ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the basic drivers and fundamental contradictions of the process of detente between the United States (US) and the Soviet Union of the late 1960s and 1970s. It argues that detente was driven by a Eurocentric logic that stemmed in part as well from global processes and had important, although often inadvertent and unforeseen, global implications. Detente was thus in its own way connected to the global sixties: a driver and a consequence of them. The objective of detente's nuclear diplomacy was to set in motion a process aimed at controlling, containing, and eventually rolling back nuclear proliferation. Detente became therefore a way to preserve order and discipline, a fairly conservative strategy aimed at propping up and strengthening the foundations of a post-war international order—and a geopolitically clear-cut partition of Europe—that showed growing signs of fragility.
