Khrushchev's Cold War

by Aleksandr Fursenko

  ALSOP’S COLUMNS and other U.S. press reaction disappointed and angered Khrushchev, who received daily translations of the most important columns and articles. He suspected the administration was behind the bad reviews of his Supreme Soviet speech. “It is not the journalists who write it themselves,” Khrushchev said, “but the journalists write about what the government thinks.”46 What stood in his way was the inability, or unwillingness, of the U.S. government to accept that he wanted disarmament, not war.

  The campaign of alarmists like Alsop helped Khrushchev see the corrosive effect that three years of his own nuclear bluster had on his ability to do business with the United States. Had he not claimed that the Soviet Union could make missiles “like sausages” had he not boasted of the capability to set the major U.S. cities afire? Of course this was nonsense; as of January 1960, the United States led the race in all the nuclear systems categories, even in the prestigious missile race. While Joe Alsop spoke of a Soviet force of 150 ICBMs, Khrushchev knew that he had only 4 and that the United States already had twice as many.

  So, Khrushchev felt he had to devise an imaginative way to undermine the popular U.S. perception of Soviet missile capability. He would offer to destroy all Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles. “They blame us for advocating cuts in conventional forces,” he told his colleagues in the Presidium a few days after the Alsop series was published. “Now let’s call for cuts in an area where they think we are ahead.”47 How could Alsop and the missile gap alarmists continue to discredit the idea of disarmament if the Soviet Union offered to get rid of its ICBMs?

  Throughout the early Cold War the United States had questioned if the Soviets were sincere in their pleas for disarmament. Stalin and Molotov were accustomed to making proposals for propaganda purposes alone. In early 1960 Khrushchev was different. He believed that now that he had some ICBMs to give away, he could talk about the destruction of all strategic delivery systems. This would undermine talk of a missile gap in the United States and perhaps lead to better relations between the superpowers.

  The idea had come to Khrushchev from the French. In the fall the French representative at UN-sponsored disarmament negotiations in Geneva, Jules Moch, had raised this possibility in general session. It is not clear whether Khrushchev happened to remember that or perhaps was inspired by some intelligence from within the French government, still a fertile field for Soviet espionage. The fact that the idea was French opened some intriguing possibilities. In late December 1959 the Western powers had invited Khrushchev to a summit of the big four in Paris in May. Khrushchev himself was planning a visit to France in March. If played right, this Soviet proposal could be wrapped in the tricolor before delivery to the Western powers at the summit.

  The Soviet leader unveiled his strategy at a Kremlin meeting on February 1,1960. “Our most sacred dream” is what Khrushchev called the dismantling of the Western military alliances: the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization, and the Central Treaty Organization. He saw these organizations as aggressive military obstacles to his goal of transforming the superpower struggle into an economic and political competition between the two different systems.

  His strategy was simple. As he explained it to his colleagues, he wanted to force the West to accept disarmament by offering them something that proved he was sincere. He also wanted to offer them something that both sides could accept.48 If Khrushchev had his way, the Soviet Union would soon be dismantling its nuclear weapons, its fleet, and its aviation. The victory of world communism did not need this high-tech weaponry.

  Khrushchev’s hand had grown much stronger in the past year, and the Presidium readily endorsed his disarmament proposal. The only disagreement arose over when and how Khrushchev should announce it. His ally Leonid Brezhnev thought he should save it for his Paris meetings with de Gaulle in March. Gromyko, who seemed to be no fan of this idea, asked that the Kremlin wait to see if the world embraced Khrushchev’s earlier call for general and complete disarmament. Khrushchev’s military advisers did not seem to care when he made the announcement so long as it was done at home, apparently to avoid the impression that it had been imposed upon him by the West. Khrushchev left the gathering without making up his mind. The one place he thought he didn’t want to make the announcement was at the summit in May. He seemed to want to do it sooner.

  His immediate problem was that the missiles he would offer to dismantle were very vulnerable. Soviet missile engineers were only now building silos or “hardened” positions for the next generation of intercontinental ballistic missiles, the R-16s and R-9s, which were expected in a few years. In the meantime it was essential that the United States not discover the exact locations of the few missiles he had. With only four R-7s to defend the entire country, Khrushchev could not accept any inspection regime before disarmament. Once the United States and the Soviet Union had dismantled their rockets, there would be no danger in letting NATO see the launchpads at Plesetsk and Tyuratam. Khrushchev meanwhile hoped that the advantages of disarmament would compel the United States to take a risk of its own before it got a full inspection.

  DISARMAMENT WAS ALSO on Dwight Eisenhower’s mind in early February 1960. At the time he was locked in discussions with Great Britain over how to make a realistic proposal to ban all nuclear testing. The British were eager to move as quickly as possible to enact a test ban. Eisenhower also was eager for one. Since 1958 the world’s three nuclear powers—Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union—had observed a moratorium on all atmospheric testing. This came largely in response to international concerns about the health hazards of testing. Japanese fisherman caught in the downdraft of a U.S. nuclear test at Bikini Atoll in March 1954 were later found to have developed cancer. Concern became even more widespread when strontium 90, a radioactive particle found in nuclear fallout, was detected in milk throughout Europe.

  Eisenhower had no plans to violate the atmospheric testing moratorium between the United States and the Soviet Union. However, he was not prepared to sign a treaty that formalized the moratorium unless it was verifiable. It was just as important to him that the United States be able to monitor Soviet compliance with the moratorium as it was that the U.S. intelligence community be able to count Soviet missiles accurately. On the morning of February 2 the president told Secretary of State Herter that there was “scarcely any proposal in the field of disarmament equitable to the two sides that he would not accept if it can be inspected.”49 For Eisenhower inspection was the key. He did not fear a world without nuclear weapons. What concerned him was the possibility that the Soviets would cheat to gain an advantage over the United States.50

  Had either the CIA or the KGB been powerful enough to discern the thinking of its adversary, the Kremlin and the White House would have discovered that in February 1960 the two most powerful men in the world were on the same wavelength. Khrushchev and Eisenhower believed in the need to eliminate nuclear weapons, and both shared the view that if there had to be nuclear missiles for deterrence, they could remain few in number. Eisenhower summarized his thinking in a press conference on February 4: “What you want is enough [emphasis added], a thing that is adequate. A deterrent has no added power, once it has become completely adequate for compelling the respect of any potential opponent for your deterrent and, therefore, to make him act prudently.”51 Not until the Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Reykjavik, over a quarter century later, did the Soviet and U.S. leadership come this close to deep cuts in nuclear weapons stockpiles. By 1986 the arsenal of each country had reached nine thousand warheads; in 1960 the number was only ten.

  A week after he had introduced to his Kremlin colleagues his new thinking on disarmament, Khrushchev tried to convey it to Eisenhower. He took advantage of the Moscow visit of the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Henry Cabot Lodge. Lodge, who had been Khrushchev’s touring companion on the trip across the United States in September, was doing some unofficial advance work for President Eisenhower
’s expected visit in June. This last was a by-product of the Camp David summit, at which Khrushchev had extended an invitation to Eisenhower to visit Moscow.

  During the American tour it was to Lodge that Khrushchev had made some of his most extreme boasts. But in an unguarded moment in California, he had also revealed that all was not well with the Soviet economy. Now, less than half a year later, the Soviet leader was even more forthcoming and was prepared to admit how far his country was behind the United States. When Lodge mentioned how impressed he was with the state of Soviet housing, Khrushchev brushed aside the compliment: “[W]e have much to do before getting ahead of you.” But the most telling comment came when Lodge mentioned that the Soviets had already surpassed the United States in quite a few fields, strategic rockets being one of them. Khrushchev said point-blank, “No, we’re not, not really.”52

  The American national security community was incapable of absorbing the implications of Khrushchev’s candor. Lodge reported his comments to the State Department, but they failed to produce even a ripple in Washington. As far as Eisenhower was concerned—if he even learned of this exchange—there was nothing new in what Khrushchev had told Lodge. The president already believed that the United States was way ahead. So too did the Republican front-runner, Richard Nixon, who in private sessions with Eisenhower and Allen Dulles agreed that the gap was phony. The problem was that publicists and military lobbyists had created a poisonous atmosphere in which debate over real threats to the United States was impossible. Too many powerful people—Democratic presidential candidates, air force generals, military contractors, “national security” columnists—stood to gain from the existence of the “gap” for it to be defeated by logic alone.

  FLU KEPT KHRUSHCHEV from visiting Paris in March, when he had hoped to test Western interest in his still-secret nuclear disarmament proposal. He rescheduled the trip for late March and early April. Once he arrived in Paris, Khrushchev played the French president, Charles de Gaulle, very well.53 As he had explained in the Kremlin in early February, he would use French disarmament proposals to his advantage. He let de Gaulle raise “his” scheme for eliminating nuclear delivery vehicles in conversation and then accepted them. The French had no interest in any conventional disarmament. They had thousands of men under arms in Algeria and some men stationed in tropical Africa and Laos, and they retained a commitment to defend West Germany from Soviet attack. France, which had just joined the nuclear club by testing a nuclear prototype in the Sahara on February 13, 1960, was so far behind the superpowers that nuclear disarmament would benefit it immediately. The French did not yet have any strategic bombers or missiles.

  Khrushchev also used this preliminary visit to Paris to set the stage for discussing Berlin at the summit scheduled for May. Although his new strategy for peace revolved around nuclear disarmament, his mind never strayed too far from the German question. He shared with de Gaulle his concept of an interim agreement. He intended to give the West an additional two years to reach some kind of agreement on the future of West Berlin, and he explained to de Gaulle that the West had to understand that this concession represented the limit of his patience on the issue. If that old crank Adenauer survived the two years and prevented any agreement, the Soviets would make good on their threat to end the three-power occupation of West Berlin with the stroke of the pen.

  Khrushchev revealed to de Gaulle that his bottom line on Berlin remained the same. West Berlin would have to become a free city-state. It could not, through a plebiscite or any other means, join the Federal Republic of Germany as a Land, or province. The West would have to pull its troops out of West Berlin. The defense of the free city-state would become the responsibility of the United Nations. All access to West Berlin, via land or air, would have to be negotiated with East Germany.

  The Khrushchev visit to de Gaulle had the expected effect. It inspired intense consultation by the West as it prepared for the formal presentation of these Soviet proposals at the summit. De Gaulle acted as the messenger, visiting first Macmillan in London, then Eisenhower in Washington. At each stop, de Gaulle explained that the Soviet leader had accepted the French disarmament proposal.54 He also spoke of the possibility of a two-year interim agreement on Berlin, which would postpone another crisis over Berlin until at least 1962.

  The British were delighted with what they viewed as new Soviet flexibility. Macmillan believed that in his comments on Berlin, Khrushchev was returning to a position that had nearly been agreed to at the foreign ministers’ meeting in Geneva in 1959. “Perhaps Mr. Khrushchev was prepared to agree to such an arrangement,” the British prime minister suggested to his French visitor, “provided he negotiated it himself.”55 If anything the British leader was even more encouraged by what the French president told him about the new Soviet position on dismantling nuclear delivery systems. At the moment the British faced difficult choices as they set about modernizing their strategic nuclear forces. It was very expensive to remain a real player in the nuclear game. De Gaulle said that he hoped that at the summit the parties could agree to the principle of establishing limits on the number of strategic bombers and missiles in their arsenals and then follow that up by establishing a permanent committee to study the problem. “This would be a great advance.”56

  MEANWHILE PRESSURE was building in Washington to disprove Joseph Alsop’s and Stuart Symington’s claims of a missile gap. No one in the U.S. intelligence community had spotted the 150 launch sites Alsop alleged existed in the Soviet Union. CIA analysts, who were just completing their annual review of the Soviet missile program, admitted that they had “no direct evidence of Soviet ICBM deployment concepts” or of “the intended nature of operational launch sites.”57 However, U.S. intelligence had identified eleven areas where ICBM deployment might be happening. Little other than fragmentary photographic intelligence and the presence of long rail lines explained why these locations were selected.

  The alarmists in the intelligence community, led by the U.S. Air Force, believed that unless and until all eleven locations had been photographed, very little could be said about the future deployment of Soviet ICBMs. Intelligence analysts were especially eager to photograph the north-central portion of Russia. In 1959 U.S. intelligence had collected evidence of a new ICBM facility near Plesetsk, along the railway line between Vovodnya and Murmansk. The CIA considered two ways of photographing the northern area.58 A U-2 flying from Greenland could enter Soviet airspace near Novaya Zemlya, then go far enough south to photograph Plesetsk before returning. The other idea was more ambitious. U-2s had never flown right across the Soviet Union. Up to that time all flights went halfway into the country and then turned around. The proposed Operation Grand Slam would start in Pakistan and photograph the Soviet Union on a diagonal from the Central Asian republics to Murmansk on the Gulf of Finland.

  President Eisenhower was lobbied hard in late 1959 and early 1960 to use the U-2. General James Doolittle of the President’s Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities urged him to send as many U-2s as he could over the Soviet Union; so too did Allen Dulles, who believed that one reason the CIA was not doing a better job of estimating Soviet missile development was the president’s reluctance to exploit the U-2.59 Since the beginning of the year Eisenhower had approved two flights. Under this pressure he approved one more at the end of March. In giving in, he asked his intelligence advisers not to let this intelligence program undermine his efforts at superpower diplomacy. “[I] have one tremendous asset in a summit meeting,” he said. “…That is [my] reputation for honesty. If one of these aircraft were lost when we were engaged in apparently sincere deliberations, it could be put on display in Moscow and ruin [my] effectiveness.”60

  Eisenhower left it up to the CIA to choose between the Greenland flight or Operation Grand Slam. The agency’s deputy director for plans, Richard Bissell, who had supervised the development of the U-2, and his team subsequently decided to attempt to do the longer flight. Soviet air defenses were quite stron
g in the north, so a flight that entered from the northern USSR would incur greater risks. In late March and early April, when plans for Grand Slam were assembled, it was assumed that Soviet radars in the south could not track an incoming U-2. By the time Soviet radar picked up Grand Slam in the north, the plane would be heading home.

  Just after making his decision, Eisenhower welcomed Prime Minister Macmillan to Camp David. The president was upbeat about the possibilities for some agreement in Paris. The four-power summit was now scheduled to begin on May 16. He had an idea of offering the Soviet Union a guarantee that the Oder-Neisse Line would remain the eastern boundary of East Germany. He believed that if Khrushchev were assured that a resurgent Germany could never take back the sections of Prussia that had been transferred to Poland at the end of World War II, the Soviets might become more conciliatory toward the Western position in Berlin. When Macmillan indicated that he was prepared to consider how they could establish a free state of West Berlin, Eisenhower said he could not agree to that, given that he thought an independent West Berlin would soon be swallowed up by the East. Instead he hoped that Khrushchev would follow up on what he had said at Camp David in 1959 and again, more recently, to de Gaulle in Paris by promising a two-year standstill on the Berlin matter. Regarding disarmament, Eisenhower was trying to devise an inspection plan that the Soviets might accept. What he had in mind was a variation on his call for open skies in 1955 that would divide the United States, the USSR, and Europe into zones and permit Khrushchev to accept inspections in stages.61

  Bissell had been instructed to complete the U-2 flight before April 19, but bad weather intervened. Meanwhile a U-2 flew over Kazakhstan and part of the Urals on April 9 before returning safely home. When the Soviets did not protest this flight, it strengthened assumptions in Washington that they would swallow more U-2 fights. Bissell requested and got a delay for Operation Grand Slam. Eisenhower ordered that “one additional operation may be undertaken, provided it is carried out prior to May 1. No operation is to be carried out after May 1.” The White House understood that the Soviets would be particularly offended by a violation of their airspace on May 1, their most important national holiday. However, the order was so carelessly phrased that Bissell understood the instruction to mean that if need be, he could send a U-2 over the Soviet Union on May Day.62