Excerpts from Chernyaev's Theses Prepared for Gorbachev's Report to the Defense Council

In this excerpt from the Mikhail Gorbachev's remarks to the Soviet Union's Defense Council, his chief foreign policy advisor Anatoly Chernyaev lays out the argument by Gorbachev that the Soviet Union can no longer sustain the arms race with the west that had raged as a part of the Cold War since the 1940s. Despite this rational observation that the Soviet Union can no longer compete with the west and simultaneously restructure its economy at home, Gorbachev is reluctant to give up the fight entirely - the West has not toned down its rhetoric or its attempts to role back communism. Thus, Gorbachev concludes that the process of restructuring international relations (and ultimately ending the Cold War) was going to be a long process and one that the Soviet Union needed address immediately if it was going to be a part of that process and not simply accept change thrust upon it.