In the course of 1956 the Eisenhower administration was moving toward this position. But, when Adlai Stevenson called for a test ban in the 1956 campaign, discussions were halted within the government, and Stevenson’s proposal was unreservedly attacked by Nixon (“catastrophic nonsense”) and by Eisenhower himself (“a theatrical gesture”). Once the campaign was out of the way, however, events resumed their course. By 1958 Eisenhower agreed to join with the British and Russians in a conference in Geneva on the discontinuance of nuclear tests. The meeting opened in November 1958, as the United States and the Soviet Union were completing elaborate test sequences. Washington then announced that, unless Soviet Russia resumed, it would hold no tests for a year. Since then, neither nation, so far as the other knew, had conducted a test.
The object of the conference was to produce a comprehensive test ban treaty—that is, a control system outlawing all nuclear testing, whether in the earth’s atmosphere, in outer space, in the oceans or underground.* Tests in air or water were readily detectable through a variety of long-distance effects—sound, light, radio waves, radiation and radioactive debris. They were consequently self-policing in the sense that violation could not be concealed. But the only known way to detect underground tests was through the measurement of the seismic waves transmitted through the earth; and seismic measurement by itself was unreliable because earthquakes often gave off signals indistinguishable from those of man-made explosions. This meant that, with the existing state of seismic research, underground testing below a certain level could not be policed without the possibility of inspection at the suspected site.
During 1959 and early 1960, Soviet representatives in Geneva displayed a modest willingness to grapple with the issues. But, while the British earnestly sought agreement, the American government remained divided within itself on the desirability of a treaty. Antitest ban scientists, like Dr. Edward Teller, showed that it was theoretically possible to muffle the seismic signals by setting off bombs in great cavities deep under the earth and so to ‘cheat’ the control system.** Moreover, the responsibility for improving the techniques of seismic detection was entrusted to the Air Force, which, of course, was dominated by opponents of the test ban. The President was not sufficiently informed about the issues, nor the Secretary of State sufficiently concerned, to overcome this resistance. As a result, the American delegation in Geneva played a weak and inglorious role in the negotiations.
“For months on end,” Sir Michael Wright of the British delegation wrote sympathetically of his American colleagues, “instructions were doled out to them from Washington much as a Victorian workhouse master might dole out the gruel.’’* It took nine months for the Americans to accept the British idea of an annual quota of veto-free inspections; and the Eisenhower administration could never quite bring itself to abandon a provision, considered “clearly untenable” by the British, denying the Russians parity on the control commission. At the end of 1959, Eisenhower even terminated the formal moratorium and declared the United States free to resume testing—an action which, of course, left the Russians technically free to resume two years later.
Nevertheless an informal moratorium continued, and negotiations in Geneva through 1960 began to narrow the areas of disagreement. In time the conference succeeded in adopting a preamble, seventeen articles and two annexes of a draft treaty. As the discussions proceeded, the treaty was assuming a new dimension: it was becoming a first step not only toward wider arms control but toward a working arrangement by which the nuclear superpowers could express their common interest in preventing wars between themselves and the dispersion of nuclear weapons to new powers. Harold Macmillan regarded this as an historic opportunity to make progress toward a détente, and he may have been right. But the opportunity was lost. A year later Macmillan told Kennedy that it was all the fault of the American ‘big hole’ obsession and the consequent insistence on a wantonly large number of on-site inspections.
Then Kennedy came to office determined to narrow the differences. He had been sympathetic to the idea of a test ban for some years. During the 1956 campaign his colleague Senator Clinton Anderson had convinced him that, if tests were stopped, the relative weapons position of the United States would be satisfactory. “I think the United States should take the leadership in bringing these tests to an end,” Kennedy then said. “And I think we owe it . . . because we are the only country that engaged in atomic warfare in the last war” and also because it would be the best way to stop the spread of the bomb to other countries. David Ormsby Gore renewed Kennedy’s interest in the matter in 1959 and gave him a detailed memorandum on the British and Russian positions and the American nonposition. Now as President he sent Arthur Dean to Geneva with a new set of American proposals. These included a reduction in our requirements for annual inspections and for control posts, as well as parity of representation on the control commission between the two sides under a neutral chairman. Unfortunately, as American interest grew, Soviet interest declined. Dag Hammarskjöld’s role in the United Nations intervention in the Congo had convinced Khrushchev that there was no such thing as a neutral person and turned him against the previously acceptable idea of a neutral chairman. More important perhaps, Soviet generals and scientists were now demanding the resumption of tests in the hope of achieving more compact and efficient warheads. They also probably now feared that inspection within the Soviet Union would expose the myth of the ‘missile gap,’ which had become so politically beneficial to them, and reveal Soviet missile sites as low in number and high in vulnerability. In any case, by the end of 1960 Moscow had probably begun preparations for a possible test series in 1961.
The Russians at Geneva therefore responded to the Kennedy initiative by repudiating earlier agreements and demanding the troika. Under their own new proposals an unidentified earthshock within the Soviet Union could not be inspected at all in the first four years after the treaty came into force; the chiefs of both the control posts and the on-site inspection teams would be Soviet citizens; the teams themselves would be 50 per cent Soviet; and no staff could be hired, no control posts established, no instruments set up, no seismic data interpreted and no inspections undertaken without the consent of the Soviet representative on the troika. The Soviet proposals reduced inspection in effect to self-inspection and thus to absurdity.
Some time in 1961, probably after the new American Minuteman and Polaris programs were started and after the Vienna meeting, Khrushchev definitely decided to resume testing. Certainly by that summer he was overflowing with nuclear hints. On June 21 he said publicly, “Quite a few devices requiring practical testing have been developed in the Soviet Union.” In early July he remarked to the British Ambassador in his genial way that it would take only six nuclear bombs to destroy England, eight to destroy France. McCloy, visiting Moscow in July, tried to dispose of the standard Soviet charge that the United States was secretly preparing tests in Nevada. We would be happy, McCloy said, for a team of Soviet or neutral experts to visit American proving grounds and determine the situation for themselves, if the Soviet Union would permit comparable visitations. Such a reciprocal arrangement, McCloy said, would go far toward removing suspicion and mistrust. The Soviet officials impassively turned the idea down as impractical. Impractical it certainly was, though how impractical McCloy would not understand for another few weeks.
At the end of July, Khrushchev himself told McCloy that he was under strong pressure to test, especially from his scientists, and that the Berlin crisis had increased the pressure. He had been successful thus far, he said, in holding off the decision; but, the more the United States intensified its threats of war, the more arguments it gave those in the Soviet Union who wanted to resume. His scientists favored a one-hundred-megaton bomb as the most economical, and, though they already had the rockets to lift it, the bomb itself needed to be tested. He had cheered his scientists, he said, by telling them that the United States would resume testing and thus release them to try out their own bomb:
“Don’t piss in your pants—you’ll have your chance soon enough.”
2. TO TEST OR NOT TO TEST
There was mounting pressure on Kennedy too; Americans as well as Russians chafed under the moratorium. Some really believed that the Soviet Union was cheating in big holes in Siberia. Others, while doubting that the Russians wanted to go to the enormous expense and difficulty of a clandestine program, nevertheless favored American resumption in the interest of American weapons development. It was argued further that resumption would add verisimilitude to our stance of firmness during the Berlin crisis. The growing demand came not just from the Pentagon but from the Congress, especially from members of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, and to some degree also from the public.
On the other hand, resumption would create problems. It would legitimatize renewal by the Soviet Union and therefore accelerate the nuclear arms race; and it would permit the world to blame us for having started the cycle of destruction again. “There can be no question,” Galbraith wrote from New Delhi to the President in June 1961, “that a resumption of testing would cause us the gravest difficulties in Asia, Africa and elsewhere. Certainly no other foreseeable problem could cause us quite so much difficulty in India.” The informal test ban, Hubert Humphrey said to Kennedy a few weeks later, has been “a ray of hope to millions of worried people. . . . The renewal of testing might very well turn the political tides in the world in behalf of the Soviets.” Moreover, testing in the atmosphere would bring a new surge of fallout, and this weighed heavily with Kennedy. Jerome Wiesner, his Science Adviser, reminded him one drizzling day how rain washed radioactive debris from the clouds and brought it down to the earth. Kennedy, looking out the window, said, “You mean that stuff is in the rain out there?” Wiesner said, “Yes.” The President continued gazing out the window, deep sadness on his face, and did not say a word for several minutes. He hated the idea of reopening the race: “We test and then they test and we have to test again. And you build up until somebody uses them.” But as President he could not forget his responsibilities for the national security of the United States. The Soviet about-face at Geneva, he explained to a press conference in late June, “raises a serious question about how long we can safely continue on a voluntary basis a refusal to undertake tests in this country without any assurance that the Russians are not testing.” He accordingly asked Jerome Wiesner and the Science Advisory Committee to convene a special panel to take a fresh look at the problem.
If it turned out that our military security required testing, the President was concerned to make it clear to the world that we were resuming only because the Russians would not join us in a treaty. At his direction Murrow and I prepared a set of recommendations designed to leave no doubt about the American preference for test ban. Soviet negativism in Geneva had led to a decision to recess the test ban talks; but we now suggested that Arthur Dean be sent back, if possible with new proposals; that our ambassadors and perhaps even a special envoy (we had David Ormsby Gore in mind) confer with neutral leaders; and that the President himself make a major peace speech, probably at the United Nations. My particular assignment was to prepare a white paper on nuclear testing.
Bundy, Sorensen and I discussed these recommendations with the President on July so. He immediately asked for a continuation of the Geneva talks, directed Dean to go back and ordered a canvass of neutral states. But he was worried about the growing pressure for testing. It was hard to deal with the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, he said, “because those fellows think they invented the bomb themselves and look on everyone else as Johnny-come-latelies and amateurs.” He himself remained unconvinced that the military gains of resumption would outweigh the political losses; the whole idea of testing obviously left him cold.
Wiesner’s special panel, chaired by the physicist Wolfgang Panofsky, met with the President and the National Security Council early in August. They reported in effect that it was feasible for the Soviet Union to have conducted secret tests, that there was no evidence it had done so (or had not done so), and that there was no urgent technical need for immediate resumption by the United States. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, however, filed a paper questioning both the premises and the conclusions of the Panofsky report. My notes of the meeting describe the JCS paper as “assertive, ambiguous, semiliterate and generally unimpressive.” In summarizing it, General Lemnitzer said, “I would like to emphasize that we are not advocating atmospheric testing. Our memorandum is at fault if it suggests otherwise [as indeed it appeared to do]. And we have no objection to a reasonable delay in the resumption of testing. But we do see urgency in testing for small-yield weapons development.”
As the session continued, one saw the old disagreement in the scientific community, going back to the argument over the hydrogen bomb in 1949 and now institutionalized in the divergence between the two great nuclear laboratories, Livermore and Los Alamos. This was the scientific side of the strategic debate of the fifties between massive retaliation and flexible response. Livermore, in the spirit of Ernest Lawrence and Edward Teller, believed that American security rested on the unlimited development of nuclear striking power; in the jargon, this was ‘infinite containment.’ Los Alamos, in the spirit of Robert Oppenheimer, believed that nuclear power should be only one component in a varied national arsenal; this was ‘finite containment.’ The bitterness of the time, early in the Eisenhower administration, when the Livermore group had sought to destroy the Los Alamos position by branding Oppenheimer a security risk had to some degree abated. In the later Eisenhower years, after Lewis Strauss left the government and James Killian and George Kistiakowsky had served in the White House as successive presidential assistants for science and technology, the Los Alamos view had recovered favor. But, though only a minority of the scientific community followed Teller, the Livermore position retained strong allies in the Congress and the press; and the perseverance of its advocates, given emotional edge by their conviction of persecution, had won them access to a formidable sector of public opinion.
With Wiesner as Kennedy’s Science Adviser, the doctrines of finite containment and flexible response were clearly in the ascendancy. But, in forming the special panel, Wiesner had taken care to assemble a balanced group, including John Foster, the head of Livermore, as well as Norris Bradbury, the head of Los Alamos. Oddly enough, the Livermore scientists, who a year earlier had discoursed most eloquently on the ease and convenience for the Soviet Union of testing in secret cavities underground, were now most insistent in proclaiming the inadequacy of underground testing for the United States and demanding that we go into the atmosphere as soon as possible. Foster argued vigorously to the President that immediate resumption was necessary in order to develop the neutron bomb—that is, a fissionless bomb killing by neutron rays with very limited blast and radiation effect. Actually the scientists had not solved the problem of achieving a temperature sufficiently high to initiate a fusion reaction without the use of a fission bomb, and this problem, which did not require testing in the atmosphere, seemed likely to occupy them for years to come; nor, indeed, had there been systematic analysis of the specific military uses of such a bomb. The President remarked that he had understood that atmospheric testing was not indicated for the neutron bomb for at least another eighteen months. Wiesner added that the feasibility of the basic idea could be determined in a laboratory. It was the problem of ‘staging’ which required tests, he said, and going at this problem at once would be like building the body of a car before the motor had been invented.
The President then cross-examined the panel to find out what else we could hope to learn if we resumed testing. Foster and others outlined possibilities both in staging and in tactical nuclear weapons. “Isn’t this all a marginal advantage?” Kennedy said. “The argument that we should test for these reasons does not seem to me overwhelming.” He added, “If we test, we will presumably test underground alone. The Soviet Union will resume if we do, and they will test in the atmosphere. If you wer
e satisfied that the Soviet Union was not testing, would you favor our resumption underground?” Panofsky: “No.” Foster: “Yes.” Norris Bradbury, who had hitherto been silent: “No. There is no point in our resuming testing if we only test underground. The Soviet Union will test in the atmosphere and will overtake us.” John McCloy, who was in charge of disarmament negotiations, remarked that it would be unwise to resume testing with the UN General Assembly about to meet and that the discussion had satisfied him that the decision could be postponed to the first of the year without impairing national security. This appeared to sum up the sense of the meeting, and we adjourned, the President warning that any indications that we might renew testing would undercut our effort to get a treaty in Geneva.
3. THE SOVIET EXPLOSIONS
I came away with the feeling that, while there was no irresistible short-run case for resumption, everyone regarded a return at least to underground testing as inevitable in the long run if the Russians continued to reject the treaty. Kennedy wrote Macmillan early in August that he was still reviewing the evidence but was not very hopeful that it would be possible to wait much beyond the first of the year. If we did resume, the President continued, it would be underground, unless and until the Soviets resumed atmospheric tests. He also mentioned an idea which Ambassador Thompson had sent from Moscow—that we try once again for a limited ban, outlawing tests in the atmosphere and under water. These were the ones that caused fallout; they did not require inspection; and they were presumably the tests which would help the Russians the most.
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