Lessons from the New History of the Cold War
| Author | Thomas M. Nichols |
| DOI | 10.1177/002070209805300406 |
| Published date | 01 December 1998 |
| Date | 01 December 1998 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
THOMAS
M.
NICHOLS
Lessons from
the
new
history
of
the
cold
war
INTRODUCTION:
LEARNING
FROM
THE
NEW
HISTORY
OF
THE
COLD
WAR
THE
END
OF
THE COLD
WAR HAS
BROUGHT
A
WEALTH
OF
MEMOIRS,
materials,
and
revelations
from the
former
Soviet
empire
that
has
opened
a
world
that
Westerners
thought
might
be
closed
from
view
forever.
As
more
of
the
'missing
pages'
of
cold war
history
are
found,
important
questions
have
been
resolved,
startling
secrets
have
been
revealed,
and
vexing
debates
have
been
settled.
What
we
have
found
has
been
on
occasion amusing:
Leonid
Brezhnev's
diaries,
for
example,
show
that
he
thought
a
great
deal
about
his
weight, the
number
of
ani-
mals
he
hunted,
his
naps
-
and
precious
little
about
running
a
nuclear
superpower. Too
often,
we
have
encountered
the
bizarre
and
tragic:
the
suspicions
about
steroid
use
by
the hulking women
of
the
East
German
Olympic
teams
turned
out
not
only
to
be
true,
but
sadly
to
be
only
a
small
part
of
a
larger
programme
in
which
innocent
children
were
rou-
tinely
marinated
in
dangerous
drugs simply
for
the
greater
glory
of
the
German Democratic
Republic.
And
at
times
stories
have
emerged
that
are
terrifying
in
their
implications:
the
previously
censored
pages
of
Nikita
Khrushchev's
memoirs
tell
us
that
even
as
he
was
trying
to
extri-
Associate
Professor
of
Strategp
United
States
Naval
War
College,
andAssociate,
Davis
Center
for
Russian
Studies,
Harvard
University.
The
views
expressed
are
those
of
the
author
and
not
of
the
United
States
Navy
or
any
agency
of
the
United
States
government.
INTERNATIONAL
JOURNAL
Autumn
1998
Thomas
M.
Nichols
cate
himself
from
the
Cuban
crisis
in
1962,
Fidel
Castro
was
urging
him to
launch
an
all-out
nuclear attack
on
American
cities.
We
now
have answers
-
to
borrow
a
phrase
from
John
Gaddis,
'we
now know' -
but
what
have
we learned?
To
judge
by
the
reaction
of
some,
particularly
in
the
academic
community,
we've
learned
little
indeed.
While
these
new
revelations
have
led
some
to
a
final
overcom-
ing
of
denial
about
the
dangerous
and
aggressive
nature
of
Soviet
com-
munism,
for
others
they
have
led
to
a
revisionist
retrenchment,
in
which
East
and
West
are
somehow
both
at
fault,
and
that
in
the
end
'we all
lost' the cold
war.
(Obviously,
very
few
Russian
communists
would
accept
this
relativistic
formulation; much
of
their
anger at
the
regime
of
Boris
Yeltsin
is
grounded
in
a
distinct
feeling
that
the
Unit-
ed States
inflicted
a
humiliating
defeat
on
their
Soviet
motherland.)
Whatever
one
makes
of
them,
the
archival
materials
pouring
out
of
eastern
Europe
tell
stories
of
terrible
brutality and paranoia
behind
the
former
Iron
Curtain.
Most
people
seem
to
have
accepted
them
as
establishing beyond
doubt
the
terrible
nature
of
Soviet
communism.
Those
who
have
not
are
probably beyond
convincing.
But
there
is
more
to
the
new
history
of
the
cold
war
than
a
simple
catalogue
of
Soviet
crimes.
As
morally
satisfying
as
it
might
be
to
tra-
ditional
cold warriors,
it
is
time
to
forgo
debate
with
the remaining
revisionists
-
who,
like
the
last
barricaded
Japanese
soldiers
of
World
War
II,
refuse
to
accept
the undeniable
-
and
move
on
to
consider
what
we
might
learn,
and
what
lessons
we
might
apply
in
the future,
from the
Soviet-American
conflict
of
1945-91.
The
end
of
the
cold
war
does
not
mean
the
end
of
'cold
wars':
where
conflicting
ideologies
make
confrontation
inevitable
and
nuclear weapons make
global
war
unthinkable,
a
new
cold
war
can
emerge.
An obvious
possibility
is
with
the
People's
Republic
of
China,
but
there
are
many
other
states
whose
beliefs,
combined
with
the acquisition
of
weapons
of
mass
destruction,
could
present
the
West
with
the
need to
'fight' yet
another
cold
war
in
the
near
future. It
is,
therefore, imperative for policy-makers
and
acad-
emic
specialists
alike
to
pause
at
this
point
in
history
and
to reflect
on
the
origins
of
the
most
dangerous
struggle
in
human
history
and
how
the
West eventually
achieved
victory
in it.
LESSONS
OF
THE
COLD
WAR
Three propositions
about
fighting
and prevailing
in
a
'cold
war'
emerge
from
the
Soviet-American experience. First, revelations
about
662
INTERNATIONAL
JOURNAL
Autumn
1998
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