Détente: The Triangle

CHAPTER 9 · 1969–1979 · The Cold War, 1945–1991

By 1969 both superpowers want off the treadmill, for converging reasons. Moscow has reached strategic parity (the post-Cuba buildup has delivered) but faces a second enemy: in March, Soviet and Chinese troops kill each other over Zhenbao island in the frozen Ussuri — find the marker on the far eastern border — and Soviet diplomats discreetly ask how Washington would react to a strike on China’s nuclear plants. Washington, bleeding in Vietnam and paying for it with inflation and a cracking dollar, needs Soviet help to exit and a counterweight to everything. Beijing, mid-Cultural-Revolution and

The turn: Beijing and Shanghai, 21–28 February 1972.

This chapter is one scene of an interactive atlas: the map repaints as the dates advance, campaigns draw themselves, and every chapter argues its causes and consequences — then a field exam asks you to prove it on the map.