ABSTRACT
This chapter provides some explanatory sketches for the perceptual change that accompanied the super powers’ realization of mutual vulnerability, which also led to their realization that they had a common interest in avoiding major clashes and in preserving their nuclear monopoly against challengers. The institutionalization of methods of avoiding clashes that could lead to nuclear conflict then appeared as a potentially legitimizing principle for the new “structure of peace.” The emergence of new issues and the phenomenon of the “changing essence of power” can be appreciated only against the background of a strategic analysis which illuminates the reasons for the relative depreciation of military power in the nuclear era, at least for the “dominant” states. To that extent the historical reconstruction of the chain of events which led to such a state of affairs serves an important function.
