Khrushchev’s decision to suspend the confrontation over Berlin strengthened the conclusion already reached by some in Washington that the United States was ahead in the strategic power game. On October 21, John F. Kennedy had Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric reveal to the very wary American public that the U.S. nuclear arsenal quantitatively and qualitatively exceeded anything that Khrushchev had. Kennedy’s motives for the Gilpatric speech, which was delivered four days after Khrushchev had lifted the Berlin ultimatum, were primarily domestic. Besides calming the American people, Kennedy hoped the speech would serve as a warning to the leadership of the U.S. armed services and their allies in Congress not to use scare tactics any longer to force unnecessary procurement. The air force, for example, was gearing up for a campaign to purchase an additional two thousand Minutemen ICBMs, and members of Congress were already posturing for a B-70 bomber to counter an assumed fleet of Soviet Bounder bombers.1
Robert McNamara had originally been supposed to officiate at this public burial of the missile gap, but when a scheduling conflict arose, it was his deputy Gilpatric who delivered the speech before a conference of businessmen in Hot Springs, Virginia.2 “Our confidence in our ability to deter communist action, or resist communist blackmail, is based upon a sober appreciation of the relative military power of the two sides. The fact is that this nation has a nuclear retaliatory force of such lethal power that an enemy move which brought it into play would be an act of self-destruction on his part…. The number of our nuclear delivery vehicles, tactical as well as strategic, is in the tens of thousands, and, of course, we have more than one warhead per vehicle.”3
As the first year of the Kennedy administration came to an end, close observers noticed a more relaxed president. “It’s going better,” Kennedy told friendly journalist Hugh Sidey.4 “We’re making a little headway here and there.” Others were not so modest in their assessment of the shift in the president’s fortunes. The poet Carl Sandburg, whose signature work was a multivolume study of Lincoln’s war presidency, praised Kennedy’s handling of this more recent national peril. “The way he is doing is almost too good to be true.”5
OUTWARDLY THE FALL of 1961 seemed to be the apex of Khrushchev’s personal power. On October 30, on his instruction, the body of his predecessor, Joseph Stalin, had been removed from the Lenin-Stalin Mausoleum. The carved marble plaque above the doorway now was covered by a cloth sign reading only LENIN. For the first time it could be said that Khrushchev had indeed eclipsed Stalin in the pantheon of the gods of communism. Also, at eleven in the morning on that same day, another star burned brightly for Khrushchev. At his insistence, Soviet nuclear scientists exploded the largest nuclear device ever constructed, a fifty-megaton bomb, called the Tsar Bomba, in the atmosphere over the Arctic island Novaya Zemlya.6 After the Vienna summit Khrushchev had ordered the creation and detonation of a superbomb—originally hoped to be the equivalent of a hundred megatons of TNT—with the intention of using it to increase the pressure on the United States to wilt before his Berlin ultimatum.
As it turned out, the Berlin ultimatum was already a dead letter by the time Khrushchev had his superexplosion. Moreover, though it was a dramatic piece of political theater, the device was not at all usable as a weapon. The only Soviet aircraft that could carry it was the slow Tu-95 Bear bomber, which could have been easily shot down by U.S. air defenses, and the bomb’s yield was so great that if dropped on Central Europe, it would have poisoned the residents of Eastern Europe.
The distance between the image and reality of Khrushchev’s power was even greater behind the walls of the Kremlin, where his decision to back down in Berlin had eroded some of his prestige. When Khrushchev’s Kremlin colleagues supported giving Kennedy the ultimatum at the summit, they had not expected a public retreat on the issue as in 1959. There was now no outward revolt by members of the Presidium, but Khrushchev understood that he needed to restore coherence to his Berlin policy.
Khrushchev’s critics elsewhere in the Soviet bloc were not as restrained as those in Moscow. The Chinese had also given their support for the Berlin ultimatum on the assumption that the Soviet Union would not back down before Khrushchev achieved what he wanted. After the Twenty-second Party Congress, Beijing began to treat him as a weak leader. The East German ambassador in Beijing remarked at the end of 1961 that the Chinese wondered why Khrushchev had not shown the same courage as he had in 1956. “In the case of the Suez aggression,” the Chinese believed, “the Soviet ultimatum, which was taken seriously, scared the imperialists and forced them to stop their aggression.” Khrushchev’s retreat this time would “only induce the adversary to even firmer policies, to greater demands, and to stronger provocations.”7
Ironically, it was the Chinese who first exploited Khrushchev’s retreat for their own ends when they quickly repudiated the political approach that Moscow had brokered with the local Communist parties in Southeast Asia. In November the Chinese interceded with the Pathet Lao and scuttled an agreement to form a coalition government under the neutralist Souvanna Phouma.8 Then, a month later, Beijing sent a military delegation to Hanoi for two weeks, apparently to discuss future military operations in Laos in violation of the Kennedy-Khrushchev cease-fire.9
What the Chinese failed to grasp, whereas Khrushchev did, was that the abortive showdown with Kennedy over Berlin and the end of the missile gap fallacy revealed serious flaws in how Moscow had been managing disagreements with the West since 1955. The use of ultimatums backed by a nuclear bluff had never been a perfect tactic. In practice it had caused an overreaction in the American press and the U.S. Congress, which created both the impetus for more defense spending and the suspicions that made real disarmament impossible. Still, in a period in which the Americans doubted their own power, there had been a chance it might force some political compromises. Now, however, the Americans seemed to understand that at the very least they were not behind the Soviets and were perhaps ahead of them. What role could nuclear bluff play in this kind of international environment?
Passivity in the face of this new balance of power would have been out of character for Khrushchev. A more cautious leader might have responded to the new power relationship with the United States and the vulnerabilities in his own backyard by seeking a temporary strategic respite. A lull in the struggle would allow time for Soviet technology and improved agricultural practices to provide new sources of strategic and economic power for the future. But that was not his way. Besides being reluctant by nature to relinquish the offensive in international affairs, he was animated by a deep-seated concern that the West would exploit any perceived Soviet weakness to destroy the Communist system. This fear had prevented Khrushchev from accepting Eisenhower’s Open Skies proposal in 1955, and it reinforced his rejection of a lull in international politics in 1962. Instead he looked to turn the tactic of the occasional bluff to achieve a specific goal into a medium-term strategy of applying continuous political pressure on Washington and its allies. Convinced that despite their strength, Americans and their president continued to fear war, Khrushchev concluded that he might be able to use these fears as the Lilliputians had used cords to restrain the giant Gulliver in Swift’s book.
IN HIS PUBLIC STATEMENTS and later in his memoirs, Nikita Khrushchev did not reveal the story of his reaction to these discouraging shifts in the international power balance. Had he done so, much of his subsequent behavior in the dangerous year of 1962 would not have seemed so mysterious. Only with the release four decades later of the transcript of his remarks to his Kremlin colleagues at a rump meeting of the Presidium on January 8 could one see the thinking that lay behind what would be the greatest risks taken by any leader in the Cold War.10 The immediate cause was Khrushchev’s disappointment at how the Berlin negotiations were turning out. Six days before this session Andrei Gromyko and U.S. Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson had met to discuss Berlin, and the Soviet foreign minister needed new instructions. All fall Khrushchev had expected new proposals fro
m Kennedy, who had launched a policy review and was consulting with his allies. But when the moment arrived, the administration had nothing newer to offer than an international body to oversee the access routes to West Berlin. On the all-important issue of the future of Western troops in West Berlin, Washington had been silent. Khrushchev had to admit that neither nuclear bluff nor diplomacy had worked in 1961. It was time to chart a new course.
“The enemy is strong,” Khrushchev admitted. “[He is] not weaker than we are.” The Kremlin leadership sometimes used the less threatening term “adversary” to describe the United States, but on this day Khrushchev was in no mood for such niceties. “That is why he could play the same trump card against us that we were trying to use against him—the position of strength card.” Khrushchev’s confident prediction of May 1961 that he could push the Americans farther than they wanted to go had been proved wrong. Through its handling of the Berlin crisis, the White House had demonstrated to Khrushchev that it was prepared to fight to maintain access to West Berlin. “This is why no one can predict whether this game will end in a war or not. [No one can say any longer],” he said, “that war is impossible, that war is out of the question.”
Khrushchev confessed to more than just a misjudgment of U.S. resolve. His strategy had also reflected the expectation that an attractive, liberal capitalist like Kennedy would be both wise and powerful enough to accept a minor retreat over Berlin for the sake of a major détente with Moscow. “Who, as a matter of fact, decides a question like that—agreement or no agreement, and whether to go to the brink, the issue of war versus peace?” Khrushchev asked in his monologue. “Kennedy decides.” But this too had proved wrong. Kennedy might want better relations, but Khrushchev had no reason to believe he was willing to do what was necessary to bring them about. Kennedy “lacks authority, moral or political,” Khrushchev reluctantly concluded. “This is a young and capable man, it is necessary to give him his due,” he added, “but he can neither stand up to the American public, nor can he lead it.” Khrushchev now believed that the system, which in his mind meant American plutocrats, militarists, and alarmists, was directing U.S. foreign policy. Kennedy, “himself, is a person of little authority in circles that decide and give direction to the policy of the United States of America. He is of no authority to both Rockefeller and du Pont.” Khrushchev did not try to hide his disappointment. “[It is impossible] to say who is better, Eisenhower or Kennedy—[they are] the same shit…. Both represent the same class with different shades.”
Khrushchev’s first two errors—his mistaken assumptions that the United States would accept his terms and that Kennedy would use his authority to contain the militarists in Washington—were compounded by the fact that the Soviet leader had expected that the Europeans would help him overwhelm American intransigence. He had assumed that Western European fears of war would have canceled out whatever interest they might have had in maintaining the status quo in West Berlin. He recalled saying to the Frenchman Reynaud and the Belgian Spaak, “[H]ere, this is the maximum we can agree to.”11 Instead, to his dismay, he found that the West was unified on the Berlin question.
“[T]hey won’t agree,” he discovered, “because all of this is based upon the nonrecognition of any of their rights in West Berlin, upon the nonrecognition of their rights to have an army there, that our interpretation of free access is completely contradictory to the interpretation and understanding of the West. What they consider to be depriving them of their right to free access, we understand as free access.” Khrushchev’s conclusion was gloomy. “Will they agree to it now?” he asked himself. “No, they won’t agree.”
Although there is no record of any dissension in the room during this performance, there must have been some confusion when Khrushchev revealed that in spite of these hard truths, he wished to continue the drive for an agreement with the West on West Berlin. He had no intention of altering his bottom line in the negotiations—no international corridors; no Western troops in West Berlin; East Berlin to remain part of East Germany; West Berlin to be a neutral, international city—and he was not about to stop pushing for a settlement on these terms. “In a word,” he exhorted the officials before him, “it is now too early to say that we will not win. We should still press on. I take the worst case: They won’t agree. But it means agreeing right now that it will bring nothing. It’s too early. So it’s worthwhile playing this game.”
Khrushchev was not sure how long the Soviet Union would have to play the “game” to win, nor could he offer any suggestion on what self-imposed limits Moscow should observe. After all, he now understood that it was possible to push the United States to war, and he admitted that he did not want war. Nevertheless, Khrushchev believed that there was no hope of that he could get his way in the struggle with America without using pressure tactics.
He then introduced the metaphor of the liquid meniscus to explain the condition of permanent international tension that he now believed was necessary both to preserve and to advance Soviet interests in a world of U.S. strategic superiority: “We should increase the pressure, we must not doze off and, while growing, we should let the opponent feel this growth. But don’t pour the last drop to make the cup overflow; be just like a meniscus, which, according to the laws of surface tension in liquid, is generated in order that the liquid doesn’t pour out past the rim.” The pressure, Khrushchev explained, was not designed to force change but simply to deter the Americans from taking advantage of the Soviet bloc while they remained ahead in the superpower rivalry. “If we don’t have a meniscus,” he said, “we let the enemy live peacefully.”
Acknowledging that the earlier ultimatums had been a mistake, Khrushchev refused to set a deadline for resolving the Berlin problem. He was not about to be trapped by his own rhetoric in 1962 as he had been in 1958 and 1959 and in 1961. Those deadlines had deprived him of tactical flexibility. Instead he wanted to employ Soviet foreign policy to keep the West off-balance until Moscow was powerful enough to compel the Americans to give him what he wanted. He was still extremely eager to settle the matter; it just did not make sense to rush into another Berlin ultimatum. “[W]ith each year, our material and spiritual wealth grows as well as our armed forces. Therefore, concentrate on it now or never? Really, is such an issue on the agenda now? No, on the contrary. We don’t have this issue at all, because, if not now, then it will be tomorrow.” Behind this optimism, but left unsaid on this day, was Khrushchev’s confidence that the imminent deployment of the next generation of Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles, the R-9 and R-16, would do a great deal to alter U.S. appreciations of Soviet power and bring Washington’s arrogance to an end.
The Soviet leader stressed the logic of this new approach: “It is necessary to conduct an aggressive policy, but we need to advance rationally, not to resemble a gambler, in this game, who bets whatever is left in his pocket and then grabs a pistol and shoots himself.” But he understood that it would be perceived as weakness by those in the Soviet bloc, especially the Chinese, who insisted on continuing the ultimatums. “So our friends will blame us and will exploit us regarding this issue…. Those who will exploit, they know themselves that they are putting shit in their mouths.” It enraged him that Beijing was now assailing him for his prudence over Berlin. During the Iraqi crisis of 1958, he recalled, Mao had asked him, “What, are you willing to fight?” When Khrushchev said, “No way,” Mao had replied, “Correct, it’s not necessary.” Khrushchev believed that it was Sino-Soviet tension that explained Mao’s current behavior. “If we had good relations right now, then Mao Zedong would write us a friendly letter and would say, ‘Do you want to go to war over West Berlin?’ ‘No way, what the hell do we need that for?’ And he would be right.”
Khrushchev wanted Soviet representatives to needle Beijing about its own lapsed ultimatums in the 1950s regarding the offshore islands Quemoy and Matzu, which remained under Chiang Kai-shek’s control. He also suggested a withering attack on China’s toleration of Britis
h control in Hong Kong and Portuguese control in Macao. Khrushchev reminded his audience of Soviet diplomats that the Chinese had time and again resisted using force to eliminate their own West Berlins.
He also proposed the explanation that should be given to the East Germans and those who wondered why the Soviets did not just go ahead and sign a separate German peace treaty. He reminded his audience that the goal of the Berlin strategy was to defend East German sovereignty and Soviet prestige. A treaty that did not resolve questions of access and Western military presence was of no value. In 1958 he had been eager to declare the end of Western rights in Berlin unilaterally, but he had been persuaded by Mikoyan, among others, that the costs were still too high.
Khrushchev revealed to his audience that he believed that a “final fight on the issue of West Berlin” was inevitable. But he did not want to go down that path until he was sure that the Warsaw Pact countries could withstand the Western economic blockade that he expected would be NATO’s first response to a Soviet-East German peace treaty. Hopeful that this fight would not be too much delayed, however, Khrushchev added, “[I]t is necessary to speed up the transformation of the GDR’s economy, so that it will be reoriented away from West Germany to the Soviet Union, mainly, and other socialist countries. This is the most important thing.”
In the meantime, as part of this new policy of continuous pressure, Khrushchev urged his representatives not to allow the East or the West to assume that Moscow had given up on a Berlin settlement: “Your voice must impress people with its certainty…don’t be afraid to bring it to a white heat, otherwise we won’t get anything…. Because if we were now to start retreating in diplomatic relations…then your talks would be of no use. In your talks you must drive it with the same confidence as we have done so far.”
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