Volume 43, Number 11 · June 20, 1996
Who Won the Cold War?
By Thomas Powers
From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider's Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War
by Robert M. Gates
Simon and Schuster, 604 pp., $30.00
The great still unanswered question left by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the cold war is what military power had to do with it. When Mikhail Gorbachev took office in 1985 the Soviet Union possessed the world's largest military establishment, including thousands of nuclear-armed missiles acquired at great expense in the twenty-some years since Nikita Khrushchev's humiliating backdown in a confrontation with the United States over Soviet nuclear forces in Cuba. The details of the surrender had been negotiated by Vasily Kuznetsov with the American official John McCloy, at the latter's home in Connecticut. 'Well, Mr. McCloy,' Kuznetsov said, 'we will honor this agreement. But I want to tell you something. You'll never do this to us again.'
Review, 7593 words
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