Open access edition supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities / Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program.

The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License

Originally published as Johns Hopkins Press in 1995.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 195-207) and index.

1. The Developing Confrontation -- 2. The Breakdown of Old Arrangements -- 3. New Military Parity and the Decline of Bipolarity -- 4. Seeking America's Escape from Vietnam -- 5. Finding America's Way to Detente -- 6. Brezhnev and Squaring the Circle -- Epilogue: From Detente to the Gorbachev Revolution.

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In The Making of Detente, historian Keith Nelson details the circumstances and traces the steps that led to the first significant accommodation and easing of tension between the superpowers during the Cold War. He shows that this occurred because historical developments combined in both countries to create a scarcity of the resources needed to maintain the existing activities of their societies, economies, and governments. Given ample means and apparent success, each nation would have almost certainly been inclined to continue established policies, even if these had meant perpetuation of the Cold War. But in the face of substantial shortages - deriving from setbacks with regard to domestic unity and morale, the performance of the economy, and relations with allies - realistically conservative leaders on both sides (those with little interest in transcendent change) found themselves irresistibly attracted by the possibility of an arrangement with their foreign opponent that would reduce the demands being put on them.

Description based on print version record.