500 THE END OF THE COLD WAR
thermonuclear holocaust worldwide. As Putin reached into the
Russian budget to modernize Russian conventional forces, his milit-
arist posturings bore some similarities to Soviet traditions before
Gorbachëv’s ascent to power, and Russia became careless of foreign
criticism. This was a bad turn in international relations. But there have
always been some heavy constraints on Putin’s freedom of action.
Above all, the Russian economy continues to be over-reliant on the
export of natural resources and has little prospect of matching Ameri-
can technological prowess. Although the Russian leadership desires to
scare and bully its neighbours, it has only a limited capacity to con-
front America – and it is to be hoped that the Kremlin elite has the
sense to recognize this.
The conflicts in eastern Ukraine give grounds for acute worry
about the European future; but as yet they remain dwarfed by the dan-
gers that prevailed throughout the Cold War. The trial of strength
between USSR and America had touched every aspect of their mili-
tary, ideological, economic, scientific and political resilience. Behind
each superpower there stood a coalition of allies and friends. The
danger of thermonuclear war was unvarying. In both Washington and
Moscow, the routine assumption was that the rulers of the other
superpower were wild enough to organize an all-out nuclear offensive.
Such a scenario was never far from the concerns of the US President
and the Soviet General Secretary. Even during the brief period of
détente in the mid-1970s, there lingered the possibility of Armaged-
don. Although the ballistic missiles stayed in their silos, American and
Soviet leaders continued to fire ideological salvos and to support those
client states which shared their hostility to the other superpower. The
USSR guarded the ramparts of its fortress state and minimized its
people’s contact with the capitalist West. Only a brittle peace was
realiz able in such conditions. Until the late 1980s, a global military
cataclysm could all too easily have happened by accident, misjudge-
ment or design.
Such an outcome is not yet unimaginable while international
tension grows in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and East Asia and
questions of nuclear proliferation remain unresolved. All of us living
today owe a debt to the generation of leaders who ended the Cold War
and made it less likely that their successors will go to thermonuclear
war. Much was accomplished; more still urgently needs to be done.