ABSTRACT
The US and China had no diplomatic relations and many in the policy community, including the State Department, stuck with the nonsensical notion that the nationalist government on Taiwan would someday retake the mainland. Following the Cuban Missile Crisis and the removal of the Soviet missiles, the US saw little chance of changing Cuba’s communist government and US foreign policy in Latin America was focused on stopping the spread of communism to other nations in the Western Hemisphere. Kissinger had been deeply concerned with the issues related to nuclear weapons since his days at Harvard and publication of Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy in 1957. His interest continued with a series of articles in Foreign Affairs. A decade later he was in the White House and charged with developing actual policies that would control the proliferation of these weapons and bring some stability to a full-blown arms race the Nixon administration had inherited.
