Word: sovietizing
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...earlier, but it failed to do so. It was the Johnson Administration that had started Sentinel, and Vice President Hubert Humphrey chose not to campaign against it then (he is now a vocal opponent). For his part, Nixon was warning against a possible "security gap" vis-à-vis the Soviet Union and thus encouraging the ABM's backers. A new Administration and a new Congress offered...
Even so, McNamara, along with many prominent scientists both in and out of the Government, remained highly skeptical of the ABM's efficacy against a large-scale Soviet attack. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, and particularly the Army ? which has jurisdiction over land-based ABMs ? continued to press for its installation on the grounds that some protection was better than none. Army General Earle Wheeler, J.C.S. chairman, has argued that a full-fledged ABM might save between 50 million and 80 million American lives...
...years the Peking regime, which is vitriolic and unpredictable in its self-imposed isolation, will theoretically be able to hit the U.S. with nuclear missiles. Although the U.S. could destroy China as a modern society even more easily than it could the Soviet Union, a touch of yellow-menace fever has set in. "The Chinese are different," argues one general. "They have no regard for human life. Imagine if the Red Guards had got their hands on a couple of ICBMs!" At the same time, the Russians resisted Lyndon Johnson's initial attempts to open negotiations aimed at checking...
Another set of arguments goes beyond technology into strategy and diplomacy. Throughout the postwar period, the U.S. has based its main defense on "assured destruction"?the ability to inflict catastrophic damage on any opponent (until now, the Soviet Union) even if the adversary delivered the first nuclear blow. This second-strike capability has induced the U.S. to maintain an immense nuclear arsenal, far larger and more diverse than that of the Russians...
...McNamara, was based at least as much on domestic political considerations as on international factors. Sentinel, wags said at the time, was really a defense against American Republicans, not Chinese Communists. Johnson might well have halted the Sentinel project last summer if he could have arranged, as the Soviets wished, to begin arms-control talks. He had on his desk an unsigned message confirming his willingness to negotiate on the night that Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin brought him word of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. That was the end of that...