Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Contributors
- Introduction: The Big Picture
- PART I SCIENCE AND PLANNING
- PART II GEOPOLITICS AND THE ENVIRONMENT
- 6 Environmental Impacts of Nuclear Testing in Remote Oceania, 1946–1996
- 7 A Curtain of Silence: Asia's Fauna in the Cold War
- 8 Against Protocol: Ecocide, Détente, and the Question of Chemical Warfare in Vietnam, 1969–1975
- 9 Environmental Crisis and Soft Politics: Détente and the Global Environment, 1968–1975
- PART III ENVIRONMENTALISMS
- PART IV EPILOGUE
- Index
8 - Against Protocol: Ecocide, Détente, and the Question of Chemical Warfare in Vietnam, 1969–1975
from PART II - GEOPOLITICS AND THE ENVIRONMENT
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Contributors
- Introduction: The Big Picture
- PART I SCIENCE AND PLANNING
- PART II GEOPOLITICS AND THE ENVIRONMENT
- 6 Environmental Impacts of Nuclear Testing in Remote Oceania, 1946–1996
- 7 A Curtain of Silence: Asia's Fauna in the Cold War
- 8 Against Protocol: Ecocide, Détente, and the Question of Chemical Warfare in Vietnam, 1969–1975
- 9 Environmental Crisis and Soft Politics: Détente and the Global Environment, 1968–1975
- PART III ENVIRONMENTALISMS
- PART IV EPILOGUE
- Index
Summary
The chemical weed killers are a bright new toy. They work in a spectacular way; they give a giddy sense of power over nature to those who wield them, and as for the long range and less obvious effects – these are easily brushed aside as the baseless imaginings of pessimists.
– Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, 1962In his first foreign policy report to Congress in 1970, President Richard Nixon declared that “the postwar period in international relations has ended.” He then proceeded to lay out his plan for American leadership in a period of global flux. The United States was to reexamine the assumptions that had guided U.S. Cold War policy since the Korean War. Rising tensions between the Soviet Union and China, along with the grinding war in Vietnam and Washington's waning influence within the Atlantic alliance, convinced Nixon and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger that the global struggle between the two blocs could not continue. The new administration believed that these geopolitical changes required a new era of cooperation and political dialogue with Cold War allies and enemies alike.
In the strategy Nixon called “a structure of peace,” a budding détente with the communist world could offer a way out of Vietnam by enhancing U.S. diplomatic and military flexibility and thereby diminishing the war against communism in Vietnam as the dominant symbol of American resolve in the Cold War.
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- Environmental Histories of the Cold War , pp. 227 - 256Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010