ABSTRACT
The Kennedy administration oversaw a qualitative change in the nature of the Cold War and a turning point in containment policy. The development of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) shifted the emphasis from outright victory to that of managing an enduring balance between East and West. The new ‘logic’ of the Cold War was for a peaceful resolution and this, for US policy-makers, signalled the end of the drive for victory through military preponderance. MAD compromised the threat of massive retaliatory power and, as the Cuban missile crisis demonstrated in 1962, generated unacceptable levels of brinkmanship. Instead, the onus fell upon collaboration with the Kremlin to assure system stability. Core US-Soviet relations had to be kept in mutually accepted balance at the same time that their intense competition was fought out on the Cold War periphery, such as in Vietnam.
