This article provides an overview of the perils of U.S. and Soviet nuclear war planning during the Cold War. In particular, the article discusses instances of false alarms, when one side or the other picked up indications of an imminent attack by the other side and had to take measures to determine whether the indicators were accurate. None of these incidents posed a large danger of an accidental nuclear war, but they illustrate the inherent risks of the war preparations that both the United States and the Soviet Union took for their immense nuclear arsenals.

The study of Cold War international history in China has made major strides in the past two decades. By using newly available Chinese sources, augmented by sources from American, British, Russian, and East European archives, Chinese scholars have produced important works on Cold War history. As the latest publications in China show, Chinese scholars have been gradually adopting a more evenhanded approach in their writings about the Cold War. They have also expanded international cooperation by conducting joint research projects and engaging in meaningful academic dialogues with foreign scholars. This article offers a review of the field, including a survey of new Chinese sources, the leading Chinese scholars, and their main research interests and contributions. The article also points out the challenges, obstacles, and opportunities of the field in China.

Despite the many books and articles written about the end of the Cold War, scholars have not produced a truly international history f this seminal event. This article shows how some of the most important monographs on the end of the Cold War can be synthesized to yield a preliminary account. In particular, the article outlines an interpretation that connects the immediate crisis of the early 1980s, long-term ideological and institutional trends, and transformational choices made from 1985 to 1991. N single decision or variable brought the Cold War t an end. Personalities, trends, and institutions interacted to create an outcome that few predicted.

Efforts to document the full histories of the Nor h Atlantic Treaty Organiza-tion (NATO) and the Warsaw Pact are still hindered by key obstacles. NATO documents from 1965 onward remain closed to researchers, as do many War-saw Pact military records that were carted off to Moscow in 1991. Despite these gaps, newly declassified materials from both East and West have shed light on how the two alliances helped shape the Cold War. This article takes note of some of the more important recent scholarship on NATO and the Warsaw Pact.

Congress has received insufficient attention from scholars of Cold War foreign policy for a number of reasons, including historiographical patterns and the scattered nature of congressional sources. This gap in the literature has skewed our understanding of the Cold War because it has failed to take into account the numerous ways in which the legislature affected U.S. foreign policy after World War II. This article looks at Cold War congressional policy within a broad historical perspective, and it analyzes how the flurry of congressional activity in the years following the Vietnam War was part of a larger trend of congressional activism in foreign policy. After reviewing the existing literature on the subject of Congress and the Cold War, the article points out various directions for future research.

This article reviews the huge Cold War-era and post-Cold War literature on American Communism and anti-Communism in the United States. These issues have long been the subject of heated scholarly debate. The recent opening of archives in Russia and other former Communist countries and the release of translated Venona documents in the United States have shed new light on key aspects of the American Communist Party that were previously unknown or undocumented. The new evidence has underscored the Soviet Union's tight control of the party and the crucial role that American Communists played in Soviet espionage. The release of all this documentation has been an unwelcome development for scholars who have long been sympathetic to the Communist movement.