Editor's Note

This issue begins with an article by Kristina Spohr looking at Soviet- West German relations and Soviet-U.S. relations in the eleven months from the opening of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 to the reunification of Germany in October 1990, focusing especially on the first few months of 1990. In the mid-1990s, several years after Germany was reunified and the Soviet Union ceased to exist, Russian officials and a few former U.S. diplomats claimed that Western governments in 1990 had made explicit, binding commitments regarding the future complexion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). According to these allegations, U.S. and other NATO leaders had formally pledged that the alliance would not admit any East European member-states of the Warsaw Pact (apart from the special case of East Germany). Drawing on declassified records of the high-level negotiations in 1990 pertaining to German reunification, I debunked these assertions in an article I published in the April 2009 issue of The Washington Quarterly. Spohr agrees with my assessment, but her article seeks to widen the picture by looking closely at discussions conducted by West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher with his U.S. and British counterparts (Secretary of State James Baker and Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd) and with Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze. Even though no binding commitments or pledges regarding Eastern Europe (other than eastern Germany) were ever offered or requested, the unification diplomacy itself may have generated unrealistic Soviet expectations about the fundamental transformation—and ultimate disappearance—of NATO. Several years later, after those expectations failed to materialize and NATO began to move toward enlargement into Eastern Europe, officials in Moscow started claiming that Western governments were reneging on solemn pledges they had made in 1990. Those claims, though spurious, show how "memory" can be crucially shaped by current political concerns.

The next article, by Christopher Darnton, looks at the origins of the Alliance for Progress, a large-scale U.S. economic aid program for Latin America initiated by the Kennedy administration in 1961. The Alliance was a product of the Cold War—its chief purpose was to bolster Latin American countries in warding off Soviet- and Cuban-backed subversion and in deterring possible aggression by Cuba—but Darnton argues that scholars who have attributed the Alliance solely to U.S. Cold War concerns have missed the important role of Latin American countries in pushing for the Alliance. In particular, Darnton highlights the influence of Brazilian President Juscelino Kubitschek, who had first proposed an Operation Pan-America (OPA) in 1958, a year before Fidel Castro's radical leftist guerrillas seized power in Cuba. Kubitschek and other Latin American leaders fully shared U.S. concerns about potential Communist subversion, and they wanted to bolster the political and economic stability of their countries against such threats. Although Kubitschek's OPA proposal initially made scant headway, he was adept at keeping it on the U.S. political agenda and helping to "steer" U.S. officials toward that option after John F. Kennedy took office.

The next article, by Arnold Ringstad, discusses important shifts in the U.S. civil defense program and its preparations for a nuclear war in the early 1960s compared to a decade earlier. Examining the films produced for the agencies overseeing U.S. civil defense efforts in the early 1950s and those produced in the early 1960s, Ringstad highlights four notable changes in the content and manner of presentation of the films. First, the later films abandoned heavy-handed ideological appeals and focused solely on practical advice. Second, the later films no longer treated nuclear war as little different from past conventional wars and emphasized that preparations for this new, much more destructive type of war could be integrated into everyday life. Third, the later films discarded the narrative structure (with characters and story lines) of the earlier films and adopted a sober documentary style. Finally, the later films eschewed the insouciance of the earlier films and became much more candid about the lethal effects of nuclear weapons. These shifts were driven partly by technological developments (the advent of enormously powerful thermonuclear warheads and intercontinental-range...