Whatever the outcome of the 1984 presidential campaign, the first item on the next president's agenda of foreign policy will be—as it has been for more than three decades now—America's relations with the Soviet Union, Those relations have been tense and troubled, sometimes (as in the case of the Cuban missile crisis of 1962) traumatic since America's Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union began in the late 1940's, but thus far the two superpowers have avoided the tragedy of an all-out nuclear war. Nevertheless, the arms race has continued and indeed accelerated, and the danger of unleashing the greatest weapons of destruction in human history has intensified. Yet, contends diplomatic historian Norman Graebner, "nuclear weapons have proved to be quite irrelevent to the task of creating a stable international order." Moreover, Mr. Graebner notes in discussing what he calls "the strange phenomenon" of U.S.-Soviet relations, "despite the global fears that sustain the Cold War, the Soviet danger has remained so imprecise that no one has managed to define it. Nowhere ...have the Russians revealed any ambition or interest of sufficient importance to merit military aggression or a showdown with the United States." Mr. Graebner has been following the course of Soviet-American relations since the inception of the Cold War. He is the Randolph P. Compton Professor of History at the University of Virginia, and his books include Empire on the Pacific, Cold War Diplomacy, and The Age of Global Power. He is a former Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford University and has served as a visiting professor at the U.S. Military Academy, West Point.