Drawing upon newly-released official and private papers, this book
provides an intimate account of Anglo-American debates over one of the
most grave and politically sensitive foreign-policy issues of the early
1960s. It examines the roles played by John F. Kennedy and Harold
Macmillan in the test-ban negotiations between 1961 and 1963. It also
describes the way in which contrasting domestic political imperatives
and conceptions of how the Cold War could best be won, created tensions
between the two allies. Nevertheless, they retained a broad unity of
perspective and purpose, eventually producing the imaginative diplomacy
that resulted in the signing of the Limited Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty in
August 1963.