Everything You Always Wanted to Know about the Cold War

Abstract

Here, in a total of 1,723 pages of text and annotated bibliography is the combined wisdom of 75 major scholars from 18 countries (though most of them live in either the United States or the United Kingdom) of the period of world history known as the Cold War. An epigraph for the entire enterprise would be J. R. McNeill's observation, at the opening of his essay on “The Biosphere and the Cold War,” that the Cold War “is one of the handful of subjects that can keep hundreds of historians busy all their lives” (3:422). In effect, these volumes comprise a history of the postwar world from 1945 to 1991. Origins concludes, by and large, in 1962; Crises and Détente runs roughly from 1962 through mid to late 1975; and then there is Endings. Each volume includes both transnational thematic essays as well as country studies. Not surprisingly, no single theme unifies the essays in any given volume, though Odd Arne Westad's opening essay, “The Cold War and the International History of the Twentieth Century,” establishes the ambitious scope and fundamental conviction at the base of the entire enterprise. For Westad, understanding the Cold War “is very much about understanding global processes of change.” The “very promise of modernity” that the wars of the first half of the twentieth century had brought into question was at the heart of the Soviet-American rivalry that consumed its second half. Westad argues that the “superpowers' post-1945 models of development seemed, each in its own way, to rescue two key aspects of that promise: individual freedom and social justice” (1:17). Over its long course, the Cold War was “a significant part of the history of the twentieth century and … an important ingredient in most of its other parts” (1:19).