This chapter examines the emergence of an ever closer energy relationship between Western Europe and the Soviet Union in the late Soviet period, leading to the construction of the first major natural gas export pipeline from Siberia to Europe.

Drawing on the diary of Heinrich Krone, Chapter 1 opens by exploring social and cultural changes in West Germany at the end of Konrad Adenauer’s long ascendancy. The Christian Democratic milieu was losing its lock on politics, and the successes of German integration into Atlantic and European communities gave rise to new questions about whether NATO or the EEC had precedence; how German unity could be pursued in the face of détente; and what relationships were possible with the Soviet bloc. Adenauer’s choice was to intensify relations with de Gaulle’s France, with the 1963 Elysée Treaty defining the partnership between France and West Germany as a Cold War bulwark against détente and the USSR. This approach was challenged and significantly modified by the chancellor’s critics in the Bundestag, who feared alienating the United States and pushed for Ludwig Erhard to replace Adenauer. Foreign Minister Gerhard Schröder pushed for a “policy of movement,” intended to represent the cause of German unity more forcefully. Controversies over military aid, relations with Israel, and the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty showed that Adenauer’s long delay in resigning had left a vacuum of leadership.

Continuity in Russian strategy reflects a set of enduring predilections indicative of strategic culture preferences, and habitual responses to persistent, or recurring challenges. While individual leaders and their ideas matter, the pursuit of a geopolitical space where Russian interests predominate has remained central to Russian thinking, along with a quest for status, and influence as a Great Power. The strategy for pursuing these goals, and for dealing with other leading powers like the United States, has proven sticky. Contemporary Russian strategy reprises the offensive approach which defined much of the Soviet Union’s consensus, investing in the military means for direct competition and leveraging indirect approaches to sustain a contest against a much stronger opponent in the international system. Russian grand strategy has proven evolutionary: While it grapples with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the post-Cold War world, there is greater continuity than change in the calculus and ambitions that define Russian decision-making.

Chapter 8 looks at the putative ‘breakthrough‘ of human rights in the 1970s, both in terms of the proliferation of activist organisations and their greater impact on governments. Beginning with the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Amnesty International, the chapter then looks more widely at the events of the 1970s and Amnesty’s growth. Although the membership of the British Section did not expand as rapidly as that of some other national sections, Amnesty represented a model of activism that many other organisations sought to emulate. These included Index on Censorship and the Minority Rights Group. By the later 1970s attempts were being made to organise the ‘field of human rights‘ into loose organisational networks.

This chapter is concerned with tracing the history of the drafting of the 1976 Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques (ENMOD). In seeking to understand how and why ENMOD came about, the chapter locates its emergence in the extant superpower rivalry between the USSR and USA around the time of the war in Indochina. Its provisions, it is argued, reflect the complex roles of those powers within the Cold War – as scientific innovators, military superpowers, ideological adversaries and hesitant bilateralists – and survives as a quintessential juridical exemplar of Cold War thought and practice.