ABSTRACT
A professor of mine once told his class that the most important alliance during the Cold War was between the United States and the Soviet Union-he paused here-not to have a nuclear war. It was, to be sure, a tacit and well-disguised alliance, especially in the first two decades after World War II, when crises between the communist and capitalist worlds erupted at widely scattered flashpoints (Korea, Indochina, Suez, Berlin, Cuba) that had little in common save their symbolic significance on the super-power chessboard. After going to the brink over Cuba in 1962, Washington and Moscow did a better job for the next few decades of avoiding direct confrontations, but continued to augment and modernize their stockpiles. In November 1985, when he first met Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan, who had condemned the Soviet Union as an “evil empire,” remarked that if the Earth were attacked by extraterrestrials, surely the two adversaries (and former World War II allies) would cooperate militarily to defend the planet. But in a real sense, the ETs had already landed: nuclear weapons constituted as radical a departure from previous experience and as grave and palpable a threat to civilization as would any Martian invasion-and even implacable enemies were forced to limit their difficulties accordingly.
