Editor's Note

This issue begins with an article by Jesse Ferris looking at Soviet-Egyptian relations in the early 1960s. The article is a sequel to a piece he published in the Fall 2008 issue of the JCWS. His latest article examines Soviet ties with Egypt in the mid-1960s, up to the start of the June 1967 war. Ferris highlights the importance of strategic considerations, especially Moscow's desire to counter the U.S. Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean, in Soviet-Egyptian interactions during this period. Soviet leaders repeatedly tried, without success, to secure basing and landing rights in Egypt for Soviet naval and air forces. Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser's unwillingness to permit the Soviet Union to establish military bases on Egyptian soil prior to the 1967 war caused bilateral tension, which in turn prompted Soviet leaders to try to manipulate promises of economic assistance and trade to pressure the Egyptians to yield. On the eve of the June 1967 war, Soviet-Egyptian relations had deteriorated to their lowest point under Nasser. By documenting the growing friction in Soviet relations with Egypt in 1964–1967, Ferris illuminates the connection between Soviet policy and the outbreak of the Six-Day Mideast War. This topic was explored from a different angle by Guy Laron in the Fall 2010 issue of the journal. Ferris's scrutiny of the evidence, like Laron's earlier article, raises serious doubts about a recent book by Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez, two Israeli journalists who maintain that the Soviet Union deliberately attempted to provoke the June 1967 war.

The next article, by Kristina Spohr Readman, provides a detailed account of how the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) adopted its "dual-track" decision in December 1979. The first track committed the alliance to deploy new U.S. intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF) that would offset the Soviet Union's deployment of SS-20 intermediate-range ballistic missiles armed with multiple nuclear warheads. The other track of the decision called for arms control talks with the Soviet Union designed to arrange limits on both sides' INF deployments. Spohr Readman rebuts accounts of the dual-track decision that depict the United States as having taken the lead from the outset. Scholars have long known that West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt was the one who precipitated NATO's move toward the dual-track decision through a speech he gave in London at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in 1977, and Spohr Readman makes clear that West Germany's role remained central thereafter. Schmidt and several of his ministers ended up being the driving force behind allied decision-making over the next two years, even if they wavered on the relative emphasis they wanted to give to the two tracks. The U.S. government, Spohr Readman shows, had to be prodded into getting fully behind the dual-track approach. Throughout the prolonged wrangling and negotiations that culminated in the December 1979 decision, domestic political considerations at times hindered and at other times helped policymakers in the United States and West Germany achieve an allied consensus.

The next three articles focus on Denmark's role in the Cold War. Even though continental Denmark is small in population and land area, its possession of the huge island of Greenland makes the country's total territory some 50 times larger than it otherwise would be. Two of the three articles deal with Greenland and its role in U.S. Cold War strategy. The two articles complement each other. Nikolaj Petersen discusses how the U.S. Air Force's base at Thule in northwest Greenland fit into U.S. planning for general war with the Soviet Union in the 1950s. Until the 1960s, when intercontinental-range ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) displaced heavy bombers as the mainstay of the U.S. strategic nuclear deterrent, the United States relied on bombers flown by the Strategic Air Command (SAC) to deter Soviet attacks and prepare for nuclear war. The Thule base was one of a handful of key sites used by SAC for forward-staging of strategic bombers that could deliver thermonuclear bombs against a wide...