ABSTRACT
Eminent scholars and strategists who flirted with the idea of limited war in a nuclear era found it necessary subsequently to recant their earlier indiscretions. A superficial examination of the evolution of limited war doctrines in the post-war period in the East and West may possibly be misleading. Soviet political leaders have gone on record as opposing the idea of limited warfare because of the escalatory pressures and generally unpredictable consequences. From the strategic debates in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s there emerged a sense of what limited war, with or without the use of nuclear weapons, implied and also a sense of its then rudimentary conceptual and theoretical aspects. Recently-displayed Soviet interest in the feasibility of limited and local war, and their systematic preparations for such a contingency, may reflect their current strategic-doctrinal ‘maturity’. In the 1980s Soviet foreign and military policies and strategies have become harmonious and congruent.
