This is a book with a date stamped through every chapter, and for once the date on the spine is the right one. The preface quotes Konstantin Chernenko from Pravda of 3 March 1984, a fortnight after he became General Secretary. It describes the Soviet counter-deployment of missiles taken "at the end of 1983". It names the American invasion of Grenada, which happened in October of that year, and the "focus of evil" — Ronald Reagan's phrase for the Soviet Union, from March 1983 — as a fresh insult. Twenty-six specialists wrote the twenty-six chapters, and they closed their manuscripts into the most dangerous winter of the second Cold War: the winter in which the Euromissile talks in Geneva collapsed, the intermediate-range weapons went into their silos on both sides, and the two general staffs came nearer to a launch on false warning than the public would learn for years. The book was assembled to be read in exactly that emergency, and it should be read now as a document of it.
It is not the work of a single scholar. The title page credits the Scientific Research Council on Peace and Disarmament and the Soviet Peace Fund, and the editorial board is a roster of the Soviet foreign-policy establishment: Georgi Arbatov, who ran the Institute for the USA and Canada and briefed general secretaries; Yevgeny Primakov; Vladimir Petrovsky, later a deputy foreign minister; Valentin Falin, of the Central Committee's international department; Oleg Bykov of the world-economy institute. V. S. Shaposhnikov signs as general editor and writes the preface. These are not peace campaigners who wandered into print. They are the men who manufactured Soviet arms-control policy, writing under their own names, in English, for export. The volume is a diplomatic instrument dressed as a scholarly symposium, and its intended reader is the Western peace movement — the millions who filled the squares of Bonn, London and Amsterdam in the autumn of 1983 to stop the Pershings. The book wants their trust, and much of it deserves a hearing.
It is worth being precise about the emergency the book was written into, because the whole design of the volume answers to it. The Geneva talks on intermediate-range weapons — the "Euromissiles" the book keeps naming — had run since 1981 and collapsed in November 1983, when the Soviet delegation walked out in protest at the arrival of the first Pershing IIs in West Germany; the parallel strategic talks were suspended days later, and for the first time in over a decade the two sides were negotiating about nothing at all. Yuri Andropov, who had presided over that rupture, died in February 1984 as the book went to press, and Chernenko, a dying man himself, inherited it. Behind the diplomatic wreckage lay something the public did not yet know: in the same weeks, during NATO's Able Archer command exercise, elements of the Soviet leadership had briefly read the West's war-game as possible preparation for a real first strike. It was, on the evidence assembled since, the closest the world came to nuclear war between the Cuban crisis and the end of the Cold War. A book that speaks, in its preface, of "a period of highly dangerous international developments" and of the world being pushed "closer and closer to the edge of the abyss" was not exaggerating for effect. Its authors believed the danger, and on that belief the honest half of the book rests.
The organising word is in the title. "Common security" was not a Soviet coinage. It came from the Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues chaired by Olof Palme, the Swedish social democrat, whose 1982 report Common Security: A Programme for Disarmament argued that in the nuclear age states could no longer be secure against each other but only with each other. It was the vocabulary of détente's attempted revival, neutral in origin, and the book reaches for it explicitly. "There are some people in the West," one contributor writes, "whose thinking brings them very close to the idea of collective security," and he quotes Palme directly: "We face common dangers and thus must also promote our security in common." To borrow Palme's frame was a shrewd move. It let a Soviet book speak the language of Western social democracy and Western science — Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth, the Russell–Einstein Manifesto and the Pugwash conferences are all cited approvingly in the first chapter — rather than the language of the Twenty-Sixth Congress. The question this introduction has to press is how much of Palme's mutuality survives contact with the apparatus that adopted it.
Begin by crediting what is sound, because a good deal of it is. The book's central factual claim — that a full nuclear exchange would end civilisation and possibly life on earth — was true, and in 1984 it needed saying against a US administration that had normalised talk of "limited" and "protracted" nuclear war. The opening chapter's summary of blast, fallout and the then-new hypothesis of nuclear winter is accurate popular science. The case against first-strike weapons is real: the book is right that the Pershing II and ground-launched cruise missiles arriving in Europe were, in its words, "a classic first-strike weapon", accurate and fast enough to threaten Soviet command posts in minutes, and that such weapons are destabilising precisely because they reward whoever shoots first. Its warning against the militarisation of space came months after Reagan's March 1983 "Star Wars" speech and reads, forty years on, as prescient rather than paranoid. Its chapter on the neutron bomb — Reagan authorised full production on 6 August 1981, "the 36th anniversary of the Hiroshima tragedy", the book notes with justified bitterness — makes an argument the anti-nuclear movement made in the same words. And its economic case is one Marxists and non-Marxists could share: quoting Marx, that arms spending is "the direct equivalent of a nation throwing part of its capital into the water", it sets hundreds of billions of military dollars against hunger, disease and illiteracy. On the arms race as such, on the folly of counterforce, on the waste, the book is largely rational, and a reader who wants the intelligent Soviet case against Reagan's military build-up will find it here, competently made. That much is not propaganda. It is the part of the argument that could be turned in any direction — and that is exactly why the book takes such care that it never turns homeward.
One rescue deserves to be made without qualification, because on it the book was right and its opponents were wrong. The chapter on chemical weapons rebuts the "yellow rain" affair — the US State Department's charge, pressed by Alexander Haig in a 1982 report to Congress "entitled 'Chemical Warfare in Southeast Asia and Afghanistan'", that the Soviet Union was supplying mycotoxin weapons used against tribespeople in Laos and against the Afghan resistance. The book replies that "in December 1982, the United Nations published a document which fully exposed as groundless Washington's slanderous allegations that Soviet-made poisonous substances have been used in Southeast Asia and Afghanistan." It happens that the subsequent scientific record moved decisively the book's way: the "yellow rain" samples were later shown by Western analysts to be, in large part, the droppings of wild honeybees, and the charge is now generally regarded as a Cold War error. A reader who wants a demonstration that the Soviet side was sometimes the one telling the truth about an atrocity story will find one here. It is a useful corrective to the reflex that treats every Soviet denial as a lie — and it makes the volume's evasions elsewhere harder to excuse, not easier, because it shows the authors could tell a fabricated accusation from a real one when they chose to look.
The care shows first in the treatment of the SS-20. This was the Soviet missile whose deployment from 1977 triggered NATO's 1979 decision to answer with Pershings and cruise — the hinge of the whole crisis. The book handles it with a single arithmetical gesture, repeated in several chapters: "While installing two SS-20 missiles the USSR has been simultaneously dismantling three SS-4 and SS-5 missiles." Two in, three out: a reduction, plainly. The trouble is the unit. The SS-4 and SS-5 carried one warhead each; the SS-20 carried three, independently targetable. Counted in launchers the deployment shrank; counted in deliverable warheads — the only measure of what could actually strike a city — it roughly doubled Soviet intermediate-range firepower even as the missiles retired. The book knows the difference perfectly well. It uses warhead counts freely when they favour its side, insisting that "NATO countries possess 1.5 times more warheads carried by medium-range missiles than the Soviet Union", and it accuses the United States of having pioneered the MIRV. But on the one system where the warhead count would convict its own government of an escalation, it counts launchers and falls silent on warheads. The asymmetry is not an oversight. It is the method.
Around that gesture the book builds a general rule, stated most plainly in the chapter on strategic arms: "it is the USA that was the first to deploy new types and systems of weapons, while the Soviet Union acted only in response usually about some five years later." As history this is often true — the United States did lead at most rungs of the nuclear ladder — and as an alibi it is total. If every Soviet weapon is by definition a "response", then no Soviet weapon can ever be an initiative, and the whole subject of Soviet militarism disappears by construction. A chapter actually titled "Myth of the Soviet Military Threat" completes the manoeuvre: the threat is a "myth", the fears "unjustified", the Western demand for openness about Soviet forces made "chiefly for propaganda purposes". The reader is left with an arms race that has only one driver and one direction, in which the socialist side possesses weapons but never agency. That is not analysis; it is the erasure of half the map.
The method's real test, though, is Afghanistan, because in 1984 the Soviet Union was in the fifth year of a war of its own. The book was written while the Fortieth Army was bombing villages in the Panjshir, while millions of Afghans were becoming refugees in Pakistan, while a counter-insurgency with no end in sight was grinding on at the USSR's southern border. A volume about the threat to peace, war crimes and militarism could hardly avoid it, and it does not. "Afghanistan" appears more than thirty times. What is remarkable is the angle of every appearance. The Soviet forces are always "a limited contingent of Soviet troops", introduced "at the request of the Afghan government and in conformity with international legal standards". They were sent "to defend the Afghan revolution in December 1979 at the request of the country's government". The book quotes the Soviet leadership of 25 April 1983 — "We do not seek anything for ourselves there. We have responded to the friendly neighbouring country's request for help" — and names Babrak Karmal, the man Soviet special forces installed after storming the palace and killing his predecessor, as the "legitimate government" doing the requesting. Everywhere else Afghanistan is a stick in Washington's hand: the pretext by which the United States sabotaged an Indian Ocean peace zone, the cover for CIA arms to "terrorist bands". The one thing that never appears in these thirty mentions is the war itself — the occupation, the bombing, the refugees, the fact that a large neighbouring country was resisting the Red Army by force and would go on doing so for five more years. A book that measures every American intervention against "the definition of aggression adopted by the United Nations" never once holds that definition up to its own government's tanks in Kabul. This is "common security" preached by a state waging a colonial war, and preaching it in the very years the war was at its height.
The same wiring runs through the book's silences. Its Part Three contains chapters titled "War Propaganda Is a Threat to Peace" and "Crimes Against Peace and Humanity", and it was written in the immediate aftermath of the single most inflammatory episode of the war scare: the destruction of Korean Air Lines flight 007 by a Soviet interceptor on 1 September 1983, with 269 people aboard, an event the West made into the centrepiece of exactly the "psychological warfare" the book denounces. On that episode the book is wholly silent. One can see why — the Soviet line was denial and justification, hard to fit into a volume about crimes against peace — but the silence is itself the finding. The category "crime against peace" is built so that it can only point outward.
The pedigree for all this is claimed from Lenin, and here the book joins a pattern this series has found in every Soviet foreign-policy volume it has examined. Twice the argument is anchored in a Lenin who "formulated" the principle of peaceful coexistence. Yet when a chapter comes to quote him in support — "Lenin stressed that socialism has a stake in peace because 'a better order of things cannot be created merely with the aid of war and bloodshed'" — the words inside the quotation marks say nothing about coexistence at all. The doctrine is asserted in the author's own voice, and in a school textbook the book approvingly cites ("the principle of peaceful coexistence established by Lenin"), while the actual Lenin quotations are about something else. Lenin's own slogan, the one the book does quote exactly, points the other way: "disarmament is the ideal of socialism" — an ideal, a thing belonging to the socialist future, which in Lenin's mouth carried no promise that a capitalist world could be disarmed by negotiation before it was overthrown. The pedigree is genuine as decoration and hollow as argument, and it is hollow in the same place every time.
The tradition from which this series is written answered these arguments as they were made, and it answered them without for a moment softening the case against Reagan's missiles. That is the point worth insisting on, because the lazy version of an anti-Stalinist critique would simply mirror the Cold War and treat a Soviet peace book as pure disinformation. The Fourth International did nothing of the kind. Its sections marched in the same demonstrations, against the same Pershings, and its press denounced NATO's deployment in terms as sharp as anything in this volume. What it refused was the bureaucracy's ownership of the cause. Trotsky had set out the structural critique in 1936, in the chapter of The Revolution Betrayed titled "Foreign Policy and the Army", and it reads like an advance review of this book. "Foreign policy," he wrote, "is everywhere and always a continuation of domestic policy," and the domestic policy of the Soviet ruling stratum had become the defence of its own position — so its diplomacy became the defence of the international status quo, dressed in the language of peace. The Communist International, he charged, "deceives the workers with slogans like 'collective security' and 'disarmament', and thus becomes in reality a political agent of the imperialists among the working classes"; the deepest damage of the bureaucracy's foreign policy lay in its "new religion of inaction". One need not accept Trotsky's harshest formulation — the 1980s Fourth International plainly did think a nuclear-armed world worth disarming — to see what he identified: a state that offers the defence of borders and the stability of blocs, and calls it socialism's peace policy. The book's own words confirm the diagnosis without meaning to. Its authors describe Soviet policy as the pursuit of "regional stability" and "rough military parity" — the vocabulary of a satisfied power managing a status quo, not of the world revolution the same authors are obliged to invoke.
On Afghanistan the reply is on the record and it is exact. The United Secretariat of the Fourth International issued a declaration, printed in Intercontinental Press on 3 March 1980, that took neither side offered by the superpowers. It refused Washington's crusade and the mujahideen it armed; and it wrote that "the Soviet bureaucracy did not send its forces into Afghanistan in order to support the mass mobilization" but was "concerned, above all, with protecting its own power and interests", and concluded: "it is imperative that the Soviet troops withdraw from Afghanistan immediately and that the Kremlin recognize the right of self-determination for the people of this country." A French section's paper put the prognosis more bluntly two years later, in the same weekly: "What will go rotten in Afghanistan is the Soviet army." Set that beside the book's "limited contingent... at the request of the Afghan government", and the difference between the two traditions is laid out in full. One could name the war and demand its end while opposing the imperialist intervention around it. The other could denounce every intervention on earth except the one its own troops were fighting.
There is a further reason the book courts the Western movement so warmly, and it bears on how the movement should have read it. Part Three is generous in its praise of the Western peace campaigns — the "unprecedentedly massive anti-war movement", the "World Assembly for Peace and Life, Against Nuclear War, which gathered in Prague in June 1983" — and generous for a purpose. A movement that shut down NATO's deployment while leaving Soviet forces untouched was, from the standpoint of Soviet diplomacy, an unmixed asset, and the book's enthusiasm is proportional to that usefulness. What it never grants the movement is the independence that would let it point in both directions at once — to demand, in the same breath, no Pershings in Germany and no tanks in Kabul. The Western movement's own best sections understood the trap. The largest of them refused to become an auxiliary of either general staff, and the smaller revolutionary current from which this series is written spent the decade arguing, inside those movements, that a peace campaign owned by one of the nuclear-armed states was worth exactly as much as its willingness to criticise that state — which, in this book, is nil. Trotsky had named the mechanism half a century earlier: a "disarmament", he wrote in the same chapter, offered "while imperialist antagonisms survive, is the most pernicious of fictions" when it asks the workers of the world to trust the peace policy of any state rather than their own strength. One may think, as the 1980s Fourth International did, that the nuclear danger made mass disarmament agitation necessary and right, and still hold that the danger is not lessened by handing the leadership of it to a foreign ministry.
So the book is two things at once, and an honest introduction has to hold both. It is a real and often intelligent argument against nuclear annihilation, made by serious people who understood the machinery they were describing and who were, on the physics and the economics and the madness of first-strike doctrine, largely right. And it is a machine for pointing that argument in one direction only — a peace book produced by the foreign-policy apparatus of a state that had built its every analytical instrument so that none could ever turn homeward, and that was at that moment five years into a war it could not name. The genuine case and the disqualifying evasion are not in separate chapters; they are in the same sentences, the missile that shrinks by the launcher and grows by the warhead, the definition of aggression held up to everyone but the holder. Read the book for the case it makes. Then read it for the war that is missing from it, and for the quiet, systematic labour by which twenty-six able men made sure their own state could invoke the security of all mankind while denying it to the country across its southern border.