The relationship between the Soviet Union and India was a hallmark of the Cold War. Over nearly forty years, Soviet-Indian relations passed through three distinct periods, coinciding with the ascendance of three extraordinary pairs of leaders, each extraordinary for different reasons—Jawaharlal Nehru and Nikita Khrushchev, Indira Gandhi and Leonid Brezhnev, and Rajiv Gandhi and Mikhail Gorbachev. The rise and decline of a political dynasty in India paralleled the trajectory seen in the Soviet Union. None of the periods ended well—the first in debacles with China, the second with Indira Gandhi's assassination, the third with the demise of the Soviet Union. The relationship in its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s was the product of a unique set of circumstances during the early Cold War. In the end, however, the relationship proved to be little more than a sideshow in the larger drama of the Cold War.

A sharp increase in East-West tensions in the early 1980s sparked a genuine, if unwarranted, war scare in the USSR which the Soviet leader Yurii Andropov tried to exploit for political purposes. Soviet intelligence officials, however, were sufficiently informed about the enemy's true intentions that they did not sound the alarm in November 1983 when NATO conducted its “Able Archer” exercise, which has been retrospectively misinterpreted as having been capable of provoking nuclear escalation. The increased awareness of the risks inherent in the accumulation of nuclear weaponry, though not that particular incident, spurred President Ronald Reagan to take steps to reassure Moscow that the United States wanted peace—steps that eventually helped defuse the East-West confrontation

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The fragile détente that dawned after the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 was a necessary but not sufficient condition to ensure the conclusion of the Limited Test Ban Treaty eight months later. Nikita Khrushchev's political weakness after his Cuban fiasco was the main obstacle. New evidence from the Soviet side shows that by April 1963—three months before John F. Kennedy's conciliatory speech at American University that is usually regarded as the turning point—the Soviet leader became committed to the treaty in principle. Discord within the Communist world inhibited him from pursuing it actively until efforts to mend the rift with China collapsed, underscoring the value of a successful agreement with the West. Once the treaty was signed, however, the two sides failed to build on their common accomplishment and got bogged down by political issues that divided them. The opportunity for a deeper détente and a comprehensive test ban were lost.

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