In the 1960s, Indian governments were embroiled in a succession of diplomatic disputes involving defections from East to West. In March 1967, Svetlana Iosigovna Alliluyeva, the only daughter of Joseph Stalin, defected through the US embassy in New Delhi. Further back, in 1962, Vladislaw Stepanovich Tarasov, a Soviet merchant seaman, jumped ship in the eastern Indian port of Calcutta. After a legal wrangle in the Indian courts the Russian sailor left the subcontinent to begin a new life in the West. The Tarasov episode came at a point when India was reeling from a military defeat inflicted by China, and the national government was actively courting American and Soviet assistance to stave off what, at one point, appeared a threat to the India Republic’s survival. More broadly, defections staged in India served as an unwelcome irritant in relations between the Soviet Union, the United States and Great Britain, when these countries were attempting to forge more productive ties in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis. This chapter focuses attention on the role played by Western intelligence services in the story of Cold War defection.

This chapter examines military attitudes toward “emotional injuries” resulting from the end of romantic relationships. Evaluations of why some men “cracked” evolved substantially from World War I to the present. Often, however, psychiatrists attributed servicemen’s maladies to deficient female love: whether that of mothers or romantic partners. In Vietnam, psychiatrists construed romantic rejection as a “narcissistic injury”: a blow to the ego that led men to decompensate in various ways. Alcoholism, going AWOL, self-harm, and violence directed toward others were all associated with Dear John letters. The chapter considers how the military medical and legal establishments adjudicated unlawful acts perpetrated by servicemen whose intimate relationships had recently been severed by letter. It focuses on two court-martial cases: a Korean War POW who briefly rejected repatriation to the United States in 1953, citing a Dear John as his motive for defection, and a Marine Corps private court-martialled in 1969 for killing four Vietnamese peasants. In the latter case, military lawyers deemed the defendant to have been temporarily insane after his fiancée sent him a Dear John.

In chapter nine the focus is entirely on de-escalation, which compared to the discussion about escalation, is rather under-theorised presently. The starting point form the Cold War ideas on how conflict is supposed to de-escalate, followed by a treatment of the literature on the restraints of terrorism and insurgency whether self-imposed or not. Two hypotheses related to de-escalation are formulated based on the literature about de-legitimation and norm convergence and about an inability shift to continue the conflict, in the shape of a loss of foreign support and defection. The vignette in this chapter is the Chechen independence movement.