Simon Miles, ‘On Guard for Peace and Socialism: The Warsaw Pact, 1955–1991’

Throughout the Cold War, policy-makers in the United States and its allies crafted strategy with one principal audience in mind: the Warsaw Pact, particularly the Soviet Union. This new book project by Simon Miles tests whether the strategic concepts that guided U.S. and NATO policy actually operated on their targets east of the Iron Curtain in the way that practitioners and scholars claimed. Taking an international archival approach, it rejects the trope of Moscow as puppet-master and treats the Warsaw Pact as a multilateral military and political organization designed to provide collective security in the nuclear age, shedding new light on Cold War history and strategic issues today.

Miles is an assistant professor in the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University.