Summary of Serhii Plokhy's The Last Empire

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#1 Summit is the top of a mountain. It has also been used to denote a supreme achievement, but it was not until 1953 that it entered the vocabulary of diplomacy. The word gained popularity during the Cold War, as meetings between Nikita Khrushchev and John F. Kennedy, and then Leonid Brezhnev and Richard Nixon, captured the attention of the world media.

#2 The Bush-Gorbachev summit in Moscow was presented by the media as the first post–Cold War summit. The two superpowers had placed plenty of nuclear arms on the world stage, so there would be a second act involving different actors who might want to fire them.

#3 The world now had two nuclear powers, and they were on a collision course. They tried to outdo each other by developing a new generation of nuclear arms. In the 1950s, the Soviets put Sputnik into orbit in 1957, demonstrating that they had missiles capable of delivering bombs to the United States.

#4 In 1983, the Soviets shot down a South Korean airliner with 269 people aboard, and awaited American retaliation. In November of the same year, the Soviets mistook the Able Archer NATO exercises in Europe for preparations leading up to nuclear war.

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Rafbók: 4 juni 2022