Superpower Detente is an outstanding assessment of the highs and lows in the relationship between the two superpowers in the 1970s, and the prospects for a continuing detente between them in the 1980s.

This thorough examination of the 1970s reminds us that improvements early in that decade gave way to stalemate and the demise of detente. The early 1970s saw the most far reaching moves toward detente since the inception of the Cold War. But, Bowker and Williams suggest, the coincidence of interests between the superpowers hid divergent conceptions of what detente was and what kind of behaviour it required.