Most writing about British Cold War culture has concentrated on nuclearism, pacifism, decolonisation, socialism, postmodernism, Americanisation – in short, on everything but war. One effect of the attention paid to these various narratives has been to obscure the fact that citizens of the USSR and those of Western capitalist democracies alike understood and feared the Cold War as war, even if later accounts have tended to lose sight of what Holger Nehring has called the ‘warlike character’ of their experiences. If the Cold War is to have any explanatory force as a context for literary works beyond serving as a useful periodising shorthand, then we need to know in what sense, if any, the literature of the Cold War era understood itself as a war literature. ‘What kind of war was this?’ asks the historian Anders Stephanson. ‘The two sides never went to war with each other. There is no obvious beginning, no single moment of initial aggression, no declaration of war, no crossing of a certain line, and no open military engagement.