The Cold War: A World History

"The book’s strength is its breadth. There are some who look back to the Cold War period with a certain nostalgia, thinking this was a time of prudent and disciplined rivalry in which there were rules of the game regulating US-Soviet relations. There is some truth in that last point, but it is also true that at times only good luck averted a devastating nuclear war neither side wanted. What Westad’s book describes is the Cold War as a whole, not just in the places on which most studies have focused—the United States, the Soviet Union and Europe—but also in Asia, Africa and Latin America. He challenges the view that this was a ‘long peace’. It was not a long peace for Koreans and Vietnamese, nor indeed for the Americans who were killed in those wars far from their native shores. Not many scholars know both Russian and Chinese, write in English, and have a native language which is different again. Westad, a Norwegian, is one such scholar, and his book has the additional merit of being highly readable. I’ve touched on that already. At times of high tension during the Cold War, the world came closer to catastrophic nuclear war than most people realized at the time. The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 is the best-known example. If Nikita Khrushchev had not been prepared to withdraw Soviet missiles from Cuba, and if President Kennedy had been less patient, or unwilling to make concessions of his own, we might not be here having this conversation today. There were other occasions when it seemed as if Soviet missiles had been launched against the United States and when (at a different time) American missiles were apparently heading for the Soviet Union. They were all the result of technical failure or human error. We were more reliant than we knew at the time on the cool heads and prudent judgement of the officers on both sides who had to advise their military superiors whether the attack was for real or a false alarm."