in dominating the French vernacular literary scene.