How does Mclean describe the ideological differences between The United States and Soviet Russia?
There are two points to be stressed here. First, the arms race did not cause superpower conflict; rather, the reverse: the arms race stemmed from and was sustained by political and ideological conflict. When that political conflict ended, Russia and America found it relatively easy to reach agreement on dismantling arsenals. Second, the arms race was not essential to the Soviet- American conflict. That is, there is no reason to believe that in the absence of nuclear weapons the Cold War would not have occurred. Overall, nuclear weaponry played a paradoxical role in the Cold War. On the one hand the destructive potential of such weapons gave the conflict an especially dangerous dimension. A crisis in political relations between the superpowers, such as occurred over the question of Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962, carried the risk of escalation to the point of nuclear warfare. We should not assume that this risk was never real. It is true that both Moscow and Washington, at all stages o
