A Cardboard Castle? is the first book to document, analyze, and interpret the history of the Warsaw Pact based on the archives of the alliance itself. As suggested by the title, the Soviet bloc military machine that held the West in awe for most of the Cold War does not appear from the inside as formidable, nor as unified, as outsiders often believed.

Most of the 193 documents included in the book were top secret and have only recently been obtained from Eastern European archives by the Parallel History Project on NATO and the Warsaw Pact (PHP), an international consortium of scholars dedicated to the study of the military aspects of the Cold War and its implications for current security issues.

"This volume opens the door to one of the most important yet largely neglected chapters of the Cold War in Europe—the Warsaw Pact. Mastny's provocative overview of its history should fire the interest of general readers as well as specialists; only a scholar with his breadth of knowledge of Eastern European history and languages could execute such a project. He and Byrne are to be congratulated for producing this monumental volume, with a trove of translated documents that is a major boon to both scholars and teachers."

WILLIAM E. ODOM (Lt. Gen., Ret.), former Director, National Security Agency,
author of The Collapse of the Soviet Military