Detente in the 1970s, including the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT I 1972, SALT II 1979), the Helsinki Accords (August 1975), and the collapse of detente by the end of the decade

A 15-mark "assess" needs a weighted judgement.

Achievements

SALT I (Moscow, 26 May 1972) capped strategic launchers at existing levels and restricted anti-ballistic missile systems to two sites (one later). The Basic Principles Agreement (1972) committed both sides to peaceful coexistence. The Helsinki Final Act (1 August 1975) accepted post-1945 European borders, opened economic exchange, and committed signatories to human rights through Basket III. SALT II (Vienna, 18 June 1979) capped MIRV warheads.

Failures

SALT II was never ratified by the United States Senate. The Helsinki human rights commitments produced dissident movements (Helsinki Watch in the United States, Moscow Helsinki Group, Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, 1977) that the Soviet bloc repressed. Soviet build-up of SS-20 intermediate-range missiles (from 1976) panicked NATO into the December 1979 dual-track decision. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (24 December 1979) ended the political possibility of detente.

Judgement

Detente stabilised the strategic competition at strategic parity but failed to manage proxy conflicts in the Third World and Soviet defence industrial momentum. Its institutional gains (the OSCE process, the ABM Treaty until 2002) outlasted the political relationship.

A 3-mark "outline" wants three distinct, correctly dated conditions, each in a sentence.

Strategic parity

By about 1969 Soviet ICBM numbers had caught American levels; with both sides able to destroy the other (Mutual Assured Destruction), arms control became rational rather than weakness.

The Sino-Soviet split

Armed clashes on the Ussuri River (March 1969) and Nixon's opening to Beijing (visit February 1972) gave Moscow an incentive to deal with Washington before being isolated.

West German Ostpolitik

Brandt's Moscow and Warsaw treaties (1970) and the Four Power Berlin Agreement (1971) defused the German question, removing the central European flashpoint.

Marking criteria

1 mark each for three distinct conditions, correctly identified and (where relevant) dated; do not simply describe SALT.

A 4-mark "explain" needs a cause-and-effect chain with specific detail.

What it did

The ABM Treaty (26 May 1972) limited each superpower to two anti-missile defence sites of 100 launchers (cut to one site in a 1974 protocol) - the Soviet Galosh system around Moscow and the American Safeguard site at Grand Forks.

Why it mattered

By renouncing missile defence each side stayed deliberately vulnerable, which preserved the logic of Mutual Assured Destruction: if neither side could shield itself, neither had an incentive to strike first or to race for an unbeatable arsenal.

Its durability

The treaty outlasted detente itself, holding until the American withdrawal in June 2002, which marks it as the most enduring institutional achievement of the period.

Marking criteria

1 mark for the site limits/detail; 1 mark for linking it to Mutual Assured Destruction; 1 mark for why limiting defence stabilised the arms race; 1 mark for its significance or durability.

A 5-mark "explain ... using the source" wants the source decoded, then linked to own knowledge.

Decode the source

Basket III turned human rights into a public, signed treaty commitment, not merely Western rhetoric. Moscow accepted it as the price of the Basket I recognition of post-1945 borders it wanted, assuming the clauses were unenforceable.

The unintended effect (own knowledge)

Dissidents used the signed text as a legal yardstick to hold their own governments to account. The Moscow Helsinki Group (1976) under Yuri Orlov, Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia (1977) under Vaclav Havel, and the Western Helsinki Watch committees monitored compliance and publicised abuses.

The outcome

Soviet repression of these monitors exposed the gap between signature and conduct, eroding the bloc's legitimacy. Sarah Snyder treats Helsinki as a delayed-action time bomb beneath Brezhnev's regime.

Marking criteria

1 mark for decoding Basket III as a binding human-rights commitment; 1-2 marks for naming the dissident groups it inspired; 1 mark for the legitimacy/repression link; 1 mark for the judgement that the effect was unintended.

A 5-mark "assess the usefulness" question rewards origin/perspective plus own knowledge, ending in a judgement.

Perspective

Source B reflects the "global Cold War" reading associated with Odd Arne Westad: it is useful because it corrects a Eurocentric, treaty-focused account by foregrounding the proxy conflicts that the SALT process left untouched.

Corroboration from own knowledge

It fits the record: Soviet and Cuban intervention in Angola (1975 to 1976), the Horn of Africa (1977 to 1978) and Nicaragua (1979), culminating in Afghanistan (December 1979), repeatedly poisoned the relationship even as arms talks continued.

Limitation

By stressing the Third World it can understate the European and strategic causes - the SS-20 deployment and the NATO dual-track decision (December 1979), the failure to ratify SALT II, and the domestic human-rights backlash that made cooperation politically toxic in Washington.

Judgement

Highly useful for explaining why detente could not be insulated from regional rivalry, but it must be read alongside the strategic and domestic causes; collapse was over-determined, not single-cause.

Marking criteria

1 mark for identifying the global/Third World perspective; 1-2 marks for own-knowledge corroboration (named interventions, dates); 1 mark for a limitation; 1 mark for a judgement on usefulness.

A 6-mark "why" question wants a ranked set of causes, not a list, weighing superpower motives on each side.

Shared driver: strategic parity

By 1969 to 1970 the two arsenals were roughly matched. Mutual Assured Destruction made an unconstrained arms race ruinously expensive and pointless, so capping launchers through SALT served both.

Soviet motives

A slowing planned economy needed Western grain and technology and credit; the Sino-Soviet split (Ussuri clashes, March 1969) raised the spectre of a two-front confrontation once Nixon opened to Beijing in 1972; and recognition of the post-1945 borders (secured at Helsinki, 1975) was a long-standing Soviet aim.

American motives

Nixon and Kissinger wanted Soviet leverage on Hanoi to extract the United States from Vietnam (the Paris Accords followed in January 1973); triangular diplomacy with China increased American bargaining power; and arms control answered domestic and allied pressure to control defence spending.

Judgement

Parity was the enabling condition, but the decisive motives were asymmetric: Moscow sought legitimacy and economic relief, Washington sought help in Vietnam and an advantage from the China opening. Detente was a convergence of different interests, not a shared vision, which is why it proved fragile.

Marking criteria

1 mark for the parity/MAD frame; 1-2 marks for distinct Soviet motives; 1-2 marks for distinct American motives; 1 mark for a ranked judgement distinguishing the two sides' interests.

This is an extended-response/essay. Markers reward a sustained, evidence-based argument that addresses the comparison directly and weaves in historiography - not a narrative.

Band-6 PLAN

• Thesis. Soviet conduct supplied the provocations that wrecked detente - SS-20 deployment, Third World adventurism and, decisively, Afghanistan - but those provocations destroyed detente only because a shift in American politics had already drained away the constituency that sustained it. Soviet actions were the trigger; the American turn was the loaded chamber. Both were necessary; the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was the proximate cause, the American political shift the underlying one.
• Argument 1 - Soviet actions as the trigger. SS-20 deployment from 1976 (eventually 441) and intervention in Angola (1975 to 1976), the Horn of Africa (1977 to 1978) and finally Afghanistan (24 December 1979) repeatedly breached the spirit of the 1972 Basic Principles. Evidence: Carter framed Afghanistan as "the most serious threat to peace since the Second World War" and withdrew SALT II from the Senate.
• Argument 2 - The American political shift as the underlying cause. Detente lost its domestic base before Afghanistan. The Jackson-Vanik amendment (1974) tied trade to Soviet emigration; the human-rights lobby and Carter's 1977 overture to Sakharov made cooperation toxic; the Committee on the Present Danger and a resurgent right attacked SALT II as appeasement. Evidence: SALT II faced defeat in the Senate even before Afghanistan made the vote moot.
• Argument 3 - The interaction and the decisive moment. The SS-20s provoked the NATO dual-track decision (12 December 1979) twelve days before the invasion, showing European security unravelling independently of Afghanistan; but it was the invasion that converted a faltering relationship into open confrontation, and Reagan's election (November 1980) sealed it.
• Historiography. Raymond Garthoff (Detente and Confrontation, 1985) stresses mutual misperception and the asymmetry of expectations - each side believed detente licensed its own Third World gains. Odd Arne Westad (The Global Cold War, 2005) makes Soviet and proxy intervention in the periphery the solvent of cooperation. John Lewis Gaddis (Strategies of Containment, 1982) sets the collapse within shifting American strategic doctrine, restoring weight to the Washington turn.
• Judgement. Weigh Westad's Soviet-action emphasis against the Garthoff/Gaddis stress on misperception and American politics: Soviet provocations were the proximate cause, but they detonated detente only because the American political ground had already shifted against it. The single decisive event was the invasion of Afghanistan; the deeper cause was the erosion of the American constituency for detente.

MODEL PARAGRAPH (Argument 2)

Detente was dying in Washington before a single Soviet tank crossed into Afghanistan. From the mid-1970s the policy lost the domestic coalition that had carried SALT I: the Jackson-Vanik amendment of 1974 tied most-favoured-nation trade to Soviet Jewish emigration, turning economic detente into a human-rights battleground, while Carter's 1977 letter to the dissident Andrei Sakharov signalled that the new administration would press the moral case Nixon and Kissinger had set aside. The Committee on the Present Danger and a resurgent conservative movement attacked SALT II as strategic surrender, and the treaty signed at Vienna in June 1979 was already struggling for the votes it needed in the Senate. As John Lewis Gaddis argues, detente had always rested on a particular reading of American interest that was now being repudiated at home; the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 did not so much create the collapse as supply the final, public justification for a retreat that American politics had already begun. The chamber, in other words, was loaded before Brezhnev pulled the trigger.

Marker's note. A band-6 response keeps "to what extent" in view throughout - ranking Soviet actions against the American political shift rather than narrating 1972 to 1980 - anchors every claim in dated evidence (SS-20s, Jackson-Vanik, the dual-track decision, Afghanistan), sets at least two historians in genuine tension (Westad's Third World emphasis against Garthoff/Gaddis on misperception and American politics), and reaches a graded judgement. Listing the causes of collapse without weighing the two sides caps the response in the middle bands.

This is an extended-response/essay. Markers reward a sustained, evidence-based argument that addresses the proposition directly and weaves in historiography - not a narrative.

Band-6 PLAN

• Thesis. The proposition is half right and ultimately self-defeating: detente delivered the Soviet Union its immediate prizes - parity codified, borders recognised, Western credit and grain - while the West's gains looked thin in the 1970s; but the West's apparent concession at Helsinki (Basket III) planted the human-rights dynamic that corroded the bloc Moscow thought it had secured. Judged in the short run the proposition holds; judged in the long run it inverts.
• Argument 1 - The Soviet "success". SALT I (1972) ratified strategic parity and the ABM Treaty froze American missile defence; the Helsinki Final Act (1975) gave Basket I recognition of the post-1945 borders and the East European status quo; trade and technology eased a slowing economy. Evidence: the Interim Agreement froze launchers at favourable Soviet ICBM levels; Brezhnev treated Helsinki as a diplomatic triumph.
• Argument 2 - The Western "failure" (the short-run case). The West capped its own missile defence, recognised Soviet borders, and watched Moscow arm clients in Angola, the Horn of Africa and Nicaragua and deploy SS-20s, while SALT II foundered in the Senate. Evidence: Soviet Third World gains continued throughout detente; SS-20 deployment from 1976 undercut European security.
• Argument 3 - Why the proposition inverts. Basket III armed the Helsinki Watch movement, Charter 77 and the Moscow Helsinki Group; the legitimacy erosion they began helped corner the regime Gorbachev inherited, and the ABM Treaty and OSCE process outlasted the USSR. Evidence: Soviet repression of monitors discredited the bloc; Gorbachev later treated Helsinki as a constraint he chose to honour in 1989.
• Historiography. Raymond Garthoff (Detente and Confrontation, 1985) reads detente as a stabilising but mutually misperceived bargain rather than a Soviet win. Sarah Snyder (Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War, 2011) and Daniel Thomas (The Helsinki Effect, 2001) make Basket III a delayed Western victory. Vladislav Zubok (A Failed Empire, 2007) shows the Soviet "success" rested on an economy that detente-era imports only postponed reforming.
• Judgement. Weigh the short-run Soviet gains (Garthoff, Zubok on the immediate bargain) against the long-run Helsinki effect (Snyder, Thomas): the proposition is sound for the 1970s but reverses over the 1980s, because the West's largest concession proved its most corrosive instrument. Detente was a Soviet success that carried the seed of Soviet failure.

MODEL PARAGRAPH (Argument 3)

The clause that looked most like a Western surrender at Helsinki turned out to be its sharpest weapon. In accepting Basket III, the West appeared to trade hard recognition of the post-1945 borders for soft, unenforceable promises about human rights; Brezhnev signed in the confidence that the clauses could be ignored at home. Yet the signed text gave dissidents a yardstick their own governments had endorsed. Within a year the Moscow Helsinki Group under Yuri Orlov was monitoring Soviet compliance; Charter 77 followed in Czechoslovakia in 1977, and Western Helsinki Watch committees publicised every breach. As Daniel Thomas and Sarah Snyder argue, the Final Act behaved like a delayed-action charge beneath the Brezhnev regime: the more the bloc repressed its monitors, the more it advertised the gap between its signature and its conduct, draining the legitimacy that Gorbachev would find he could no longer restore. The recognition Moscow prized in 1975 thus came bundled with the instrument that helped unmake its empire - which is precisely why the verdict that detente simply "succeeded" for the Soviet Union cannot survive the long run.

Marker's note. A band-6 response interrogates the proposition rather than accepting it - distinguishing the short-run (Soviet gains) from the long-run (the Helsinki effect) and reaching a judgement that the proposition inverts over time - anchors each claim in dated evidence (SALT I launcher freeze, Basket I/III, the dissident groups), and sets historians in tension (Garthoff/Zubok on the immediate bargain against Snyder/Thomas on the delayed Western victory). Simply agreeing or disagreeing without the time dimension caps the response in the middle bands.