administrations, was sharply reversed in the early Reagan years. It is common
to see the period afterGorbachevcame to power in the Soviet Union as the
second de ́tente. However, there had been earlier periods of relaxation of
tension under Khrushchev, and perhaps immediately after Stalin’s death in
1953.
The country where de ́tente was both most politically important, and
perhaps most real, was Germany, where the Ostpolitik identified with Willy
Brandt represented a genuinerapprochementbetween the Soviet Union and
West Germany, which took place about 20 years before the collapse of Soviet
power in Europe and the unification of the German states.
Deterrence
Deterrence is a concept much used by defence strategists and military planners
and their political allies. Literally, deterrence refers to the capacity to protect
oneself from attack by another nation by being able to threaten terrible, or at
least unacceptable, reprisals. Deterrence, however, has come into its own in the
often bizarre world of nuclearstrategy, and highly sophisticated theories have
been developed around the concept. Political leaders of both the Western and
Eastern powers have argued, ever since 1945, that their countries need nuclear
weapons, or at least very strong conventional forces (seeconventional arms),
so that peace can be maintained. The argument is that as long as a potential
enemy knows that any attack by them would cost them dear, no attack will be
made. In terms of nuclear capacity a host of other concepts become involved in
the detailed working out of this essentially simple notion, especially those of
mutual assured destruction,second strike capacity, pre-emptive strikes,
massive retaliationandflexible response. Perhaps the most significant
point is that military capacity does now seem to be justified everywhere in
terms of the need to deter others, rather than of having an offensive capacity.
The problem with deterrence is that it is ultimately a matter of comparative
psychology: one can never know what will deter a potential enemy, only what
would deter oneself. Recent military activity, such as the British recapture of
the Falkland Islands from Argentina, or the United Nations-sponsoredGulf
Waragainst Iraq, ought not to have been necessary because, rationally, the
aggressors must have known that their opponents possessed superior military
power. In both cases what went wrong was that the aggressors calculated that
others would not use those powers. It would certainly appear that nuclear
deterrence, where the sheer level of destruction that might follow an act of
aggression would be too high to allow even the slightest risk of miscalculating
an opponent’s reaction, is more effective. In neither of the above examples was
there any serious threat of using nuclear forces.
Deterrence