Science, the Cold War, and the American State

Abstract

Why should students of diplomatic history care about the interior dimension of the Cold War? The answer to this question is clearer now that the Cold War is finally over: What the superpowers did internally in order to conduct their external competition had a decisive impact on its eventual outcome. With their economy groaning under the weight of massive defense expenditures, and with mounting evidence of a widening gap in military technology between East and West, the Soviet leadership in the mid-1980s began a series of desperate domestic reforms that led not to renewal, but to revolution and collapse. The interior and exterior dimensions of the Cold War are inextricably intertwined, and any attempt to reexamine the history of the last half century that overlooks this fact will be fundamentally flawed. As important as they undoubtedly are, the crises, negotiations, blunders, breakthroughs, and missed opportunities that typically occupy the attention of diplomatic historians are, at best, only one half of a larger story.