Robin examines factors that shaped the scientists' thinking and explores their psycho-cultural and rational choice explanations for enemy behavior. He reveals how the academics' intolerance for complexity ultimately reduced the nation's adversaries to borderline psychotics, ignored revolutionary social shifts in post-World War II Asia, and promoted the notion of a maniacal threat facing the United States. Putting the issue of scientific validity aside, Robin presents the first extensive analysis of the intellectual underpinnings of Cold War behavioral sciences in a book that will be indispensable reading for anyone interested in the era and its legacy. Ron Robin is Professor of History at Haifa University in Israel. Among works on the Cold War, Ron Robin's book stands out on account of the sheer quality of its exposition and analysis and because of its attention to the less-studied and distinctly problematical field of behavior sciences.
Most historians take as a given the intellectual assumptions of the Cold War.