We All Lost the Cold War

One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 1994 "The orthodoxy ... is that deterrence worked and the arms race defeated the Soviet Union. Hitherto there has been little dissent from those positions, apart from those 'revisionist' historians who merely turned the whole orthodoxy on its head... Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein are not revisionists in that sense. They are far too sensible for emotional nonsense of that kind. Yet their work is quite as unorthodox, probably as shocking to the closed corporation of Cold War 'scholars' but much more surprising than that of the Chomskyans."--Godfrey Hodgson, The Independent (London) "They've got it just right. It is a dangerous conclusion that the West won the Cold War. The argument that one side won the Cold War is mistaken. We all lost the Cold War, particularly the USA and the USSR. We all won by ending it."--Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev

Richard Ned Lebow is Professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh. Janice Gross Stein is Harrison Professor of Conflict Management and Negotiation at the University of Toronto.

PrefaceAbbreviationsCh. 1Introduction3Pt. 1The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962Ch. 2Missiles to Cuba: Foreign-Policy Motives19Ch. 3Missiles to Cuba: Domestic Politics51Ch. 4Why Did Khrushchev Miscalculate?67Ch. 5Why Did the Missiles Provoke a Crisis?94Ch. 6The Crisis and Its Resolution110Pt. 2The Crisis in the Middle East, October 1973Ch. 7The Failure to Prevent War, October 1973149Ch. 8The Failure to Limit the War: The Soviet and American Airlifts182Ch. 9The Failure to Stop the Fighting198Ch. 10The Failure to Avoid Confrontation226Ch. 11The Crisis and Its Resolution261Pt. 3Deterrence, Compellence, and the Cold WarCh. 12How Crises Are Resolved291Ch. 13Deterrence and Crisis Management324Ch. 14Nuclear Threats and Nuclear Weapons348Postscript. Deterrence and the End of the Cold War369Notes377Appendix523Name Index527General Index535