Old wine in new bottles? The continued relevance of Cold War strategic concepts

Abstract

Cold War strategic concepts played a significant part in my time as a student at The Australian National University (ANU). Arriving in Canberra in the early part of 1988, the penultimate year of the multidecade struggle between East and West, I joined the smaller predecessor to today’s much larger master’s program. The core course in that original master’s degree was dominated by a subject that has largely disappeared from today’s teaching in strategic studies. This was the strategic nuclear balance between the United States and the Soviet Union and, in our case, there was a particular focus on the development of US nuclear strategy.