Improbable Dangers: U.S. Conceptions of Threat in the Cold War and After

Why did U.S. policy-makers so regularly exaggerate the Soviet threat during the Cold War? With the disappearance of the Soviet Union, is the tendency toward threat exaggeration likely to persist? Robert Johnson examines these questions employing a combination of psychological and political analysis and focusing upon U.S. conceptions of threat in the European, nuclear, and Third World arenas of conflict. This is a different kind of Cold War revisionism that concentrates on mistaken ideas about threats while accepting the reality of threat and the need for a policy of containment. It offers a theory about threat exaggeration based upon the human needs for order and control and the necessities of American politics, advances a cyclical view of U.S. alarmism in the Cold War, and includes numerous case studies.