ABSTRACT
If one were to believe the more extravagant claims made on behalf of détente, then it represented a genuine break in the cold war mould of superpower relations. Certainly if one judges détente by the aspirations of some leading participants, this was the case. Georgi Arbatov, Director of the USA and Canada Institute in Moscow and a prominent adviser to the Kremlin in the 1970s and 1980s, declared that ‘detente is not a continuation of Cold War by other, more cautious and safer, means. It is a policy that, by its nature and objectives, is opposed to Cold War, and is aimed not at gaining victory in conflicts by means short of nuclear war, but at the settlement and prevention of conflicts, at lowering the level of military confrontation, and at the development of international cooperation’ (Arbatov 1983: 13). Doubtless this statement served a political purpose of associating the Soviet Union with the most sweeping and publicly appealing conception of détente. It was made in 1983, by which time détente had run into the ground, and represented an implicit claim that the fault for the downturn in US-Soviet relations lay with the United States. It is noteworthy, though, that détente should have been talked about in these terms at all. It fed the popular assumption that US-Soviet relations were an either/or matter – cold war or détente (which indeed was the title of Arbatov’s book on the subject).
