Anyone who is interested in the critical intensifications in Cold War politics cannot avoid analyzing the cultures of decision-making behind these processes. As a top event, the Cuban Missile Crisis stands for how setting the wrong course on the part of the politicians involved could have led the world to the nuclear war. "Whoever shoots first is dead second," was how an American general summed up the game theory dilemma in these decades. But not only in the military, but also in many other political contexts, West and East confronted each other politically, economically and with regard to the respective social policy and shaped their own styles of decision-making in delimitation and in parallel with each other. The competition to the respective opponent, the belief in the feasibility of political visions and the control of society drove the theoretical as well as practical efforts. How politicians in East and West, in their heads, but also in the subordinate instances, designed and carried out the decision-making process, how to get advice from experts in science and business in these processes, and in which way political institutions received and processed information - These are the key questions in this volume, which the authors address using various case studies from the USA and USSR, FRG, GDR and Czechoslovakia.