Nuclear War and Nuclear Fear in the 1970s and 1980s

Abstract

In September 1949, brooding over the recent discovery that the Soviet Union had tested an atomic weapon, George Kennan wrote a telling note in his diary. Then the head of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff, Kennan declared that what matters are 'intentions, rather than the capabilities of other nations'. His compatriots' obsession with the latter, he added, meant that the United States was 'drifting toward a morbid preoccupation with the fact that the Russians conceivably could drop atomic bombs on this country.'1 Kennan's point was insightful, but of limited value. The United States could not really know the Soviets' intentions, then or at any other point during the Cold War. Intentions can be partially determined in many different ways: through the help of spies, by careful analysis of shifting capabilities, with close analysis of public statements. But for decades a lack of understanding of what Moscow wanted, or what it planned to do, was one of the biggest weaknesses of the United States' foreign policy. It was also the source of some of the most intense debates of the Cold War: did the