ABSTRACT
Nothing is more complex than the assessment of the strategic situation of a superpower in the nuclear age. Any analysis of Soviet leadership and elite thinking on almost any subject, particularly strategic ones, must begin with the generational factor. The Soviet Union has developed a deep-water navy and has acquired new bases. The United States has lost the Vietnam War, and the Soviet-Chinese conflict has been the most dramatic event in the shattering of the world communist movement. There are a number of reasons for the difference between the apparently enormous changes in the world over the last quarter of a century and similarity in the US perceptions in the late 1950s and the early 1980s. Significant economic reform in the Soviet Union has foreign-policy implications. The raising of consumer prices and other changes in social policy will be politically very difficult without a challenge to the priority given to military spending.
