This forum presents three different perspectives on the eighth volume in the Harvard Cold War Studies Book Series, The Cold War after Stalin's Death: A Missed Opportunity for Peace? edited by Klaus Larres and Kenneth Osgood. The fifteen contributors to the book discuss changes and continuities in the international environment during the first few years after the death of Josif Stalin, seeking to focus on whether there was a chance during that period to end the Cold War. The book covers U.S.-Soviet relations in depth but also deals with numerous other European and Asian countries. Three distinguished scholars offer their assessments of The Cold War after Stalin's Death and explore some of the major issues raised by the contributors to the volume.

John L. Gaddis's classic 1982 book Strategies of Containment , now out in a revised and expanded edition, characterizes the Cold War strategies of successive U.S. administrations as either symmetric or asymmetric. The new edition of the book retains this distinction and applies it to the administrations of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. Gaddis incorporates a few findings from research that has appeared since 1982, but the original text has undergone fewer revisions than one might have expected. Gaddis's general approach, and many of his specific claims, are bound to provoke objections, but historians and political scientists will find his analysis stimulating and provocative.