U.S.-Soviet Security Cooperation
These Stanford authors share their Harvard colleagues' premise that if the threat of nuclear Armageddon has been mostly responsible for preventing war between the superpowers, the U.S. and the Soviet Union ought to be able to turn their shared security interest into cooperation, tacit or explicit. This impressive volume mines the postwar history of such efforts in Europe, in arms control and in dealing with regional conflict. While the relationship is and will remain fundamentally conflicted-only in Europe have the two superpowers developed a set of assumptions and agreements that amount to a security regime-still, they share incentives to cooperate: each senses it is vulnerable to modern war and that unilateral measures to promote security are not enough. In the future, as in the past, explicit agreements are not always possible or necessary; instead, agreement takes the form of "a mix of unilateral policies and cooperative arrangements."
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