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The Cold War

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Abstract

This chapter offers an original conception, namely the periodization of the Cold War, which is the field of the author’s long-term specialization, as a four-decades-long period without a direct military confrontation between its key actors. The first part is dedicated to the question whether this specific form of long-term confrontation was avoidable or inevitable. Eichler presents not only the classical, conservative answer but also the revisionist point of view. As his periodization of the Cold War is based on the role of nuclear deterrents, he pays particular attention to the first plans of the US nuclear attacks at the targets on the territory of the USSR and their impacts on the security relations between the two key winners of World War II. Another big subject of this chapter are the so-called periphery wars (Korea, Vietnam) and the big crises (Suez, Cuba, Intermediary Nuclear Forces (INF)), their causes and long-term international consequences. In the last part, Eichler does not hide his fascination about the second half of the 1980s because of the swift and bloodless end of the Cold War and the roles of R. Reagan and M. Gorbachev, the signatories of the first disarmament treaty in the nuclear age.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of International Relations Prague, Praha, Czech Republic

    Jan Eichler

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  1. Jan Eichler
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Eichler, J. (2017). The Cold War. In: War, Peace and International Security. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-60151-3_3

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