If anybody ever asks me what I did in the cold war, I have an answer: I stopped traffic in Mayfair – from Park Lane to Savile Row, I was told – for an hour or two.

I achieved this victory for the forces of freedom by calling the police after one of the employees at the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty news bureau passed a metal detector over a suspicious-looking package that had been delivered to our offices on South Audley Street, causing the device to let out a loud squawk.

We took security reasonably seriously at RFE/RL. The radio stations were part of a concerted western effort to break the information blockade that Warsaw Pact countries relied on to keep their populations in the dark about the outside world. When I came to work there as London bureau chief in 1984, I had been given a security briefing. Six years earlier, one of our stringers, Georgi Markov, had been assassinated by the Bulgarian secret service with a ricin pellet allegedly jabbed into his leg by a trick umbrella while he waited for a bus on Waterloo Bridge. Our security people thought the Bulgarians were particularly angered by a series of broadcasts he had made for us about President Todor Zhivkov’s personal life.

The police acted promptly and halted traffic in case the infernal device blew up. The denouement was chagrin and anticlimax on our part: the package was a box of books for one of our Russian correspondents. The employee had not properly read the directions for using the metal detector. But the police didn’t chastise us; they told us to call again, any time. The next time could be for real.

My road to battle was a long one. As an American baby-boomer, my childhood existed in the shadow of the cold war. In elementary school, we practised rolling up like hedgehogs under our desks to protect ourselves against the effects of a Soviet nuclear warhead. It never seemed strange to me that we were doing this in Evansville, Indiana, population just over 100,000. My classmates and I had to study more maths and science because the Russians were leading in these areas, and fight in Vietnam in order to beat back the forces of “godless communism”.

By early adulthood, I had lost faith in the cold war, mostly because of Vietnam. I took time off from my studies to become a staffer for Eugene McCarthy, the antiwar Democrat who challenged President Lyndon Johnson over Vietnam. When I finished my education, I almost joined the US Navy, but chose instead to spend the next four years doing alternative service, first teaching in a poor area of Kentucky, then in a mission school in Tehran. My wife and I visited the Soviet Union, but weren’t impressed: the USSR could blow us all to smithereens, but its internal structures were so obviously weak that world domination seemed unlikely.

Then came the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. I knew the country as a tourist during a stint working as a librarian for a school in Pakistan, and I was outraged. The first Soviet troops entered Afghanistan in 1979; by 1980, I was organising a relief programme for Afghan refugees in the tribal areas of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province. One day in the NWFP, my driver and I rounded a curve in the road and came upon about 200 refugees on a hillside. We stopped, and I met the elders, who told me they had just crossed over the border after a Soviet attack on their village. I wandered among the shattered people until I found a young woman named Bibi Shah. She had a tired, drawn face (no burka for her) and had been widowed during the attack. She had one cooking pot, and was gathering grass that she planned to boil into soup to feed her children. I was appalled, and from that moment on, like Paul on the road to Damascus, I was a firm believer in the necessity of defeating the Soviet Union.

By the mid-1980s, I was stopping traffic in London.

. . .

Relations between Russia and the US are today at their worst since the end of the cold war. After a burst of solidarity following 9/11, they had been deteriorating, but following western recognition of Kosovo as an independent state, the open fighting between Russia and Georgia this August, and Washington’s plans to deploy an anti-ballistic missile system in Poland and the Czech Republic, they are now frosty. US politicians are pushing the expansion of Nato to include Ukraine and Georgia. Russia, meanwhile, is poking around in America’s neighbourhood: Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez has invited the Russians for joint naval manoeuvres, and two Russian nuclear-capable bombers recently paid a visit. Vladimir Putin has talked about restoring defence ties with Cuba. “New cold war” is the journalistic shorthand for where we stand today.

If we are indeed heading for a new cold war, we’re doing so with populations largely ignorant of the old one: well over 60 per cent of Americans living today were not yet born when the Cuban missile crisis unfolded; about a quarter of Americans today were born after the Berlin Wall was dismantled by jubilant Germans from east and west. Half the population of Russia was born after 1970.

Is this new cold war more fiction than fact? I decided to consult some other former cold warriors. I would begin by asking them, in hindsight, who had won the war. But that was mostly to get them talking. More substantially, I wanted to know if people with experience of cold war “battles” agreed: were we really entering another cold war? And what would it mean if the US and Russia did sleepwalk into open hostility?

I started with Rich Cummings, former director of security for RFE/RL. He had joined the radio stations’ Munich headquarters just months before Carlos the Jackal, funded by the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, bombed the building, and he recalled the early years of his tenure as deadly serious, with constant worries about infiltration by spies. He also reminded me that the stations themselves were a microcosm of the internal dynamics of the cold war: many of the various nationalities who worked there had almost as much dislike for one another as they did for communism. In one memorable event, two staffers who had been doing some hard drinking in the headquarters canteen let their nationalist passions escalate into a fight in which one man put his cigarette out on the other’s forehead. In retaliation, the branded man bit off his opponent’s finger.

Cummings, who still lives in Germany, continues to delve into the history of the cold war. His book, Cold War Radio, is scheduled for publication next year. I asked him if he thought the US had won it. “I think the objectives that I read from the CIA in the late 1940s and the state department in 1949 to 1950 were reached with the final fall of communism in Russia in 1991. It doesn’t mean we won. It means that [we met] the objectives, and those were simply to give the people [of the eastern bloc] a chance to do what they wanted to do. But, did we win? I don’t think we, meaning America, really won anything.”

I tracked down another radio employee who’d worked in Munich: Vladimir Matusevich (pictured right), Radio Liberty’s Russian-language correspondent in London when I arrived there, and director of the Russian Service in Munich from 1987 to 1992, when he was transferred to Washington (he left RFE/RL in 1995 and is now retired). Matusevich didn’t know Cummings’ canteen story, but he had his own. “I’m coming to the canteen, and I’m passing a table where some Romanians are sitting and one of them says: ‘Mr Matusevich, when will you give us back our Bessarabia?’ Well, I am not Brezhnev, I am just Matusevich.” As for who won the cold war, he said: “For me that’s not the crucial question. For me, the more important question is why on earth the United States and western Europe couldn’t use this victory or the end of the cold war a bit more efficiently.”

Sidney Bearman, who edited The Strategic Survey for the International Institute of Strategic Studies – a London-based think-tank – from 1977 until 2001, and before that was a senior analyst specialising in east and south-east Asia at the CIA, spoke to me from his home in La Jolla, California. He says that people are wrong to see a US-Russia cold war looming. “Things are different: it isn’t as if they were these two massive centres at each other’s throats ... The picture we’re looking at if we look a little bit into the future is not a second cold war. It’s going to be a time where we will have difficulty with the Russians. They’re going to try to push their way back into a position where they have a great deal of influence around their periphery ... [but] they can no longer stand up to China. China’s got a really booming economy. If there’s going to be something like the cold war in the future, it won’t be between the US and Russia; it will be between the US and China.”

Or could it be that the cold war really isn’t over yet? An acquaintance at the Hoover Institution suggested I talk to Oleg Darusenkov. Darusenkov joined the Soviet Union’s diplomatic corps in 1956 and retired as the Russian Federation’s ambassador to Mexico in 1992. He was in Cuba during the missile crisis and served on the staff of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party. Like many other Russians, he had to make his own way when Russia’s economy tanked in the early 1990s. He left the Russian diplomatic service and worked for several years as an executive for a Mexican television network. Now he’s a businessman in Dallas, Texas.

“The main reason for the end of the cold war was the collapse of the Soviet Union,” Darusenkov says. “It was an internal process. The [previous] leadership was foolish, doing nothing, and Gorbachev wasn’t the person to manage that situation, for many reasons...

“The economy was down, the people were very angry. Those were the reasons that Gorbachev, and then Yeltsin, could not negotiate very well with the Occident. They really gave away everything without receiving anything from the Occident, and there were a lot of things left without definition. Now it seems to me that we have the last act of the cold war at this moment, when definitions have to be done.”

. . .

In 1987 and 1988, I spent months in Geneva covering the Afghanistan withdrawal negotiations – and have since become convinced that the Afghan misadventure was an important factor in the end of the cold war.

I decided to track down Giandomenico Picco, an Italian diplomat who did much of the heavy lifting during those seemingly interminable talks that eventually led to the Soviet withdrawal. Picco was a great off-the-record source, willing to retreat to the diplomatic lounge and feed reporters bits of the negotiations over an espresso. I found him at his home in Connecticut. While Picco wasn’t exactly a cold warrior, he was intimately involved in one of the events that brought the cold war to an end.

Picco told me he was concerned about the future of Russian-American relations because he feared the power of narratives could take over from rational thought, should relations deteriorate. He worries about the power of crisis, because crisis “provokes a dynamic of its own that the players are no longer able to control”. In a crisis, narratives assume even more power, and if narrative takes over from analysis for “one too many in the decision-making process, then all bets are off”.

One of the narratives playing out today is the somewhat tattered post-cold war western narrative of expanding democracy and human rights. But there’s another narrative that many of us in the west do not attend to – a Russian one of external threat. Oleg Kalugin (pictured left) is a former head of KGB counterintelligence and the youngest man ever to make general in the KGB. He is a controversial figure: he was a spy for the Soviet Union in the US, was accused of being a CIA agent by adversaries in the Soviet Union, was elected to the Supreme Soviet during the last years of the Gorbachev period, and is now a US citizen – and loathed by fellow KGB man Vladimir Putin.

Kalugin reminds me that Russia has a long history of being threatened. The French under Napoleon took Moscow, and the Nazis came close to conquering Stalingrad. The new Russia has, he notes, created an annual national holiday in November to commemorate the expulsion of Polish invaders from Moscow in 1612. Which brings us closer to the heart of the matter: western historians generally argue that the Russian mode of dealing with the fear of encroachment has been to push outward.

Most of the Russians I spoke to, including one former senior Soviet diplomat with intimate knowledge of thinking at the highest levels, cited an American “promise” not to expand Nato past Germany as a big factor in today’s tensions. The Americans with whom I spoke are divided on whether the “promise” was ever made – and whether the person who allegedly made it would have had the authority to do so. At issue is a conversation between James Baker, secretary of state under George Bush senior, Gorbachev and Eduard Shevardnadze, Soviet foreign minister. The date: February 9 1990. The venue: Moscow. The issue: the reunification of Germany.

The US administration was desperate to win Soviet agreement that Germany could reunify and that the united state could remain in Nato. The Americans feared that without such a deal, West Germany could withdraw from Nato in order to reunify, thus blowing a hole in the post-second world war security arrangements that had kept Europe at peace.

There is no question that Baker, Gorbachev and Shevardnadze met. There’s not much dispute about what Baker said: three books – with the combined authorship among them of Strobe Talbott (pictured right), chief Russia adviser to Bill Clinton; historian Michael Beschloss; Condoleezza Rice, current secretary of state and Russia scholar; and Philip Zelikow, a senior National Security Council staff member in 1990 dealing with German reunification – all contain passages in which Baker is quoted as having proposed to Gorbachev that Germany be reunited and tied to Nato but that there would be “no extension of Nato’s current jurisdiction eastward”. Talbott, in his book The Russia Hand, goes even further, quoting Baker as saying: “If we maintain a presence in Germany that is a part of Nato, there would be no extension of Nato’s jurisdiction for forces of Nato one inch to the east...”

But what did Baker mean, and was it a promise? He was not available when I called his office in Houston: Hurricane Ike was bearing down. But his spokesman told me that Baker has always insisted that the statement applied only to the reunification of Germany, and that he had backed away from it within hours of making it. The aide also directed me to a 1995 article by Zelikow arguing that there was no promise that Nato would not expand.

Jack Matlock (pictured left), US ambassador to Moscow in 1990, was quoted by Zelikow in that 1995 article as saying “we gave categorical assurances” to Gorbachev of no Nato moves east. When I called him at his home in Princeton, Matlock restated that Baker had made the assurance. Talbott, despite citing the quotation in both The Russia Hand and an earlier book with Beschloss, At The Highest Levels, told me that when he was in charge of Russia policy for Clinton he did not regard the Baker “promise” as binding. Nor did he regret the Clinton administration’s push to expand Nato.

One of my Russian interlocutors, still active in the diplomatic world and therefore unwilling to speak for attribution, said he thought Gorbachev and Shevardnadze believed they had a commitment they could count on because they were “darlings of the west and the west would never lie to them”.

. . .

To talk more generally, I called two other former ambassadors, Art Hartman (Matlock’s predecessor in Moscow) and Peter Burleigh, a career ambassador who retired from the US foreign service in 1999. Both Hartman and Burleigh had criticisms of recent Russian actions, but they also said the US approach towards Russia in recent years has been unhelpful. “We mishandled the time after the fall of the Soviet Union in not making a greater allowance for the sensitivities that were bound to come out,” Hartman told me.

Burleigh’s formulation went like this: “We haven’t appeared to seriously consider and assess Russia and its interests.”

I also asked Talbott about these issues. He sent back an e-mail:

1. I believe that the basing by the US of a missile interception system in Poland and Czech Republic ... makes little sense scientifically, strategically and politically; moreover, I’m not surprised that it’s raised questions in Moscow about a possible violation of the Founding Act between Nato and the Russian Federation.

2. For every president from Harry Truman through Bill Clinton, the USSR – or Russia – was always number one or number two on the list of strategic concerns, but for the Bush administration, Russia didn’t make the top 10 until relatively recently.”

I had asked him specifically how he could explain the poor state of US-Russian relations, given that the secretary of state, Rice, is a specialist in the region. He replied: “I was mystified by it for a long time, although she’s clearly focused on the problem now.” In fact, he said, he had just had a 90-minute conversation with her. This conversation took place before her latest hard-line speech on US-Russian relations.

The first presidential debate between Barack Obama and John McCain showed the traction that the hard-line narrative has in the US, with Obama seeming to endorse the arrival of antiballistic missiles on the Russian border and referring to Russia as “resurgent and very aggressive”, and McCain riffing on George W. Bush’s eyeball view into Putin’s soul with the quip, “I looked into Mr Putin’s eyes, and I saw three letters, a ‘K,’ a ‘G,’ and a ‘B’.”

Russians are worried, too, and although the prisms through which they see events may differ from those of many in the west, old cold warriors in Moscow fear tougher times ahead.

Through a mutual acquaintance, I got the Moscow phone number of Genrikh Borovik, who covered the US for Novosti Press Agency and Literaturnaya Gazeta during the 1960s and early 1970s. He is also the father of Artyom Borovik, whose career as a major Soviet, then Russian, journalist known for his criticisms of Putin was cut short by a fatal plane crash. “We are living now in very difficult times,” is how Borovik put it. “Unfortunately the policies of the [US], especially connected with the military installations in Poland and the Czech Republic and the naval ships in the Black Sea, are stupid, and not only stupid, but very, very dangerous.”

There’s a real reason to care if hard-line narratives take hold in Washington and Moscow. Despite the diminishment of Russia and the relatively battered state of US power, economic might and global influence, these two countries still have the world’s biggest nuclear arsenals, and a nuclear war between the two countries would devastate both.

In the 1980s, we learned a lot about something called “nuclear winter”, the idea that a major nuclear exchange would put the world climate in an icebox. Recent academic studies, one by the US National Academy of Sciences earlier this year, warn that even a “regional” nuclear war, involving only 100 Hiroshima-size bombs, would produce both nuclear-winter effects and a giant, nearly global hole in the ozone layer.

I called Ronald Reagan’s chief arms control negotiator, Max Kampelman (pictured right), now a Washington lawyer. I asked him what he thought about this mess. In our first conversation, he talked mainly about good and evil.

The second time we talked, I asked him to think back to the Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Reykjavik, where the two leaders came within a hair’s-breadth of agreeing to start negotiations to abolish the Soviet and US nuclear arsenals. I asked him how important the existence of these nuclear arsenals is today, not to mention the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Shortly after the attacks of September 11, he said, he had started thinking again about nuclear weapons: he read that if the planes that hit Washington and New York had been carrying nuclear devices, the two cities could have been totally destroyed. His response was to call his old arms control staff and ask them to reconvene. Many of those in the room had been among the opponents of abolition back in the Reykjavik days. “I asked them: ‘Were you guys right, or was Reagan right?’” After several meetings of the old team, Kampelman said he and some of the experts who had been against the abolition came to the conclusion that Reagan had been correct, “and something had to be done about it”. They decided that abolition had to become a moral imperative, what he called “an ought”. “The ’ought’ had to be how to get rid of the God-damned weapons.”

Among those leading the effort to put global nuclear disarmament on the table are some of the most prominent living US cold warriors – Henry Kissinger; Zbigniew Brzezinski, the hawkish national security adviser under Carter; and George Shultz, secretary of state under Reagan.

. . .

Many of those who fought the real cold war have mellowed. They see the costs on both sides. Many of them worry that we could slip into a situation in which the cold war narratives start playing again and, in Picco’s words, “all bets are off”. How could this happen? One needs to look back only 32 years before the start of the cold war, to August 1914.

In 1962 the historian Barbara Tuchman published The Guns of August, a masterful study of the outbreak of the first world war – a war that caught the world by surprise. She referred back to a popular treatise published in 1910, “The Great Illusion”, by Norman Angell. Angell argued that the world was so interdependent that it would be complete folly for nations to fight. Yet in August 1914, Wilhemine Germany deeply believed its own narrative of encirclement and acted on it with devastating consequences.

Today, everyone knows that it would be folly for Russia and the US to make their relationship hostile – that a nuclear war is unthinkable. But there’s a new narrative in the making: the narrative of the new cold war. Perhaps Darusenkov is right, and now is the time for Russia and the US to write the definitions needed to put a final end to the cold war. Perhaps Kampelman is right, that it’s time for the nuclear superpowers to admit that the possession of these weapons is, as he says, “a crime against humanity” and take up the challenge of abolition. The old cold war was a bad time for the world. A new cold war could be worse.