The Cuban Missile Crisis: An Analysis of Soviet Calculations and Behavior

1964 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 363-389 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arnold L. Horelick
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cuban Missile Crisis ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Television Interview ◽  
And Behavior

In A television interview not long after the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, President Kennedy observed that both the United States and the Soviet Union had made serious miscalculations in the Cuban affair. “I don't think we expected that he [Khrushchev] would put the missiles in Cuba,” he said, “because it would have seemed such an imprudent action for him to take He obviously thought he could do it in secret and that the United States would accept it.”

The Possibilities of Peaceful Coexistence, 1958–1959

2018 ◽  
pp. 122-151
Author(s):  
Rósa Magnúsdóttir
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Cultural Exchange ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cuban Missile Crisis ◽  
American People ◽  
Peaceful Coexistence ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Great Patriotic War

This chapter focuses on the official cultural exchange agreement from 1958 and its immediate outcome. The focus is first on Soviet reactions to the American National Exhibition in Moscow in 1959 and then Khrushchev’s trip to the United States, which aptly illustrates the changes in both official and popular discourses on America that had taken place since 1945. In 1959, Khrushchev emphasized the demonstrated capabilities of the Soviet and American people to fight for peace together: the Soviet-American alliance again entered the Soviet narrative of the Great Patriotic War, and even if hopes for a real thaw in Soviet-American relations came to nothing in the early 1960s, culminating in 1962 with the Cuban Missile Crisis, there was never again such a strong effort to control and contain images of the United States in the Soviet Union as there had been during the early Cold War.

6. Star Wars and beyond

2020 ◽  
pp. 80-103
Author(s):  
Joseph M. Siracusa
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
Arms Race ◽  
Cuban Missile Crisis ◽  
The Public ◽  
Star Wars ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Public Imagination

‘Star Wars and beyond’ focuses on the various anti-missile shields proposed after the Cuban Missile Crisis. By the 1960s, both the United States and the Soviet Union, looking for alternatives to the doctrine of mutual assured destruction, found themselves caught up in an offensive and defensive arms race. Would an anti-missile shield respond effectively to the complex demands on it? Was the American arsenal enough of a deterrent to discourage rivals from striking first? Would the ‘shield’ approach reignite the arms race? Reagan’s Strategic Defence Initiative (christened ‘Star Wars’ by critics) did not at first capture the public imagination, but its legacy continued in later administrations and is still felt today.

The Carter Era and the Collapse of Détente, 1977–80

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keren Yarhi-Milo
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Selective Attention ◽  
The United States ◽  
Carter Administration ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
Jimmy Carter ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
The U.S

This chapter discusses the relevant predictions of the alternative theses about how states should assess intentions by analyzing the case of the Carter administration during the period 1977–1980. Jimmy Carter began his time as president of the United States with great optimism about the USSR and was committed to improving the U.S.–Soviet relations. By the end of his tenure, however, Carter’s perceptions of the Soviet Union had changed and his policies emphasized competition over cooperation. The détente had collapsed. The chapter examines the Carter administration’s assessment of Soviet intentions, and more specifically the dramatic changes in U.S. perceptions of the Soviet Union, using the selective attention thesis, capabilities thesis, strategic military doctrine thesis, and behavior thesis. It considers whether key decision makers in the Carter administration engaged in intentions assessment attend to different indicators than the U.S. intelligence organizations.

Utopias of One

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua Kotin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
World War I ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Personal Autonomy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Soviet Period ◽  
Original Research ◽  
The Soviet Union

This book is a new account of utopian writing. It examines how eight writers—Henry David Thoreau, W. E. B. Du Bois, Osip and Nadezhda Mandel'shtam, Anna Akhmatova, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, and J. H. Prynne—construct utopias of one within and against modernity's two large-scale attempts to harmonize individual and collective interests: liberalism and communism. The book begins in the United States between the buildup to the Civil War and the end of Jim Crow; continues in the Soviet Union between Stalinism and the late Soviet period; and concludes in England and the United States between World War I and the end of the Cold War. In this way it captures how writers from disparate geopolitical contexts resist state and normative power to construct perfect worlds—for themselves alone. The book contributes to debates about literature and politics, presenting innovative arguments about aesthetic difficulty, personal autonomy, and complicity and dissent. It models a new approach to transnational and comparative scholarship, combining original research in English and Russian to illuminate more than a century and a half of literary and political history.

Trust, but Verify

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Arms Control ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
East West

This book uses trust—with its emotional and predictive aspects—to explore international relations in the second half of the Cold War, beginning with the late 1960s. The détente of the 1970s led to the development of some limited trust between the United States and the Soviet Union, which lessened international tensions and enabled advances in areas such as arms control. However, it also created uncertainty in other areas, especially on the part of smaller states that depended on their alliance leaders for protection. The chapters in this volume look at how the “emotional” side of the conflict affected the dynamics of various Cold War relations: between the superpowers, within the two ideological blocs, and inside individual countries on the margins of the East–West confrontation.

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