Soviet-U.S. Relations

Washington, D.C., December 5, 2024 – Thirty years ago, the Budapest Memorandum ensured the destruction of dangerous post-Soviet nuclear stockpiles but was overshadowed at the time by Russian President Boris Yeltsin’s complaint that NATO expansion was causing a new division of Europe, according to declassified U.S. documents published on the anniversary today by the National Security Archive.

Washington, D.C., November 20, 2024 – The failure of the U.S. intelligence community to adequately warn policymakers about the poor Soviet grain harvest of 1972—resulting in higher food prices in the U.S.

Washington, D.C., April 29, 2024 - New evidence from Russian archival sources and published today by the National Security Archive details Fidel Castro’s extraordinary April-May 1963 trip to the USSR, which Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev saw as an opportunity to mend relations that had soured after the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Washington, D.C., December 14, 2023 – The National Security Archive is pleased to announce the publication of a major primary document collection on the presidency of Jimmy Carter. The latest in the Archive’s award-winning Digital National Security Archive series, U.S. Foreign Policy in the Carter Years, 1977-1981: Highest-Level Memos to the President comprises more than 2,500 communications and top-level policy-making records that Carter personally viewed and, in many cases, commented on directly.

Washington, D.C., November 29, 2023 - Henry Kissinger’s death today brings new global attention to the long paper trail of secret documents recording his policy deliberations, conversations, and directives on many initiatives for which he became famous—détente with the USSR, the opening to China, and Middle East shuttle diplomacy, among them.

Washington, D.C., October 26, 2023 - In early August 1977, Communist Party General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev wrote to President Jimmy Carter to inform him that the Soviet Union had detected a nuclear weapons test site in South Africa and to ask that the U.S. and other governments take “energetic efforts” to prevent the emergence of a new nuclear weapons state. Within days, the U.S.

Washington D.C., October 17, 2022 - In a secret “eyes only” memorandum for John F. Kennedy, written 60 years ago today at the outset of the Cuban Missile Crisis, U.N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson admonished the president to abandon his initial plan to attack Cuba and to consider, instead, the diplomatic option of dismantling U.S. missile bases in Europe in return for the withdrawal of the Soviet missiles in Cuba.

Washington, D.C., October 14, 2022 - Today the National Security Archive publishes for the first time in any language a translation of the first meeting between Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and Cuban Defense Minister Raul Castro on July 18, 1960. The newly available transcript helps explain Khrushchev’s 1962 determination that defending Cuba from U.S. intervention would require a massive Soviet military base in Cuba, together with the deployment of nuclear weapons.

Washington D.C., October 4, 2022 – Federal judge James Boasberg today supported a CIA claim that a public document about a famous nuclear war scare should be censored “to protect ‘intelligence activities’ or ‘intelligence sources or methods,’” despite the fact that his ruling and the CIA’s argument actually highlight the information and undermine any such protection.