This year's Reith Lecturer is American adviser, diplomat, political scientist, and historian George Frost Kennan. He is best known as "the father" of the USA Containment Policy and is a leading authority on the Cold War. In his series 'Russia, the Atom, and the West', he considers the relationship between the two superpowers Russia and the USA.

In his fourth lecture entitled 'The Military Problem', Professor Kennan discusses the military aspect of the West's conflict with Soviet power. He considers how atomic weapons have changed the relationship between East and West, and confronts the problem of the 'mutually assured destruction' doctrine.