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Arms Race and Detente

Instructions: Carefully read pages p. 146-152 in your Cold War Textbook. Fill in below while highlighting each of your answers with yellow.

Post WW2

What is Détente?

The process of easing tensions between the superpowers


Although Détente wasn’t fully realized until Nixon and Brezhnev, when did the idea of it begin?

From the mutually assure destruction, and Khrushchev and Eisenhower.


What was the first major summit in 1955?

The summit to discuss global issues of mutual concern

What critical decision did Truman make about the use of nuclear weapons?

The use of nuclear weapon is a political decision

According to Americans, how was the relationship between the political sphere and military sphere supposed to function in regards to war and peace?

The politicians should make decisions such as war and peace, the military choose how to use.

Did the Soviets essentially agree with this relationship about dealing with politics and military (especially in regards to nuclear weapons)?

They agreed

Eisenhower altered Truman’s policy slightly. What changed in under the “New Look?”

A instrument of policy and War

What was Khrushchev’s primary goal within the military sector of the Soviet Union? What motivated this goal?

To decrease military spending in order to be able to increase standard of living

What were the terms of the 1962 Nuclear Test Ban agreed upon by both the USA and USSR?

To cease nuclear test everywhere.

By 1964, what countries (other than the USA and the USSR) had nuclear weapons?

Britain, France, PRC

What did the Non-Proliferation Treaty of July 1968 agree to? Why could the USA and USSR fundamentally agree to the terms of the treaty despite many raging cold war crisis happening simultaneously?

No one sharing nuclear technology so this power is controlled by rational actors