Kennedy

Kennedy Kennedy came to office with flair. He offered a new vision and a new frontier for America. He also inherited a secret war in Cuba, a Cold War with the Soviet Union and China, and an emerging crisis in Southeast Asia. He preferred a flexible security strategy over Eisenhower's heavy-handed nuclear threats. Flexible Response was no highly explicit theory nor written in a single authoritative source. Flexible Response was realistic in that nuclear weapons couldn't be used. It tried to provide credible means to match non-nuclear escalation. The word "flexible" stressed the value of having "multiple options" available should a crises arise. Having multiple options during a crisis appeared to be better than reference to a few preset war scenarios. Having multiple options was thought to enhance the credibility of the U.S. deterrent (reassuring allies while deterring the opponent). At the same time, however, flexibility made it also improbable that the U.S. would want or need nuclear attack. In effect Flexible Response called for the continued presence (in Europe) of sizable conventional forces. Conventional forces were to serve two functions, a deterrent function and the function nuclear, weapons, flexible, war, response, options, kennedy, conventional, wanted, multiple, having, wars, should, non-nuclear, new, limited, increase, function, forces, flexibility, escalation, either, eisenhower, deterrent, crisis, continued, beyond, available, allies, written, word, while, vision, value, union, two