Mr. Abel and Ambassador Harriman may well be right in their understanding of the origins of the Cold War. I believe they are right in most of what they say in the first half of their comments, and, on some issues, I think they are making points that I was trying to make myself. For example, that the “fate of Poland… had been pretty much decided before Roosevelt and Churchill went to Yalta in February, 1945” is one thing I was attempting to express; that “as the Nazi threat diminished, so did the need for Allied cooperation” is another.

On other points, I believe Mr. Abel and the ambassador are mistaken:

1) They say, “Seizing upon what purports to be a Soviet transcript of” the Potsdam plenary session of August 1, 1945,1 reproduce an exchange among the Big Three that appears to outline explicitly understood spheres of interest in the world. I don’t know what is meant by “purports.” I have quoted what the Soviet government has published as its English-language version of the conference transcripts. Now, it is possible that the Soviets just made up this exchange out of whole cloth: they have been known to have a taste for inventing history. And it is true that the American notes, which are not literal transcripts, and which are often sketchier than the other countries’ sets of transcripts, do not appear to cover such a specific discussion of global spheres of interest. But when we turn to the British records (to be found in the Foreign Office archives under file reference CAB 99 38 8461), they seem to confirm the Russian transcripts.

2) I go on, they observe, “to express astonishment that Germany should somehow have emerged as the ‘very center and source’ of the Cold War as a result of the Potsdam negotiations”; they imply that I have ignored Germany’s historically central position in European policy calculations. But, no, of course Germany was in the same geographical neighborhood before Potsdam. That is not the issue I meant to raise. The issue is whether mere geographical position creates an inevitable casus belli . I think not. To believe that it does is to believe in a form of historical determinism.

3) They remark that “Truman demobilized the Army and Navy with extraordinary speed.” Well, yes, he did. I am not sure that the point is entirely relevant, but the truth is that he could not do otherwise, given America’s traditional aversion to standing armies and the climate of opinion at the time. However, he tried. On August 17, 1945, three days after the surrender of Japan, he announced that he would ask Congress to approve a program of Universal Military Training. Congress declined. Demobilization proceeded.

4) It is also true, as they point out, that Truman “kept the national defense budget to an average of $13 billion a year” between 1947 and 1950—but it is