From its beginnings in the late 1940's America's Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union has rested on images of danger—what Walter Lippmann once described as "pictures in our heads." Animated generally by feelings of hostility, U.S. officials have at times exaggerated the perils to this country's security in events which implicated the Kremlin. It was this tendency in official perception that permitted the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, a region of no historic American concern, to inaugurate a conflict over beliefs and intentions so intense that it soon threatened the whole international order with catastrophe. Marshall Shulman, director of Columbia University's W. Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union, has likened the post-Afghan international climate to that produced by the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962. Former Ambassador to Russia Malcolm Toon has called relations with the Soviets worse than at any time since World War II. Reports from Moscow reveal that the Russians view the present state of Soviet-American relations with equal anxiety. Perhaps the grimmest assessment comes from Soviet expert George F. Kennan. Writing in the Oct.3, 1983, issue of The New Yorker, Kennan observed that public discussion of Russian-American relations had created the impression that a military showdown remains the only means of settling differences worth considering. "Can anyone mistake, or doubt," he asked, "the ominous meaning of such a state of affairs? The phenomena just described ...are the familiar characteristics, the unfailing characteristics, of a march toward war—that, and nothing else."