In preparation for the first meeting the brothers discussed the outlines of the U.S. positions on the major issues that separated the two powers. The president was especially eager to focus Khrushchev’s attention on securing a nuclear test ban treaty. Since 1958 the superpowers had been negotiating a comprehensive nuclear test ban while maintaining a voluntary moratorium on any testing. From the start, disagreement had arisen over how to make the agreement verifiable, and it had especially intensified as the nuclear powers moved their testing facilities underground. American and British negotiators pointed out there were hundreds of seismic events a year on the vast Soviet landmass, each of which potentially represented an unannounced nuclear test. The U.S. position was that it should have the right to mount a number of on-site inspections a year to verify that these were acts of nature.
The Soviet position on the test ban had hardened over the course of 1960. Kremlin negotiators had never agreed to any on-site inspections, seeing them as U.S. attempts to spy on Soviet territory. In the aftermath of the Congo crisis, Khrushchev had further complicated an agreement on verification by ruling out any role for the United Nations in monitoring compliance. Similar in spirit to his UN reform proposal, he wanted the monitoring to be controlled by a troika of countries representing each of the two blocs and the neutral world. Not fully trusting even the third world, Khrushchev also insisted that the troika had to be unanimous for any inspection to occur.
Kennedy was certain he could not give in on letting the Soviets veto an inspection of a suspicious event on their territory, but he was confident he could get the number of on-site inspections down to something Khrushchev would accept. JFK was a strong advocate of a test ban.58 He also did not want to resume testing in part because a test ban would symbolize a rare foreign policy achievement for his fledgling administration.
Kennedy had a second important proposal to make. In late April his administration had seriously considered sending U.S. Marines into Thailand to shore up Souvanna Phouma’s position in Laos, and the president did not want the Soviets and their allies to push the United States that close to intervention again. If possible, at Vienna he wanted to formalize the understanding that he seemed to be reaching with Khrushchev over neutralizing a united Laos.59
At his first meeting with Bolshakov on May 9, Robert Kennedy rolled out the president’s thoughts on the outlines of a test ban deal amid pleasantries about better relations and the possibility of a neutral Laos.60 The president, he reported, would be prepared to accept a limit of ten on-site inspections per year and an international commission to monitor compliance with the treaty, so long as neither side had a veto over its operations. The attorney general expressed his brother’s impatience for a real achievement in Vienna: “The President does not want to repeat the sad experience of Khrushchev’s meeting with Eisenhower at Camp David and hopes that this forthcoming meeting will produce concrete agreements.”
The Kennedys expected the Kremlin to move fast once Khrushchev understood that the U.S. president had become personally engaged in reaching real agreements before the start of the summit. They hoped that after Bolshakov’s report had been absorbed in Moscow, the diplomats of each country would be assigned to work through the details of a test ban agreement, which could be signed when the two leaders met in three weeks. But the Bolshakov communiqué had come absolutely out of the blue for Khrushchev, whose thoughts were still on setting a date for the summit. On May 12, possibly without even having read Bolshakov’s report on his meeting with Robert Kennedy, Khrushchev signed a letter to President Kennedy calling for a summit in June or July. The letter said nothing about achieving a test ban but mentioned optimism about progress in Laos before stressing that the problem of West Berlin “urgently require[d]” a solution.61
Once Khrushchev finally digested the report from Bolshakov—he did not know the GRU officer, though his son-in-law, Aleksei Adzhubei, was acquainted with him—he was disappointed. Kennedy had said nothing of interest about Berlin, the main reason Khrushchev had wanted to meet in the first place. He had little interest in achieving a test ban agreement at Vienna. On the contrary, his military chiefs were advising him that after a delay of two years it was time for the Soviet Union to resume nuclear testing. Despite the fears of some in the U.S. intelligence community, the Soviets had not violated the test ban moratorium. Soviet generals appealed to Khrushchev’s interest in curbing the costs of the Cold War with arguments that testing would make the Soviet nuclear arsenal more efficient. Although Khrushchev liked that argument, it did not completely neutralize his unwillingness to be the first to break the moratorium. World public opinion would turn against the first superpower to resume atmospheric testing, which was believed to spread harmful radioactive ions. Unlike the United States, the Soviet Union could not yet do any of its testing underground.62
With Kennedy determined to make the test ban the focus of the summit, Khrushchev realized there was nothing much he could offer in his reply through the back channel. The only exception would be a kind word on Laos. Khrushchev asked that the message go back that he was pleased to hear Kennedy confirm the policy on a neutral Laos that he seemed to be following since March. Otherwise, the foreign and defense ministries were to produce boilerplate responses on the test ban and the Berlin question to encourage the Kennedys to come back with something more creative.
Gromyko’s Germanists had to juggle preparing these talking points for Bolshakov with completing a few think pieces for Khrushchev and the delegation to take with them to Vienna. The Soviet Foreign Ministry had learned the hard way the pain of being caught off guard by the country’s mercurial leader. Once in 1958 and twice in 1960 Khrushchev had changed the country’s entire approach to a major foreign policy problem at the last minute, without any warning to his foreign policy staff. Perhaps in the expectation that he was about to do the same again, as of mid-May the Foreign Ministry had prepared far less for the Vienna meeting than it had in the months before the abortive summit of May 1960.63 Gromyko and his people were watching what Robert Kennedy had to say in these secret talks with as much anticipation as Khrushchev.
Meanwhile, as if he had needed more pressure, Khrushchev was receiving information that hardened his resolve to focus the summit on Berlin. Ulbricht sent word in mid-May that he could not wait much longer to do something about the flood of East Germans leaving the country through West Berlin. In April 1961 twice the number of refugees signed in at the registration center in West Berlin as in the same period a year earlier. This was largely because East Germany’s economic woes had increased dramatically. An attempt to lift wages and reduce the number of hours in the workweek had failed in the East German parliament. With industrial production down and export income declining, the regime could not afford these luxuries. So the number of people voting against socialism with their feet was increasing. As Ulbricht himself had to reluctantly accept, “it is not possible for a socialist country such as the GDR to carry out peaceful competition with an imperialist country such as West Germany with open borders.”64 The Soviet ambassador in East Germany, Mikhail Pervukhin, warned Moscow that even though this might complicate “the struggle for a peace treaty,” the East Germans wanted to close the sectoral border between East and West Berlin now. Perhaps the summit could be used, Pervukhin suggested, to reach at least a provisional agreement on Berlin, which would precede a general settlement of the German question.
WHEN ROBERT KENNEDY met again with Bolshakov on May 21, this back channel scheme began to take a very negative turn. The attorney general was as disappointed in Bolshakov’s message as Khrushchev had been when he heard the gist of the May 9 meeting. Nevertheless, Robert Kennedy came armed with one more offer to make on the test ban. Washington would accept a troika of inspectors but no veto. Kennedy impatiently called Bolshakov two days later, hoping for better news from Moscow. “Please hurry the response to the issues raised,” he said.65
Khrushchev had set progress on Berlin as the test of American statesmansh
ip, yet now he could see from the GRU report on the meeting in Washington that President Kennedy wanted to talk about practically anything else but Berlin. In response to Bolshakov’s statement about the need for a peace treaty, Robert Kennedy had said on behalf of his brother, “The President will discuss this subject with Khrushchev in Vienna, but only to discuss it and not to seek any kind of agreement at this meeting.”66 The attorney general’s effort to sugarcoat the White House’s inability to come up with anything new on Berlin only increased Khrushchev’s frustration. The president, Robert Kennedy added on May 21, “understood the importance of resolving the German question, but this was a very difficult problem, which had historical roots and for any resolution of it the US government would need time.”67 Khrushchev believed he had already waited long enough.
The Kennedys were clamoring for a response, so Khrushchev decided to give it to them himself. Taking advantage of the visit of some American figure skaters, Khrushchev invited Ambassador and Mrs. Thompson into the Kremlin’s box at the rink. He would give Washington one last chance to understand that Berlin was the main obstacle to better relations. If Kennedy truly wanted détente, he would have to come to Vienna with concessions on Berlin.
The ice rink discussion was the toughest any U.S. envoy had had to sit through in years. Khrushchev relentlessly poked and prodded the Thompsons on Berlin. When the U.S. ambassador asked why the status quo could not be maintained for another seven years, the Soviet leader blew up. The status quo was unacceptable to him. Jane Thompson, the ambassador’s wife, became so uncomfortable that she came to the assistance of her husband, debating with Khrushchev how long the Soviets could wait for a resolution. Ultimately Khrushchev heard an angry Llewellyn Thompson threaten him: “Well, if you use force, if you want to cut off our access and connections by force, then we will use force against force.” Khrushchev responded: “You don’t interpret it quite right. We have absolutely no plans to use force. We will sign the peace treaty, and this is how your rights stemming from the conditions of capitulation will end.” He added that the United States could count on the Soviets and the East Germans signing a peace treaty after the West German elections in September and certainly after the Soviet party congress in October. He warned that U.S. forces in West Berlin “might have to tighten their belts.”68
Unfortunately for Kennedy, who needed to know that he was heading into an ambush in Vienna, Thompson discounted much of what Khrushchev was telling him.69 This longtime Kremlin watcher understood that the Soviet leader had invested a lot of his personal prestige into finding a way out of the Berlin impasse. Thompson had been the ambassador in 1959, when Khrushchev had backed down on Berlin the first time. Having seen that retreat, Thompson now doubted the Soviet leader would provoke a second crisis. If he did, the U.S. ambassador assumed, it would not come until after the party congress in mid-October. It is quite “possible K[hrushchev] will attempt [to] slide over Berlin problem in sweetness and light atmosphere.”70 He couldn’t have been more wrong.
IN THE YEARS since the collapse of Soviet power in 1991, with the flood of revelations that so much of the red menace had been made of papier-mâché, it has been natural to question how dangerous the Cold War really was. How close did we ever come to nuclear war? The Central Committee documents of Nikita Khrushchev reveal that starting with the Presidium meeting on May 26, 1961, the world moved closer to nuclear war than at any time since the Soviets tested their first atomic bomb in August 1949. Even if Khrushchev’s war talk was the product of a frustrated man, rather than a sign of mental breakdown, the Soviet leader on that day deliberately set in motion the machine of war. In the prenuclear age such a decision had only local consequences. In the Kennedy-Khrushchev era this act of willfulness immediately had global significance.
The May 26 meeting was to be the last Presidium meeting before Khrushchev left to see Kennedy in Vienna on June 3. The Soviet leader planned to travel by train so that he could view progress in the cornfields of the Ukraine. The Czechs had also asked him to make a short stop, and the Austrian Communists were hoping for some time with him, too. Khrushchev’s mind was not really on these requests, however. Instead he wanted to set a new, more dangerous course for Soviet foreign policy. It appears that the only warning the other Kremlin leaders had was that Khrushchev invited his stenographer to this meeting on the Vienna summit. Since 1958 he did this only when he intended to announce a new policy.71 “I attach a lot of significance to the meeting with Kennedy,” Khrushchev began, “because we are approaching the moment when we must solve the German question. This is the key issue.”
Then Khrushchev let his colleagues know what he thought of Kennedy: “He is a son of a bitch,” he said. In the two days since the ice show, the Soviet leader had made up his mind that he had no choice but to seek an early confrontation with the Kennedy administration. The back channel through Bolshakov and the front channel through Ambassador Thompson confirmed that Kennedy was no more prepared to accept Khrushchev’s Berlin demands than Eisenhower had been.
“We are not afraid of German aggression…. Germany…will not start anew war,” Khrushchev said; “the most dangerous [country] is America.” He blamed the U.S. system of government more than any individual for American misbehavior. The Bay of Pigs and the disappointing back chnnel that followed had convinced him Kennedy was not in control of his government. Kennedy, like Eisenhower, was a captive of the Pentagon and CIA. “That’s why we cannot vouch for America. Its decisions are not based on logical principles; rather [it is] governed by different groups and sudden coincidental events. That’s why America could easily start a war, even if it is fully aware—according to military circles—of the fact that the situation could grow worse. That’s why certain forces could emerge and find a pretext to go to war against us.”
Under these circumstances, a patient leader might have suggested a quiet period, building up Soviet strength to meet the dangers of an erratic United States, but Khrushchev was impatient. He announced to his colleagues that he intended to drag the world through the greatest nuclear crisis of the Cold War. Khrushchev did not believe he was choosing war, but he was prepared to take that risk. East Germany, the keystone of the Soviet position in Eastern Europe, would die without an agreement that closed the West Berlin loophole and strengthened its sovereignty. The Soviet demands regarding Berlin, he believed, were reasonable, and the Americans had to be made, even at the point of a sword, to accept them. “[T]he risk that we are taking is justified; if we look at it in terms of a percentage, there is more than a 95% probability that there will be no war.”
Khrushchev described how this crisis would begin. The Soviet Union would sign a peace treaty, then turn over control of the air, rail, and road access routes to the East German government. He then revealed how he expected the end game over Berlin to play itself out: “We don’t encroach on West Berlin, we do not declare a blockade; [but] we cut off air traffic. We show that we are ready to permit air traffic but on the condition that Western planes land at airports in the GDR, near Berlin. We do not demand a withdrawal of troops. However, we consider them illegal, though we won’t use any strong-arm methods for their removal. We will not cut off the delivery of foodstuffs and will not sever any other lifelines. We will adhere to a policy of noninfringement and noninvolvement in the affairs of West Berlin. Therefore, I don’t believe that because the state of war and the occupational regime are coming to an end it would unleash a war.”
Khrushchev’s confidence that he could pull this off stemmed from his assumption that international public opinion and the Western European members of NATO would prevent the United States from using force to defend its position in West Berlin. “[French President Charles] de Gaulle and [British Prime Minister Harold] Macmillan will never side with the Americans in unleashing war in Europe now,” Khrushchev told his colleagues, “because the main deployment of nuclear weapons will be in the territory of West Germany, France, and England. They are intelligent people, and they understand this
.”
In the United States Kennedy’s advisers were telling him that Khrushchev faced opposition from hard-liners who disliked his efforts at détente with the West. In truth Khrushchev fathered all the offensive policies directed at the United States and had no one of any consequence pushing him to be more aggressive. After listening to Khrushchev’s description of this new policy, only one man in the room stood up to oppose this descent into danger.
Just as in November 1958, when Khrushchev had advocated ending four-power control over Berlin unilaterally, Anastas Mikoyan was the lone voice of reason in the Presidium.72 Mikoyan believed the probability that war would result from Khrushchev’s proposal was much greater than he had predicted. Mikoyan was not convinced that fear of a nuclear engagement would be sufficient to deter the NATO countries from going to war over their rights to West Berlin. “In my opinion,” he said, “they could initiate military action without atomic weapons.”73 Essentially, Mikoyan and Khrushchev were disagreeing over the value of nuclear deterrence in a local conflict like Berlin. Khrushchev assumed that the West would be so afraid of the possibility of a general nuclear war that Kennedy would choose not to initiate any military action whatsoever in reaction to a Soviet blockade of West Berlin. Mikoyan believed that the Americans might respond to the Soviet provocation by using conventional weapons. Mikoyan was also not yet ready to discount the character of the new American president. Under pressure, Kennedy might prove a worthy opponent.74 He mentioned only a 10 percent possibility of war, but this was a rhetorical ploy to prevent Khrushchev from looking like a fool. Mikoyan sought to rally his colleagues around the idea that Khrushchev’s proposal would most likely corner Kennedy, with potentially disastrous consequences. He stressed that closing down the air corridors would create “a great aggravation.” Perhaps, he suggested, keeping them open would make the fait accompli acceptable to the West.
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