The Macmillan letter contained certain ambiguities. It did not make clear, for example, whether the use of Christmas Island was conditioned on our agreement to a disarmament conference at the summit, or whether the resumption of American atmospheric testing was conditioned on the conference’s failure. It did make clear, however—and in moving and powerful language—both the extent of Macmillan’s anxiety and the magnitude of the decision which confronted us. As Adlai Stevenson promptly wrote the President, “It would be unfortunate and could be tragic if we were to give the Prime Minister a dusty answer.”
But the State Department was considerably less moved. On January 12 Bundy and I went over to Rusk’s office to examine State’s draft reply. The answer could hardly have been dustier. It was an evasive, bureaucratic screed, falling so far below Macmillan in style and tone as to be unresponsive. One high State Department officer said contemptuously about the Macmillan letter, “Why are we taking so much trouble over this hysterical document?” and “We can’t let Macmillan practice this emotional blackmail on us.”
Rusk, however, agreed that the answer should not be perfunctory. Any reply, he said, must contain three elements: an affirmation that our concern equaled Macmillan’s; a rejection of any link between the use of Christmas Island and a new disarmament initiative; and an initiative we might offer ourselves as a substitute for what seemed to us the questionable notion of a grandiose disarmament conference. Bundy then prepared an excellent reply along these lines, concluding: “We are ready to examine with you the possibilities for new efforts toward disarmament on the most urgent basis.”
In the meantime, a debate arising from the President’s State of the Union message had redirected attention to the idea of a test ban confined to the atmosphere. At Kennedy’s instruction, the early drafts promised one last try for such a ban before we resumed testing above ground ourselves. But this thought had aroused such distress in both State and Defense that the President eventually reduced it to a generality about breaking the log jam on disarmament and nuclear tests.
Still the idea persisted. In Defense John McNaughton now argued that the offer of a treaty banning tests in the atmosphere alone would probably work to our advantage, whether accepted or refused by the Soviet Union, unless the Russians accepted the ban for two or three years and then found a pretext to break it. If they took advantage of the ban to prepare secretly for new tests, we might lose nearly a year in the technology race. To guard against this, McNaughton therefore proposed a number of political and legal devices to help make the ban stick. In the White House Carl Kaysen after a careful analysis concluded that an atmospheric ban would not pose unacceptable military risks and might well lead to new and striking gains in arms control.
This debate was not simply a disagreement between virtuous antitesters and wicked big-bomb men. A wholly intelligent case for atmospheric resumption existed, and Robert Komer of the White House made it in comments on the Kaysen-Schlesinger position. The Russians, Komer suggested, were a few years behind us in the intellectual comprehension of the meaning of nuclear plenty; there was doubtless a cultural lag to be overcome before they would understand that arms limitation would be safer and more advantageous to both sides than continued rivalry. If this were so, then they would not appreciate the value of stable deterrence until they grasped the futility of the arms race. So long as our policy encouraged Moscow to think it might possibly overtake us in nuclear power, the Russians would have less incentive to consider other ways of insuring their security. “It is ghastly to think that we may have to escalate the arms race further (at least technologically) before we can start the curve downward. But what realistic alternative is there?” There might be no other way to drive home to Moscow the strategic realities of the nuclear age. Moreover, incessant American concern about nuclear weapons might signal to the Russians a reluctance to use them and thereby, in a time of crisis over Berlin and southeast Asia, compromise our nuclear deterrent before we had fully developed adequate defenses of other sorts.
5. THE RESUMPTION OF ATMOSPHERIC TESTING
I had to leave Washington in mid-January for the meeting of the Organization of American States at Punta del Este and then for various missions in Japan, India and Europe; so I missed the concluding phase in the argument. In the course of February Kennedy received an analysis of the Soviet tests by a panel of leading scientists, including so prominent an advocate of the ban as Hans Bethe. Their report disclosed a highly advanced nuclear technology, with new designs and techniques, including some unknown to the west—or at least unexplainable on the basis of the information available—as well as substantial gains in weaponry. The technical basis had evidently been laid for a new series which might enable the Soviet Union to develop bombs whose yield per weight of explosive would be somewhat higher than ours. While this would not give any substantial military advantage to the Soviet Union, the knowledge that the Russians had better weapons would have given them a political and diplomatic advantage the President was disinclined to accept. With a heavy heart, he decided that we would have to resume atmospheric testing. As for the tests themselves, he made it clear he wanted low-yield detonations concentrated in short periods. In the next months, he spent a good deal of time reviewing and revising the proposals for the American atmospheric series.
The next question was when the world should be notified. Kennedy at first thought, and Macmillan concurred, that announcement should be delayed until after the eighteen-nation Disarmament Committee had met in Geneva; this would mean sometime in April. At the same time, the President wanted to rescue Macmillan’s suggestion for a new disarmament initiative. Opposition had arisen to the proposal that we make one more offer of an atmospheric test ban before resuming our own tests, partly because it would seem a retreat from our original Geneva position and partly because it provided no insurance against secret preparations and thus against another surprise Soviet series. The President therefore decided to declare his readiness to trade off our atmospheric series, not for a partial, but for a comprehensive test ban treaty.
Late in February I lunched in London with Hugh Gaitskell, who had just come back from a visit to Washington filled with enthusiasm for Kennedy. The President had provided him with a full technical briefing on the testing matter—something which the British government had curiously never given him—and Gaitskell agreed that the United States had no choice but to go ahead. Kennedy later told me that Gaitskell’s argument for relating resumption to the Geneva disarmament talks had strengthened his determination to try once more for the Geneva treaty, but that it had also convinced him, contrary to Gaitskell’s recommendation, that he should not allow the Disarmament Committee to begin its work under the illusion that the United States was not yet settled in its own mind about the need for testing.
On February 27 Kennedy therefore informed Macmillan that he planned a television talk on the subject to the nation on March 1. The Prime Minister had still hoped somehow to stave off American resumption, and Kennedy’s message came as a shock. His leading scientific adviser, coming to see me that day in London, said that Macmillan was “a sad and embittered man,” and quoted him to the effect that the American decision would “shatter the hopes of millions of people across the earth.” The Prime Minister asked the President again for postponement, but Kennedy could not see his way to delay the announcement for more than another twenty-four hours.
The President himself was hardly in a gay mood about his decision. He told me later that he had phoned Truman and Eisenhower. Truman, he said, was sympathetic and seemed to understand how hard the judgment had been. Eisenhower, cold and grumpy, said, “Well, I thought you should have done this a long time ago.”
On March 2, Kennedy made his speech. He described the precautions taken to restrict fallout, adding: “I still exceedingly regret the necessity of balancing these hazards against the hazards to hundreds of millions of lives which would be created by a relative decline in our nuclear strength.” The United States, he sai
d, would come to Geneva with a series of concrete plans for a major “breakthrough to peace.” In particular, it would once again offer a comprehensive test ban treaty. If the Soviet Union were now ready to “accept such a treaty, to sign it before the latter part of April, and apply it immediately—if all testing can thus be actually halted—then . . . there would be no need for our tests,” That action, he added, would be “a monumental step toward peace—and both Prime Minister Macmillan and I would think it fitting to meet Chairman Khrushchev at Geneva to sign the final treaty.”
Khrushchev quickly declined the offer. On April 25, as dawn broke over Christmas Island, the United States began a new round of tests in the atmosphere.
6. DISARMAMENT AND THE DEFENSE BUDGET
The rogue elephant was loose again, and neither Kennedy nor Macmillan was content to let him rampage unchecked. In March Dean Rusk went to Geneva with new test ban proposals. But the Russians now insisted that the test ban could not be considered apart from comprehensive disarmament, thereby repudiating their own position of 1958–61 (Khrushchev had said then, “Is there any surer way of sabotaging the suspension of nuclear tests than by such conditions?”) and adopting the attitude for which they had so self-righteously denounced the Americans in 1956–58.
As for general and complete disarmament, when Arthur Dean presented the updated American plan in Geneva in April, the Russians lost no time in rejecting it because of its insistence on inspection and a dozen other real or pseudo-reasons. For their part, they put forward a plan demanding abolition in the first stage of all means of delivering nuclear weapons, as well as of all foreign bases. This would mean the immediate unbalancing of the existing equilibrium in favor of conventional force and could hardly be acceptable to the west. In addition, the Russians continued to oppose any serious verification of anything except weapons destroyed until the end of the third stage. The talks, as they dragged on through the summer of 1962, seemed more and more a propaganda minuet, repetitive, pointless and sterile.
Yet Kennedy persisted in the struggle for disarmament. I do not think he quite saw the arms race in the image of Macmillan’s rogue elephant; for the race was not in fact so insensate as that. Staggering as defense expenditures were, they remained a relatively small proportion of the total national output in both the United States and the Soviet Union; and of money spent on defense, only a fraction—in the United States, perhaps one-fifth—went to nuclear striking power. Nor was the ‘overkill’ idea—the notion that each side was compulsively engaged in piling up more and more nuclear bombs—justified, at least in its more nightmarish form. Actually each side (outside the air forces) was coming to realize that it had more than enough; and a good deal of the new expenditure went, not to increase stockpiles, but for replacement, modernization of weapons systems, research into new weapons and the maintenance of a higher state of alert. Nor was Lord Snow’s sensational fantasy of 1960—“Within, at the most, ten years, some of these bombs are going off”—necessarily acquiring more validity each passing minute; for the vast effort, in the United States at least, to improve fail-safe controls was reducing the probability of the Dr. Strangelove effect.
In short, if there was an arms race, neither side was galloping as fast or as frantically as it could. But this provided only comparative consolation. Even if it was all not so insane as Lord Russell liked to think, it was still a hell of a way to run a world. For his part, Kennedy was sure that we had enough for nearly any conceivable contingency; he regarded the balance of terror, however ingeniously safeguarded, as deeply fragile; and he used to say that he would consider it “the ultimate failure” if he ever had to order the use of a single nuclear weapon. Moreover he was increasingly concerned about the diversion to armaments of resources which could be better put to other uses. “I don’t know why it is,” he said at the fiftieth anniversary dinner of the Department of Labor in March 1963, “that expenditures which deal with the enforcement of the minimum wage, that deal with the problem of school dropouts, of retraining of workers, of unskilled labor, all the problems that are so much with us in the sixties, why they are always regarded as the waste in the budget, and expenditures for defense are always regarded as the untouchable item in the budget.” All these considerations made him even more determined to lead the world toward arms reduction.
The experience of the spring and summer of 1961, moreover, had convinced him that running faster in the race would only provoke his opponent to run faster too and thereby increase the strain without necessarily altering the gap. He had seen no alternative to higher defense spending in order to liberate American strategy from its predominant reliance on nuclear weapons; but the rise in Washington’s defense budget had now produced a comparable rise in Moscow’s. Increases and decreases in the two capitals had paralleled each other before, and the administration, as time went on, began to draw a significant conclusion: that the defense budget itself might be used as an instrument of arms limitation. For it was evident that the budget was the most effective means of signaling to the Soviet Union our intentions, whether defensive or first-strike, as well as the kinds of weapons and strategies which might be mutually advantageous and the kinds of limitation that might be mutually possible.* These considerations were much in the minds of Kaysen and Wiesner when the first full Kennedy defense budget came under consideration within the government in the late summer and fall of 1961.
There remained for a moment the question of the ‘missile gap.’ Though disowned by McNamara in February, the gap had persisted as a center of intra-service argument, with the Air Force continuing to claim that the Russians had 600 to 800 ballistic missiles, while the CIA estimated 450 and the Navy 200. But on Thanksgiving weekend, when the President convened his defense experts for a meeting at Hyannis Port, the weight of evidence was plainly against the Air Force, and the issue finally withered away. The budget nevertheless contemplated a sizable increase in missiles; and the White House staff, while favoring a larger Minuteman force than the original Eisenhower proposal, wondered whether the new budget was not providing for more missiles than national security required. But the President, though intimating a certain sympathy with this view, was not prepared to overrule McNamara’s recommendation. As for the Secretary, he did not believe that doubling or even tripling our striking power would enable us to destroy the hardened missile sites or missile-launching submarines of our adversary. But he was already engaged in a bitter fight with the Air Force over his effort to disengage from the B-70, a costly, high-altitude manned bomber rendered obsolescent by the improvement in Soviet ground-to-air missiles. After cutting down the original Air Force missile demands considerably, he perhaps felt that he could not do more without risking public conflict with the Joint Chiefs and the vociferous B-70 lobby in Congress. As a result, the President went along with the policy of multiplying Polaris and Minuteman missiles.
Within the magnitudes of the budget the President, of course, retained a series of choices about weapons systems. He had a profound aversion to weapons which could be used effectively only in a first strike and which for that reason might invite a pre-emptive strike from the other side—like the Jupiters which had been sitting for some years on soft bases in Turkey and Italy. As Bundy remarked later, “he always preferred the system which could survive an attack against the system which might provoke one.” The budget communicated this preference to the Soviet Union; and McNamara drove the point home in statements and speeches, especially in an address at Ann Arbor, Michigan, in June 1962. Here he argued forcefully for “a strategy designed to preserve the fabric of our societies if war should occur.” By this he meant that the targets of nuclear war should be military forces and installations, not civilian populations. This ‘counterforce’ strategy required us to have the capacity to hold in reserve, even after a massive surprise attack, sufficient striking power to destroy the enemy society if driven to it; this would give an opponent “the strongest imaginable incentive to refrain from striking our own cities.” At the s
ame time McNamara reorganized the control system so that, instead of investing all striking power in a single presidential push button, the command structure could retain after attack the ability to respond in a number of ways besides blowing up the world.
The counterforce doctrine had its ambiguities. A striking force large enough to ride out a nuclear salvo and still concentrate selectively on enemy military targets would have to be larger than a force designed only to retaliate against enemy cities in a single convulsive blow. It would in consequence be quite large enough to strike first itself, possibly even large enough to suppose that it might erase the enemy’s retaliatory capacity by a surprise attack; indeed, to be effective against Russian soft-based missiles, our attack would presumably have to be made while their missiles were still on launching pads. Some critics accordingly interpreted the administration’s desire for nuclear superiority as an ‘overkill’ philosophy concealing a first-strike premise. Nor could one ever know what secret thoughts lay in the minds of Air Force generals when they urged bigger defense budgets. Yet there were ambiguities on the other side too; for the anti-overkill theorists preferred a ‘cities-only’ strategy, which would at once emphasize the horror of nuclear war and guarantee those horrors if war should come.
These ambiguities were partly inherent in the rudimentary state of strategic doctrine. It should never be forgotten that the relatively recent development of the intercontinental ballistic missile had revolutionized the problem of war, that the rethinking of strategy in terms of the ICBM had been going on only for five years in the United States and hardly at all in the rest of the world, that previous military experience offered almost nothing to help this analysis and that thinking about the unthinkable was painful anyway. Everything existed in the shadow world of pure theory; nor could the electronic computers of the systems analysts program the political realities weighing on the policy makers. Moreover, deterrence was in the end not a mathematical but a psychological problem. “A threat meant as a bluff but taken seriously,” as Henry Kissinger wrote, “is more useful for purposes of deterrence than a ‘genuine’ threat interpreted as a bluff.”
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