A week later the President went to New York. “Let us here resolve,” he began, “that Dag Hammarskjöld did not live, or die, in vain.” He called on the General Assembly to reject the troika. To install a triumvirate, he said, would be to “entrench the Cold War in the headquarters of peace.” It would paralyze the United Nations; and in the nuclear age the world needed the United Nations more than ever before. For “a nuclear disaster, spread by wind and water and fear, could well engulf the great and the small, the rich and the poor, the committed and the uncommitted alike. Mankind must put an end to war—or war will put an end to mankind. . . . Let us call a truce to terror.”
The goal of disarmament, he continued, “is no longer a dream—it is a practical matter of life or death. The risks inherent in disarmament pale in comparison to the risks inherent in an unlimited arms race.” He set forth the American plan and asked that negotiations continue “without interruption until an entire program for general and complete disarmament has not only been agreed but has been actually achieved.” The logical place to begin, he said, was a test ban treaty. He called further for contributions to a United Nations peace-keeping force, the improvement of UN machinery for the peaceful settlement of disputes, the extension of world law to outer space and the support of the UN Decade of Development.
In his conclusion, he reminded the Assembly of its historic opportunity. “We in this hall shall be remembered either as part of the generation that turned this planet into a flaming funeral pyre or the generation that met its vow ‘to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.’ . . . The decision is ours. Never have the nations of the world had so much to lose, or so much to gain. Together we shall save our planet, or together we shall perish in its flames. Save it we can—and save it we must—and then we shall earn the eternal thanks of mankind and, as peacemakers, the eternal blessings of God.”
The President spoke with particular intensity, and the delegates, many seeing him for the first time in person, were moved by his handsomeness, spirit and commitment. They responded with deep and sustained applause. Kennedy himself, as he looked out at the representatives of the world community, understood more vividly than ever before the power and potentiality of the United Nations. He said later that he was surprised by the majesty of the occasion and the impact of his remarks. His speech, moving beyond the clamors of the day, transcending the crises of Berlin and Southeast Asia, abolishing the memories of the Bay of Pigs, established him as a leader of humanity’s party of hope.
The momentum of his words, sustained by Stevenson’s effective leadership in New York, continued throughout the session. The troika was defeated, and U Thant of Burma became the new Secretary-General with unaltered authority. The application of Communist China for membership was turned back by a decisive vote, and the Assembly resolved that any proposal to make a change in the representation of China was an “important question” requiring a two-thirds majority. Outer Mongolia was admitted, Nationalist China abstaining. The groundwork was laid for new negotiations on disarmament. The Assembly called for a treaty to ban nuclear tests under effective international measures of verification and control and asked the Soviet Union to refrain from exploding its 50-megaton bomb. And, to deal with the financial problems caused by the UN operation in the Congo, the Assembly authorized a $200 million bond issue to be taken up by the member nations.
3. INTERLUDE IN BERMUDA
The urgencies of security, however, remained at war with the dreams of disarmament. Kennedy had felt that the Soviet atmospheric tests left him no choice but to authorize underground testing of our own. Now, as one explosion in the skies above Siberia followed another through the autumn, it became increasingly difficult to hold the line at underground tests. The Joint Chiefs of Staff in particular wanted to resume American tests in the atmosphere as speedily as possible. Early in October they forwarded a paper calling for atmospheric testing in November.
The JCS paper was below their usual level in logic and literacy. When we met to consider it at the State Department, Secretary McNamara, who had obviously not examined it with care before the meeting, quickly perceived its imperfections and abandoned it as a basis for argument. One defense official made an impassioned case for the resumption of atmospheric testing in order to prevent the world from believing that the Communists were gaining so commanding a lead that there was no point in resisting them further. McGeorge Bundy replied that he was against tests for the sake of psychological warfare and insisted on the principle that we never test in the atmosphere unless required by military necessity to do so. Then McNamara made clear that a serious case for resumption existed in terms of military security, and the meeting ended with a recommendation that the United States take an early occasion to reserve its freedom to test above ground.
On the morning of October 30 a call from the White House awakened me to report the largest detonation so far—probably that of Khrushchev’s threatened 50-megaton bomb. This proved to be the case, though Khrushchev archly said the next day that his scientists had miscalculated: “Instead of fifty megatons it proved to be more, but we will not punish them for that.” Our own scientists told us that, if the Soviet super-bomb had had a uranium casing, the explosion would have had the force of one hundred megatons. This final atrocity made it impossible to put off our own preparations for atmospheric testing any longer. Kennedy now directed Ted Sorensen to draft a statement saying that, while we would test in the atmosphere only if required to do so by overriding arguments of national security, contingency preparations should begin at once. Three days after the great Soviet explosion, the paper was laid before the National Security Council.
Shortly after the meeting started, Harry S. Truman, who had dined at the White House the night before, came into the room. Looking white and frail, he made a jocose remark across the table to the Vice-President and then listened attentively to the discussion. The meeting had begun with a preliminary analysis of the Soviet tests. The new Russian series, according to the CIA report, followed logically from its 1958 series; this suggested that, despite the ‘big hole’ thesis, there had been no cheating in the interim. Then McNamara, after an impressive and dispassionate review of our weapons situation, asked that development and effects tests in the atmosphere be authorized at the earliest possible moment. The President inquired about the timing of the projected series and said that, if we had to have the tests, they should be run off rapidly; “we want to do as little as possible to prolong the agony.” On this note the meeting adjourned.
At the end of the day the President announced publicly that preparations were under way for atmospheric tests “in case it becomes necessary to conduct them.” They would not be undertaken, Kennedy emphasized, “for so-called psychological or political reasons.” But if “the orderly and essential scientific development of new weapons has reached a point where effective progress is not possible without such tests,” then they would be undertaken “within limits that restrict the fallout from such tests to an absolute minimum.”
The machinery of government was thus set for resumption. But preparation was one thing, actual testing another. The President still hoped to avoid further corruption of the atmosphere and further stimulus to the nuclear race. Jerome Wiesner maintained in December that it remained basically a political question: “While these tests would certainly contribute to our military strength, they are not critical or even very important to our over-all military posture.” Long hours of debate in the National Security Council and in the privacy of the President’s office, involving scientists from Defense, AEC and various bomb laboratories, led the President to the conclusion that Wiesner was essentially right. Yet one began to notice an unconscious hardening through the government, as if a final decision had been made. Those who wanted to delay resumption in the interest of political considerations and ‘world opinion’ were at the usual tactical disadvantage in debating with the ‘realists.’
One day a meeting at the State Department considered the
public position we should take on nuclear matters. The discussion assumed that we were about to go into the atmosphere ourselves and must readjust our political warfare accordingly—that we should stop talking, for example, about the menace of fallout. I feebly protested that we should also consider what our information policy should be if we decided not to go into the atmosphere, or else we would be foreclosing the presidential decision. When I later described the meeting to Kennedy, he said, “Personally I hate the idea of resuming atmospheric tests. But it’s going to be damned hard to stave off the pressure, especially when the news gets out that the big Soviet explosion was relatively clean. This will show that they have something we don’t have, and we will be under intense pressure to test in the atmosphere ourselves. But I have made no final decision, and I have told everybody that I have made no decision.”
The critical question, as the matter crystallized in the President’s mind, became not the Soviet round of 1961 but the rounds which might follow in 1962 or 1963. It was evident that the current series would not by itself enable Khrushchev to reverse the balance of nuclear power. But if the Russians, on the basis of the knowledge so acquired, were to conduct a new series while the United States refrained from atmospheric testing, the next one might well put them in the lead. We could, in other words, “eat” one Soviet round but not two; and without the treaty we had no assurance that, having completed one sequence, Soviet scientists and generals would not demand another and another. However much Kennedy loathed the idea of atmospheric tests, any President who stood aside and allowed the enemy to achieve nuclear superiority would plainly have taken an unacceptable risk in the face of his constitutional obligations.
This, I believe, was the President’s state of mind when, after several weeks of racking contemplation, he discussed the problem with Harold Macmillan in Bermuda on December 21. We needed British support in the decision to go ahead. The British colony of Christmas Island in the central Pacific offered an ideal site for testing in the atmosphere; and, in any case, it would be politically difficult for the United States to resume without British concurrence. But the nightmare of nuclear holocaust stirred more than ever underneath Macmillan’s Edwardian flippancies, and he opened the talks by evoking the awful prospects of an indefinite nuclear race.
If all those talented scientists were to continue going about their business, the Prime Minister said, the only result would be more and deadlier bombs. Was this the goal to which the next generation of man should dedicate itself? If these horrible weapons were not fired off, it would be a hopeless economic waste; if they were, it would be the end of civilization. And, while the United States and the Soviet Union were having this sophisticated competition, many other nations in a few years would begin to acquire their own simpler bombs. Berlin, Macmillan said, seemed to him small beer compared to the destruction of humanity. The world could not continue down this path. You and I, he said to Kennedy with emotion, could not sit in an ordinary little room four days before Christmas and talk about these terrible things without doing something about it. Before we went into the atmosphere ourselves, should we not make one more effort to break the cycle? The arms race was a “rogue elephant” against which we all must act.
Perhaps you and I, he told Kennedy, should meet at the summit with Khrushchev and really push for disarmament. We might fail, but we would have lost only a few months. Macmillan added that, after reading Russian novels and everything else he could find about Russia, he felt that they might come around. Moreover, the nuclear effort was costing the Soviet Union ferociously. And the Soviet position itself was changing. The Russians were halfway between Europe and Asia and watching the rise of China with foreboding. The west thought of them as enormously different, but their economic and social structure was not that alien. After all, mines and railroads were nationalized through most of Western Europe, and one saw already in Russia a spread of unequal privileges through society; the children of the ruling class were going to elite schools, as they did in Britain. Without yielding, could we not provide time to allow the forces of humanity to exert their influence?
Macmillan was eloquent, and Kennedy was moved. But he had to face realities. The problem, he pointed out, was what would happen in 1964 if the Russians continued to test and the west didn’t. We could not afford to be taken twice. Even though he was himself a “great anti-tester,” he saw no alternative but to prepare for resumption and, if there was no progress with regard either to Berlin or disarmament, to resume.
The two delegations were staying together in Government House, sharing meals, taking walks and discussing many things not listed on the agenda; it all had, as the participants recalled it, the atmosphere of a country weekend. The Kennedy-Macmillan relationship, David Ormsby Gore later said, “blossomed very considerably during the course of that meeting, and after that it was almost like a family discussion when we all met.” As they chatted over drinks before luncheon the next day Macmillan teased the scientists present about the mischief they had made. One replied with dignity that they were only the innocent victims of the folly of politicians. Someone asked Sir William Penney, the Australian physicist who was serving as Macmillan’s scientific adviser, how many bombs it would take to destroy his country. Penney replied in his broad accent, “If you are talking about Australia, it would take twelve. If you are talking about Britain, it would take five or six, but, to be on the safe side, let us say seven or eight and”—without a change in tone—“I’ll have another gin and tonic if you would be so kind.” This singular statement, uttered in one rush of breath, summed up for the Prime Minister and the President the absurdity of mankind setting about to destroy itself; and the refrain—“I’ll have another gin and tonic if you would be so kind”—somewhat lightened their subsequent discussions of the matter.
When the talks resumed, the Prime Minister began by asking that the final decision be postponed to permit one last try at disarmament. Kennedy replied that a new effort would only enable the Russians to stall things for many more months. Our case would be no better a year from now, and in the meantime the Russians could get ready for a new series of tests. He concluded later in the day by asking whether Macmillan would agree to atmospheric tests on Christmas Island if the situation did not change. Macmillan responded that this was a decision for the cabinet; but Britain and America were partners, we were in this together; he only wished that the announcement would seem less a threat than a hope.
4. MACMILLAN’S LAST TRY
The decision was now almost, but not quite, firm. Some of us in Washington still thought after Bermuda that one more effort should be made to avert what Wiesner called the “slide into chaos.” After consulting with Wiesner and with John McNaughton, a former Harvard Law School professor who was now a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, I sent a memorandum to the President proposing a two-stage plan: we should announce, first, that in order to keep the arms race from breaking out of control the United States had decided not to resume atmospheric testing; but, second, that we planned to complete all necessary stand-by preparations and, if the Soviet Union exploded one more device in the atmosphere, we would instantly begin a massive series of militarily significant tests.
The weakness in this proposal lay in the assumption that it would be possible to maintain the morale of the laboratories and the pace of technical advance even though the weapons scientists had no assurance they could try out their ideas. Though I still am unconvinced that this assumption was wrong, both the Atomic Energy Commission and the Department of Defense argued that the best people would work on what could be done rather than on what could not be done, and that resumption was necessary to avert a decay in the laboratories. Accordingly I rephrased the proposal in a few days to suggest that we announce a decision to resume but offer to cancel our atmospheric tests if the Soviet Union would sign the Geneva treaty. This, it seemed to me, would either get us the treaty or put the Russians in the position of triggering the American test series.
A week a
fter New Year’s, Macmillan returned to the battle. In a deeply personal letter to Kennedy, the Prime Minister argued again that resumption would probably lead the Russians to carry out their next series; we would be forced to do the same; the contest would intensify; and, as the burden of the race mounted, one side or the other, when it thought it had attained superiority, might be tempted to put the issue to the test. As the test programs of the great powers continued, he went on, there would be no hope of preventing the spread of nuclear weapons to non-nuclear states. If this capacity for destruction ended up in the hands of dictators, reactionaries, revolutionaries, madmen around the world, then sooner or later, possibly by the end of this century, either by error or folly or insanity, the great crime would be committed. It would seem to any ordinary person, Macmillan continued, that humanity was setting out on a path at once so fantastic and so retrograde, so sophisticated and so barbarous, as to be almost incredible. He himself noted the strange irony that he should have spent Christmas Day wondering how to commend to his cabinet colleagues the dedication of Christmas Island for this purpose.
It might be, he concluded, that we were condemned, like the heroes of the old Greek tragedies, to an ineluctable fate from which there was no escape; and that like those doomed figures we must endure it, with only the consolation of the admonitory commentaries of the chorus, the forerunners of the columnists of to-day. But in his view the situation demanded a supreme effort to break the deadlock. Amplifying the thoughts he had advanced in Bermuda, he proposed that the three leaders—Kennedy, Khrushchev and himself—convert the impending eighteen-power disarmament meeting, scheduled for Geneva in March, into a final try for general disarmament, a test ban treaty and an agreement not to transfer nuclear weapons or information to non-nuclear powers. It was, of course, he said, easy to do nothing. But, on the whole, it was not the things one did in one’s life that one regretted but rather the opportunities missed.
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