Progress, Problems, and Prospects

Extract

INTRODUCTION

Thanks to a wealth of new documents made possible by the end of the Cold War, many historians are reconsidering the origins, evolution, consequences, and meaning of that historic conflict.1 Deserving particular attention in this process of reassessment is the East-West political-military confrontation in the heart of Europe, which did so much to define the Cold War. How did that confrontation come about? Could it have been avoided, or at least mitigated in intensity, and possibly brought to a peaceful conclusion at an earlier date? How appropriate was Western policy in the region? The search for ever better-informed answers to such questions must rank high among scholarly priorities.

Consequently, the article by Phillip Karber and Jerald Combs represents a potentially valuable contribution to current historical debates. Its primary goal is to shed new light on Western intelligence estimates of the Soviet military threat to Western Europe during the early Cold War. In particular, the article seeks to appraise the validity of those assessments, and thus the appropriateness of the Western military plans that flowed from them, in view of what we now know about actual Soviet conventional capabilities at the time. A second and derivative objective is to evaluate the existing scholarship on Western threat assessments. How accurately have historians and others portrayed them?