By the end of the 1960s, the United States and Soviet Union faced a choice: slow down their Cold War competition -- a process that would be called détente -- or continue an arms race that could end in all-out war.

In 1969 a new U.S. president, Richard Nixon, came to power. Nixon had new ideas about how to make the Cold War less dangerous. He was ready to accept the Soviet Union as America's nuclear equal.

Although Nixon wanted to revise Washington's Cold War strategy, his first priority was to get American troops out of the war in Vietnam. By 1969 the war had cost the lives of 30,000 U.S. troops -- with no end in sight. Nixon told his South Vietnamese allies he planned to withdraw U.S. troops and hand over the ground war to the Vietnamese -- in a process the Nixon administration called "Vietnamization." In 1969, the first U.S. troops were pulled out of Vietnam.
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