We All Lost the Cold War

by Richard Ned Lebow, Janice Gross Stein

Overview

Drawing on recently declassified documents and extensive interviews with Soviet and American policy-makers, among them several important figures speaking for public record for the first time, Ned Lebow and Janice Stein cast new light on the effect of nuclear threats in two of the tensest moments of the Cold War: the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and the confrontations arising out of the Arab-Israeli war of 1973. They conclude that the strategy of deterrence prolonged rather than ended the conflict between the superpowers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691019413
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/23/1995
Series:	Princeton Studies in International History and Politics , #55
Edition description:	REPRINT
Pages:	566
Product dimensions:	7.75(w) x 10.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

Preface
Abbreviations
Ch. 1	Introduction	3
Pt. 1	The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962
Ch. 2	Missiles to Cuba: Foreign-Policy Motives	19
Ch. 3	Missiles to Cuba: Domestic Politics	51
Ch. 4	Why Did Khrushchev Miscalculate?	67
Ch. 5	Why Did the Missiles Provoke a Crisis?	94
Ch. 6	The Crisis and Its Resolution	110
Pt. 2	The Crisis in the Middle East, October 1973
Ch. 7	The Failure to Prevent War, October 1973	149
Ch. 8	The Failure to Limit the War: The Soviet and American Airlifts	182
Ch. 9	The Failure to Stop the Fighting	198
Ch. 10	The Failure to Avoid Confrontation	226
Ch. 11	The Crisis and Its Resolution	261
Pt. 3	Deterrence, Compellence, and the Cold War
Ch. 12	How Crises Are Resolved	291
Ch. 13	Deterrence and Crisis Management	324
Ch. 14	Nuclear Threats and Nuclear Weapons	348
Postscript. Deterrence and the End of the Cold War	369
Notes	377
Appendix	523
Name Index	527
General Index	535

What People are Saying About This

Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev

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. That is the scientific conclusion.

From the Publisher

"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. That is the scientific conclusion."—Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev

Editorial Reviews

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.

The Independent (London) - Godfrey Hodgson

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)

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)

From the Publisher

In their study of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis and the 1973 confrontation between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. during the Arab-Israeli war, the authors refute the popular notion that the U.S. policy of nuclear deterrence prevented war between the superpowers in both crises and convinced the Soviet leadership that this country would not tolerate aggression. Lebow and Stein reconstruct the calculations of the leaders on both sides to show that the U.S.'s threat-based deterrence strategy was more provocative than restraining in 1962, that it was irrelevant in '73 and that Washington's faith in the efficacy of showdown diplomacy actually prolonged the Cold War. In this significant addition to the literature of international crisis management, the authors urge greater appreciation of the risks of threat-based strategies and greater attention to the mutual clarification of interests. They suggest that these lessons be applied to the prevention, management and resolution of conflict in the post-Cold War era. Lebow is a professor of political science at the University of Pittsburgh; Stein is a professor of political science at the University of Toronto. (Feb.)

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