All of the above is sheer fiction, of course; no country has used nuclear weapons in wartime since the United States destroyed Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945. But in a couple of horrific paragraphs in John Lewis Gaddis's new book, The Cold War, this scenario is presented in straightforward fashion within the otherwise factual narrative, until eventually the author acknowledges the put-on.

This is Gaddis's unconventional way of making an important point: The Cold War was historically significant as much for what didn't happen as for what did. Terrifying though the great global showdown sometimes was, the United States and the Soviet Union never waged a full-scale war. "Prior to 1945, great powers fought great wars so frequently that they seemed to be permanent features of the international landscape," Gaddis notes. But nuclear weapons meant that "for the first time in history no one could be sure of winning, or even surviving, a great war." And so the hot wars the superpowers and their proxies fought -- such as Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan -- were limited in scope.

Gaddis, who teaches history at Yale University, is America's most prominent Cold War historian. He first emerged 34 years ago as a leader of the "post-revisionist" school of Cold War history. The earliest group of historians writing about the Cold War had blamed its origins largely on Joseph Stalin's desire for Soviet domination of Europe. In the late 1950s and '60s, a revisionist school, led by William Appleman Williams of the University of Wisconsin, argued that the Cold War was primarily an outgrowth of American economic interests, which led Moscow to react defensively to potential U.S. encroachment in its backyard.

Enter Gaddis. Rejecting both contentions, his 1972 book, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, portrayed the origins of the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union less as the lone fault of one side or the other and more as the result of a plethora of conflicting interests and misperceptions between the two superpowers, propelled by domestic politics and bureaucratic inertia. Gaddis has explored the Cold War in six other books since then, and, in the process, his views have evolved -- most notably in We Now Know (1997), which was rooted in newly opened Soviet archives. Particularly after the Soviet collapse, he has stressed the significance of democratic values and America's ability to deal with its allies in a profoundly more decent fashion than the Soviet Union treated Eastern Europe. In effect, Gaddis has swung back nearly to where the early Cold War historians started by putting the onus of blame on Stalin and the brutal nature of his regime.

Gaddis's latest book boils down the history of the entire Cold War to a sometimes brilliant 266 pages of text, in trenchant, lucid prose intended not for historians and specialists but for ordinary readers. He has not done much new archival field work to produce this new synthesis, and, at times, he relies heavily on his previous work. Yet to Gaddis's credit, he does not merely rewrite himself or retrace the main events from 1946 to 1991. Instead, he stretches to find new ways (like his startling Korean counterfactual above) to cover the subject, stepping back and looking at the entire period with distance and perspective.

Gaddis opens The Cold War, for example, not in Moscow, Washington or Eastern Europe but on an island off the coast of Scotland, where a sickly, depressed English writer named Eric Blair, writing under the pen name of George Orwell, sat down to write his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the classic portrait of a world of totalitarianism. "It is worth starting with visions . . . because they establish hopes and fears," Gaddis explains. "History then determines which prevail." In the closing pages, he concludes that the Cold War "began with a return of fear and ended in a triumph of hope, an unusual trajectory for great historical upheavals."

Gaddis's efforts at imaginative writing are not always successful. The fictitious passage on the use of nuclear weapons in the Korean War, for example, is so out of character with the rest of the book that it leaves the stunned reader wondering what on earth is going on. His concluding chapter mystifyingly diverts into a dissertation on how the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's voyage shows the hazards of historical judgment.

Gaddis is also clearly much better at writing about the early Cold War, from the 1940s through the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, than at dealing with later periods. When he covers the origins of the U.S.-Soviet conflict, his narrative is full of confident, trenchant analysis. Examining how the United States in the 1950s rejected the idea of limited nuclear war, for example, he calls Dwight D. Eisenhower "the most subtle and brutal strategist of the nuclear age. . . . [He] insisted on planning only for total war. His purpose was to make sure that no war at all would take place."

When Gaddis gets to the late 1960s and '70s, by contrast, he offers fewer insights and seems to be hurrying to cover everything. He bogs down in the details of events such as the late-1970s conflict between Somalia and Ethiopia, even though he later acknowledges it didn't affect the larger picture of the Cold War. His way of introducing the revolts against established authority in places like the United States and France in the late 1960s is to describe how China's Mao Zedong once complained that the young, rampaging Chinese Red Guards wouldn't listen to him -- a bizarre example, since, as Gaddis later admits, it was Mao who had goaded the Red Guards to rebel in the first place.

Gaddis places particular stress on the role of ideology, notably the failures of Marxism-Leninism to predict how people and countries would behave. Class struggle didn't emerge in the way that the communists' theorists had anticipated, and, to Stalin's surprise, the major Western powers cooperated with one another for decades rather than going to war over economic issues. "This is where the capitalists got it right: they were better than the communists at learning from history, because they never bought into any single, sacrosanct, and therefore unchallengeable theory of history," Gaddis concludes.

The main heroes of his story are those who challenged the Soviet regime in the realm of ideas and values, such as Orwell, Andrei Sakharov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Vaclav Havel and Pope John Paul II. On questions of grand strategy, Gaddis gives great weight to George F. Kennan (who died last year at the age of 101), the brilliant American diplomat who wrote the famous "long telegram" of 1946 and the anonymous 1947 "X" article in Foreign Affairs magazine, which together explained the sources of Soviet behavior and laid the foundations for the American policy of containment. (Gaddis, who is writing Kennan's biography, dedicates The Cold War to him.)

Gaddis is markedly less enthusiastic about Western leaders who sought a working accommodation with Soviet communism without challenging its legitimacy. For instance, he carefully explores the strategic thinking of Richard M. Nixon and Henry Kissinger, giving credit (too much credit, in fact) to some of their secret, balance-of-power diplomacy. But he then concludes that their push for détente with Moscow reflected "a kind of moral anesthesia. . . . In its search for geopolitical stability, the Nixon administration had begun to support domestic stability inside the U.S.S.R." -- thus spurning dissidents and prophets like Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn.

Such challengers got their way in the end, though. The Cold War resulted in the discrediting of dictatorships around the world and "the globalization of democracy," Gaddis writes. "Promoting democracy became the most visible way that the Americans and their Western European allies could differentiate themselves from their Marxist-Leninist rivals."

Because of these views, Gaddis has become a favorite historian of the George W. Bush administration, which, of course, is now seeking to promote democracy in the Middle East. A year ago, Gaddis was called to the White House to offer his ideas before Bush delivered his second inaugural, which gave ever-greater stress to the importance of democracy.

In his other writings, Gaddis has become a qualified supporter of the Bush administration's strategy in combating terrorism. While criticizing the administration's unilateralism in Bush's first term, he has given credit to the idea of preemptive or even preventive warfare, arguing that the Sept. 11 attacks showed that Washington required a new strategy for a new era. "That event revealed a category of threats so difficult to detect and yet so devastating if carried out that the United States had little choice but to use pre-emptive means to prevent their emergence," he wrote in Foreign Affairs a year ago.

And yet Gaddis's conclusions in his new book call into question other aspects of the current administration's thinking. Several of the administration's leading officials, starting with Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, started their careers and developed their ideas during the Cold War. They have emphasized, above all, the importance of American military power. But Gaddis draws the opposite lesson. "The Cold War may well be remembered, then, as the point at which military strength, a defining characteristic of 'power' itself for the past five centuries, ceased to be that," he argues. "The Soviet Union collapsed, after all, with its military forces, even its nuclear capabilities, fully intact." Those are words worth keeping in mind as America, the surviving superpower, deals with the world in the aftermath of the Cold War. Without ideals, the missiles won't matter.

Reviewed by James Mann
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