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11 - The Chinese bomb, American nuclear strategy in Asia and the escalation of the Vietnam War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 May 2010

Matthew Jones
Affiliation:
University of Nottingham
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Summary

For President Kennedy, the insurgencies in Vietnam and Laos, even though the latter was temporarily stifled by the neutralization agreement reached at Geneva in July 1962, were potent signs of the immediacy of the Communist threat facing the fragile states and societies of South East Asia, and tests of how the United States would meet the danger to regional stability they represented. Indeed, the ideological struggle of the Cold War showed every sign of intensifying across the decade to come, with Khrushchev's acceptance of peaceful coexistence, and recognition that a direct military clash between the United States and Soviet Union was a quick route to mutually assured destruction. In this context, the battle for ‘hearts and minds’ in the developing world held even greater significance, by moving areas notionally on the periphery to the centre of conflict. As far as the Kennedy administration was concerned, this had been the main import of Khrushchev's ‘wars of national liberation’ speech in January 1961, which signalled a transfer of the major battleground of the East–West competition to regions newly liberated from overt Western domination (though as we have already seen worries over Soviet inroads being made in the developing world had first emerged in Washington in the mid-1950s, and economic aid to key non-aligned states such as India had been enhanced as a result).

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After Hiroshima
The United States, Race and Nuclear Weapons in Asia, 1945–1965
, pp. 401 - 449
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

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