ABSTRACT
Since the ending of the Cold War in the early 1990s, two broad views of the confrontation have emerged. One contends that the Cold War ended in victory for the NATO alliance, with the Soviet bloc collapsing first into the Commonwealth of Independent States and a number of independent East European countries, and subsequently into an even looser alliance, with the Russian Federation itself under threat of decline if not disintegration. This analysis sees the nuclear confrontation as an essential part of the process, with stable nuclear deterrence providing a security context within which the much greater free market economic success of Western liberal democracies could ultimately lead to the downfall of a rigid centrally planned economic system. Central to this was the manner in which the Eastern bloc was forced into crippling defence budgets in a desperate attempt to maintain military parity with NATO.
