Author Archives: Susan Colbourn

About Susan Colbourn

Susan Colbourn is associate director of the Triangle Institute for Security Studies (TISS), based at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy. A diplomatic and international historian, she is the author of a forthcoming book, Euromissiles: A Transatlantic History (Cornell University Press, 2022), which explores the rise and fall of a nuclear arms race in Europe to show how it nearly destroyed the Atlantic Alliance – and why NATO narrowly escaped such a fate.

Accountants, Cartographers, and Systems Analysts, Oh My!

This essay is part of a forum on new histories of the Cold War. All contributions to the forum can be found here. At this point, we know a lot about the Cold War. In part, that has been the product of archival access. Across Eastern Europe, formerly communist states and ex-Soviet republics have flung open their archives, willing—indeed, eager—to share the closely-held secrets of the past. The passage of time, too, has brought mandatory declassifications and regular releases from national archives, foreign ministries, presidential Continue reading →