Stalin had not allowed the atomic bomb to alter his conception of international relations. Nuclear weapons, however, did shape the way in which his successors thought about East–West relations. It was the danger of nuclear war, above all, that led them to adopt the policy of peaceful coexistence; and it was the deterrent power of Soviet nuclear weapons that made it possible for them to declare that war was “not fatally inevitable.” But there were limits to the changes they were willing to make. They did not adopt the position Malenkov had espoused in 1954, that world civilization would perish
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