In February 1962, President Ngo Dinh Diem introduced the strategic hamlet program of forcibly relocating peasants to strategic hamlets as a way of severing the population from the Viet Cong guerrillas. Though impetus for the strategic hamlet program came from Diem, Rostow supported the program as a way of breaking down the "traditional person", arguing that the strategic hamlets would be agents of modernization. He remained baffled as to why the strategic hamlets were so unpopular with South Vietnamese peasants. In 1962, Rostow drafted the statement of Basic National Security Policy (BNSP), a 284-page document meant to outline the foreign policy of the Kennedy administration. Reflecting his interest in the modernization theory, Rostow identified the Third World, especially "the arc from Iran to Korea" as the most important "battlefield" of the Cold War. Through to some extent based upon the theory of "containment" as argued by George F. Kennan in the 1940s, Rostow's BNSP argued for the United States to promote economic growth in the Third World and for the creation of "a wider community of free nations, embracing Latin America, Africa, Asia and the Middle East". Kennan who was serving as the US ambassador in Belgrade at the time reviewed the BNSP vigorously criticized the document. Kennan attacked Rostow's advocacy of a winnable nuclear war, writing he would "rather see my children dead" than live in a world devastated by nuclear war. Kennan also criticized Rostow's optimism about process in the Third World, writing that the Third World was hopelessly backward and might be a danger to the US if allowed to process. However, some of the statements in Kennan's critique, where he argued that a First World standard of living was "peculiar to peoples who have had their origins on or near the shores of the North Sea" or to nations descended from such peoples like the United States allowed Rostow to accuse Kennan with some justification of racism.