ABSTRACT
By 1968, as the Soviet Union crushed the ‘Prague Spring’ and the United States was deeply enmired in Vietnam, the Cold War had lost the crusading element that had been present on both sides in some of the years after 1945, while the process of decolonisation had, in the formal sense at least, neared completion, having created an ‘independent’ Third World. And so the superpower relationship had reached a kind of maturity in détente.
