CHAPTER 1<br > Sixty Years of Coexistence<br >Robert Oppenheimer once compared the United States and the Soviet<br >Union to two scorpions in a bottle， but the metaphor is not apt. True， each<br >society has fife-and-death power over the other， but the half dozen or so<br >individuals in Washington or Moscow who decide how that power is to be<br >used do not act by instinct. They are more like chess players in the dark，<br >absorbed in a game they can barely see. Each player depends upon the<br >other not to upset the table. Since neither quite knows what is happening<br >on the board， each imputes to the other a master plan that tends to be a<br >mirror image of his own. It is a dangerous game， but each uses it to define<br >who he is.<br > The era of d6tente， or razriadka as the Russians call it--both words<br >signify a relaxation or unwinding--is a new stage in the global contest<br >Walter Lippmann dubbed the "cold war，" in which the small group of<br >politicians， diplomats， generals， and businessmen on each side are chang-<br >ing their relationships in complex and curious ways. At the heart of the<br >controversy over d6tente is the question Tolstoy purported to settle in<br >War and Peace: What difference do individuals make in great historical<br >processes? Tolstoy thought that even the most powerful leaders were<br >merely blind instruments in the grip of glacial historical forces. (If Napo-<br >leon had not existed， he would have been invented.) The skeptics of<br >d6tente take much the ，same view， at least of the adversary， arguing that<br >for all the clinking of glasses in the Kremlin， the Politburo retains its<br >"master plan" to destroy the power of the United States and to succeed<br >her as the number one nation. "Their objectives have not changed， only<br >