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This chapter discusses the end of Hitler's dictatorship. Social support for Hitler and for National Socialism steadily eroded as the war encroached more and more into German life, and many people certainly became fed up. Nazi propaganda played upon German fears about what would happen if or when the Soviets arrived on German territory, in order to try to strengthen the determination to resist. The warning of retribution to come for Nazi barbarities committed in the Soviet Union led many Germans to flee to the west. Those who could not or would not go were overrun by the Soviet advance. Hitler's political testament, written up on 29 April in the bunker, stated that he would rather die than be taken prisoner and deposed, and he asked his successors to do what they could to strengthen the spirit of resistance and continue the war. Before he committed suicide, he appointed a new government and stripped Himmler and Göring of their offices for opening negotiations with the Allies.

This chapter discusses Churchill's Washington visit, where he met President Harry Truman. It highlights the fact that the Americans during this time were not interested in any conference with the Soviets or in attending a Summit that was based on the highly personal approach to diplomacy taken by Churchill.

This chapter illustrates the negotiations that occurred between Kissinger and Le Duc Tho to settle an end to the Vietnam War. However, by the spring of 1970 no such agreement was yet in sight. The chapter also shows how the Cambodian invasion by the United States and South Vietnam in May 1970 expanded the war, resulting in more bombing and bloodshed. As a result of this maneuver, the ongoing process of Vietnamization was curtailed due to the negative reactions it faced, not only from Americans, but from the Chinese as well, which led to the closing down of the promising Warsaw channel of Sino-American contacts, and the Soviets diminishing eagerness for an early move towards détente.

Through Pakistani Ambassador Agha Hilaly, Zhou Enlai, the Chinese premier was able to send his message to Kissinger regarding his government's willingness to have a direct meeting or discussions with the United States. Thus, a breakthrough had arrived. All that remained was to decide on who would go and when. In this chapter, the author examines what prompted Kissinger's secret trip, codenamed Polo I, rather than an open one despite Zhou's April 27 message. It explores ideas about whether the secrecy of Kissinger's trip to China grew from a mixture of domestic political motives, international calculations, or personal ambition. Other breakthroughs discussed in this chapter are ping-pong diplomacy and the Soviets' decision to accelerate the détente process.

This introductory chapter describes the problems associated with scientific intelligence, and introduces the key questions of the book, namely: Considering how successfully the United States conducted the atomic intelligence effort against the Germans in the Second World War, why was the United States Government unable to create an effective atomic intelligence apparatus to monitor Soviet scientific and nuclear capabilities? Put another way, why did the effort against the Soviet Union fail so badly, so completely, in all potential metrics – collection, analysis, and dissemination? How did we get this so wrong?

This chapter shows how the British left was mobilised in support of China during the Chinese Nationalist movement (KMT) in its confrontation with Britain during 1925–1928. The May 30^th incident in 1925, when Chinese strikers were shot dead by British-officered police in Shanghai, represented a turning point for both Anglo-Chinese relations and the interest of the British left in China. The chapter explores the ‘Hands off China’ movement of this period, and places it in the context of the tensions between Communists and non-Communists on the left in Britain. A concluding section deals with the period 1928-31, when relations improved between Britain and China, but when the Chinese Communists began to control substantial rural ‘Soviets’.

This chapter discusses the Indochina phase of the Geneva Conference. The Geneva conferees had a number of agendas. The Soviets undoubtedly hoped to enhance international communist prestige through their support of China, Vietnam, and peaceful coexistence and create some discord among the Western allies at the same time. China, on the other hand, planned to make the most of its first international conference, and Vietminh simply wanted a cease-fire.

This chapter discusses the following events: the limited Soviet offensive in Belarus; the Soviet minor offensive in Ukraine; the Soviets and the Ukrainian issue; the Soviet major offensive in Belarus; the Spa agreement; the Curzon note; Soviet peace treaties with Lithuania and Latvia; the reestablishment of Soviet Belarus; Soviet military successes and strategic errors; Soviet diplomatic delays and peace proposals; the Battle of Warsaw; and the Minsk peace conference.

This chapter focuses on the preliminary peace talks between the Soviets and Poles. It discusses the Battle of the Niemen; the instructions for the Polish peace delegation; the peace delegations in Riga; Soviet preparations for the Riga negotiations; the beginning of negotiations and the VTsIK declaration; and; Ioffe's draft of the preliminary peace.

This chapter discusses Soviet relations with Lithuania and Belarus; the treatment of prisoners of war; distrust and tension between the Poles and Soviets; stalemate over the gold reserves issue; the Soviet note to Lithuania; the crisis of the negotiations; Chicherin's struggle with the Moscow specialists; continued crisis in Riga; Krasin's payment schemes; the agreement on repatriation; agreement on the remaining issues; Moscow's attempt to delay the signing of the definitive peace with Poland; and signing of the definitive on 18 March.

This chapter discusses the image of the happy Cold War child. It shows that in both the Soviet Union and the United States, the ideal of the happy, afforded, and defensively mobilized child became a building block for the containment of populations. These images of protected, prepared, and patriotic children provided a scopic regime, or visual trigger, for the larger Cold War in the early 1950s that helped define the cultural and conceptual boundaries of the conflict for populations on both sides of the Iron Curtain. When Americans and Soviets looked upon images of their own protected, happy, afforded children, they were participating in a process of knowledge-building that theoretically provided them with the tools and certainty they needed to continue on, to avoid apathy, and to fall in line behind their countries' leaders.

This chapter examines Senator Lyndon Johnson's views on space. The senator was considered a the rival of Eisenhower, and was described as “second in power only to the President of the U.S.” by the New York Times. The two men had an antithetical opinion on space. For Eisenhower, the satellite launching was a means of space exploration Johnson, however, believed that whoever dominated space “would have the power to control the earth's weather, to cause drought and flood, to change the tides and raise the levels of the sea, to divert the Gulf Stream and change temperature climates to frigid.” He wanted to get on equal footing with the Soviets regardless of cost.

This chapter considers how territorial motives lead to the terrorizing of captives. In early April 1940, Soviet forces executed over twenty thousand Polish military officers and other elites across several sites. These killings became collectively known as the Katyn massacre, or Katyn Forest massacre, one of the most notorious atrocities from the Second World War. It is argued that the killings were motivated by the Soviet Union's desire to permanently annex long-sought-after Polish territories. The method of violence employed, the timing of the killings, and the selection of which captives to kill and which to spare all suggest that concerns over conquest largely drove this extreme prisoner abuse. When territorial motives were less present, Soviet conduct toward captives improved significantly, even if the lot for prisoners remained far from ideal.

This chapter examines the relationship between Japan and Russia after World War II. Through the war, Japanese leadership and the broader population alike viewed Russians and the Soviet Union with respect. Despite the animosity between Russia and their ally, the United States, many Japanese hoped to cultivate cooperation with the Soviets. Moreover, even though the Soviet Union posed a double menace of military force and ideology to the Japanese empire, the two countries shared a pragmatism that facilitated coexistence—a mutual respect for their respective sociopolitical systems and the principle of nonintervention in each other's domestic politics. As such, the Japanese crackdown on communism and its friendship with the Soviet Union were two separate matters.

This concluding chapter argues that cooperation is often best secured because of misperception. When actors hold flase intersubjective beliefs (FIBs)—in which agents wrongly believe that their understanding of a relationship is shared—cooperation may be much more likely to happen, especially if there are principled differences or conflicts of interest. The case of détente—the most robust period of cooperation between the superpowers—was only possible because of FIBs. Détente to the Soviets meant that they could safely support national liberation movements without US meddling. On the other hand, the Nixon administration thought that Soviet strategic parity meant that military competition had been replaced by political competition.

This chapter describes the Polish communists' learning experiences on the Eastern front in 1943–45. With Stalin's support, they sought to create a center of power that would rival the political and military forces loyal to the Polish government in London. Stalin saw that a Soviet-sponsored Polish organization with its own military units as a potential asset in at least three ways. First, it would allow Stalin to speak on behalf of a visible, institutionalized Polish community in the Soviet Union during the inevitable negotiations with the other leaders of the great powers over the postwar order—and thus, it would help legitimize Soviet geopolitical interest as a Polish claim. Second, there was a functional advantage to having such an organized political community ready for a potential power contestation in Poland, whatever its exact nature might be. Third, the symbolic weight of associating the Polish left with the agents of victory on the Eastern Front and the liberating Red Army furnished the communists with a weapon against Polish skeptics.

This chapter explains why John F. Kennedy (JFK) placed a greater emphasis on controlling proliferation. It notes that the Soviets hoped to impede Chinese, as well as West German, access to the bomb, yet, JFK and Khrushchev faced domestic critics, especially in their own defense establishments, who did not support a modus vivendi to contain proliferation. The chapter observes that JFK resorted to false machismo and a traditional positions-of-strength policy, including a massive military buildup, and resumed nuclear testing, all undercutting arms control goals. It notes that by the spring of 1962, the prospects of a nonproliferation agreement seemed dimmer than at any other point since 1958.

This chapter presents a historical analysis of Vladimir Lenin’s judgment on the Soviet in the various phases of the Russian revolution. Lenin’s method seems to give prominence to practical-theoretical reflections on each aspect of the analysis, especially the issue of the doctrinarian Marxist tradition and the theoretical analysis of the specific development of the real movement of class and capital in Russia. Lenin extenuates these analytical aspects, reshapes, and renovates them while always subjecting them to the sectarianism of the practice that innervates his notion of the party and to which he responds. This chapter examines Karl Marx’s views on the relation between the struggle of the working class and the political movement of capital, as well as Lenin’s interpretation of the council tradition and his analysis of the revolution of 1905, and how the working class struggling in the course of the revolution of 1905 invented the Soviets.