Cold war or détente? The Soviet viewpoint

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About the Authors

Georgi Arkadyevich Arbatov is the director of the Institute of United States and Canadian Studies in Moscow. He is a Doctor of History, and has been a Full Member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences since 1974. At the Twenty-sixth Party Congress in 1981 he was elected a Full Member of the Central Committee. He is a deputy of the USSR Supreme Soviet and has been a member of the Commission on International Affairs of the Supreme Soviet's Council of Nationalities since 1974. His decorations include the Order of Lenin, the Order of the October Revolution, the Order of the Red Star, two Orders of the Red Banner of Labor, and the Badge of Honor.

Georgi Arbatov was born on May 19, 1923, in the Ukrainian city of Kherson. He entered military school in June 1941, and took part in World War II as an officer of a rocket-mortar unit. Demobilized in 1944, he went on to the Moscow Institute of International Relations. He graduated in 1949 and began work as a journalist and editor at the Foreign Literature Publishing House, then on the staffs of the journals Kommunist and Problems of Peace and Socialism. From 1962 to 1964 he was a department head at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations. In 1964 he became a consultant to Yuri V. Andropov, then one of the Secretaries and now the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and in 1967 began his present job as director of the Institute of United States and Canadian Studies.

Mr. Arbatov is the author of a number of works, including The Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism (coauthor, 1958), Ideological Struggle in

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International Relations Today (1970), USA: Modern Management Methods (1971), The Nixon Doctrine (1972), USA: Scientific-Technological Revolution and Foreign Policy Trends (head of research teams, 1974), and US Global Strategy in the Age of Scientific-Technological Revolution (1979).

A participant of the Pugwash Conference since 1967, the Dartmouth Conference since 1969, the Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues (the Palme Commission] since 1980, and the 1973 Soviet-American summit, Mr. Arbatov has long been actively involved in parliamentary contacts between the United States and the Soviet Union. He is married and has a son.

Willem Oltmans, the noted Dutch journalist and author, was educated at Yale University and spent twelve years as a United Nations correspondent. On the basis of the M.I.T.-Club of Rome project Limits to Growth, Oltmans conducted a series of 120 interviews with some of the world's leading thinkers on the subject of population growth and resource exhaustion. These interviews were published in two volumes entitled On Growth (G.P. Putnam & Sons, 1974-75).

After many years of political reporting, Willem Oltmans is now specializing in scientific subjects. In the summer of 1981 he completed a series of twenty-four interviews with Dr. Philip Handler, president of the National Academy of Sciences from 1969 to 1981, a few months before Dr. Handler's death.