The 1969 Nuclear Crisis: Confusion, Contingency, and China

Speakers: David Logan and Joseph Torigian
What are the political effects of nuclear weapons? What are the dynamics of territorial disputes and militarized crises between nuclear-armed states? As China continues with its unprecedented nuclear modernization program and U.S.-Russian nuclear arms control agreements are cast aside, these questions have taken on new urgency. We address these questions through a detailed reexamination of the 1969 border crisis between China and the Soviet Union. This crisis is a crucial case for both Cold War history and international relations theory. However, until recently, much of the evidence on this incidence remained either unused or inaccessible. Using hundreds of newly available and previously unused archival and primary sources from Albania, China, France, India, Italy, Japan, the Soviet Union, and the United States, and elsewhere, we shed light on new and important dynamics in the crisis including the role of psychological factors in interstate bargaining, elite politics in authoritarian states, and the impact of the strategic nuclear balance. The work has important implications for our understanding of the history of the Cold War, crisis escalation dynamics, state signaling and perception, and the political effects of nuclear weapons.