ensuring that neither side could win. The chief goal of U.S. policy-makers became avoiding any move that might disturb the nu- clear "balance of terror."
Moreover, the "ideology of arms control" was soon extended to con- ventional warfare, Coats says. To win the land war in Indochina, for example, would have invited Soviet or Chinese intervention, it was thought; field commanders were ordered instead to kill as many of the enemy as possible in South Vietnam to bring Hanoi to...