Kennedy: The Classic Biography (114 page)

He was, moreover, genuinely concerned about fallout: the airborne radioactive debris produced by all atmospheric nuclear explosions which emitted tissue-damaging rays into human bodies and food. He realized that natural radiation hazards would have a far greater impact on present and future generations than several series of U.S. and Soviet tests combined. But he could not accept the bland assurances of Teller and others that there was no danger at all. Even one more case of leukemia, cancer or sterility was an unwelcome responsibility; and he thought it remarkable that extremist groups opposed to fluoridation of urban water supplies could strongly favor this pollution of our air.

One rainy day, seated at his desk, he asked Jerome Wiesner what brought the radioactive particles down on areas not immediately beneath an explosion. “And I told him,” said Wiesner, “that it was washed out of the clouds by the rain, that it would be brought to earth by rain, and he said, looking out the window, ‘You mean, it’s in the rain out there?’—and I said, ‘Yes’; and he looked out the window, looked very sad, and didn’t say a word for several minutes.”

Even after August 30 he repeated his hopes for a test-ban treaty, his hope to get the nuclear “genie back in the bottle.” Now he had to decide whether his resumption of atmospheric tests would convince the Soviets that a treaty was necessary or impossible.

An impartial panel of scientists evaluating the Soviet tests concluded that they had made important weapons progress, particularly in the development of larger weapons of low weight and high explosive content. Another long, secretly prepared and intensive Soviet series, based on the findings of the first series, might achieve a breakthrough of dangerous proportions if the U.S. had not meanwhile conducted its own experiments. The Defense Department argued that the improvement in our own capabilities from a new test series, even if not essential to the deterrent, could help provide that extra margin for limiting damage should deterrence ever fail. The unanimous military and scientific opinion was that underground and outer space tests would not be adequate.

Nearly all the principal advisers involved favored resuming atmospheric tests (although a few days before the tests began McNamara startled Rusk and Bundy at lunch by suggesting that they were not really necessary). Wiesner thought the technological arguments about even. Arthur Schlesinger suggested that we agree not to test unless and until the Soviets tested again, and Britain’s Macmillan made a similar suggestion. But that meant a return to the pre-August 30 status quo as though nothing had happened. “If they fooled us once,” said the President, “it’s their fault. If they fool us twice, it’s our fault.” American scientists could not be kept constantly in a state of readiness with no testing of our own, no commitment from the Soviets and no knowledge of their possible preparations.

Macmillan was eloquent in his pleas to the President to find some way to avoid more testing. He agreed that the West must test if no agreement could be reached. But a new round of testing by both sides, he said, could spur the arms race onto a path “at once so fantastic and so retrograde, so sophisticated and so barbarous, as to be almost incredible,” with nuclear weapons ultimately turning up in the hands of all kinds of “dictators, reactionaries, revolutionaries, madmen…. Then sooner or later, and certainly I think by the end of this century, either by error or folly or insanity, the great crime will be committed.”

Kennedy shared Macmillan’s concern. He agreed on the need for a “determined new initiative, a supreme effort to break the log jam” before he ordered atmospheric tests resumed. But how was that new initiative to be launched? Macmillan proposed a summit. Not without evidence that agreement is possible, said JFK. But the Soviets might stir up a new crisis over Berlin if the United States tests, warned Macmillan. They could anyway, said Kennedy. The new disarmament talks opening in Geneva might be wrecked unless the Americans forgo testing, said the Prime Minister. The Soviets would be more likely to attribute such a decision to weakness rather than goodwill, said the President, and make a treaty all the more difficult to reach.

In the end, Macmillan—whose cooperation was essential as our long-time nuclear ally and partner at Geneva, and whose Christmas Island test site was badly needed—loyally supported the President’s decision. But it was the leader of his loyal opposition, Labour Party Chief Hugh Gaitskell, who helped shape the final Presidential policy. Gaitskell, whom the President liked immensely, suggested in a letter on February 20 that our tests not begin before the new disarmament conference opened in Geneva on March 14, that they be announced before that date to enable the Soviets to agree to a treaty during the first month of that conference, and that the President make clear that the conclusion of a treaty would call off our tests. The President liked this approach, for he was willing to take whatever disadvantages would accrue from the Soviets’ testing last in exchange for the advantages of an enforceable treaty.

Some delicate problems remained. Some urged that he not announce our decision until the day of testing. No, said the President, secret preparations by the United States during the Geneva talks would seem too much like the previous year’s Soviet performance. The State Department proposed a test over Nevada immediately after the President’s announcement to show there was no indecision, no fear of fallout and no agonizing wait ahead. That made no sense to Kennedy on any of those grounds. Writing Macmillan on February 27, after we had worked on his speech over the holiday weekend at Palm Beach, he stated his intention to make a nationwide TV address on March 1 announcing atmospheric tests beginning April 15, unless an agreement were reached before then. The Prime Minister requested that the speech be given March 2 when the House of Commons would have recessed for the weekend (JFK agreed) and that the Soviets be given until May 3 (JFK changed it to “the latter part of April”).

The President’s solemn, factual televised address was impressive. He refused to sound so reassuring on the possible dangers of fallout that a future test-ban treaty would seem unimportant. He explained that his own soul-searching had concluded that the overriding dangers were those confronting free world security if the U.S. failed to test. With a painstaking detail which made no effort to oversimplify the facts, he reviewed the results of Soviet tests, the types of American tests needed, the stricter controls he would impose on fallout, the illogic and impossibility of another informal moratorium and the renewed offer to the Soviets of a treaty. He was acting, he stressed, on behalf of all

free peoples who value their freedom and security and look to our relative strength to shield them from danger….

It is our hope and prayer that these grim, unwelcome tests will never have to be made, that these deadly weapons will never have to be fired, and that our preparations for war will bring us the preservation of peace. Our foremost aim is the control of force, not the pursuit of force, in a world made safe for mankind. But whatever the future brings, I am sworn to uphold and defend the freedom of the American people, and I intend to do whatever must be done to fulfill that solemn obligation.

No Soviet agreement was forthcoming, and the tests began on April 25, 1962. They received as little publicity as the President could “manage.” He wanted no pictures of mushroom clouds, no eyewitness reports of each blast, and as little stimulus as possible to picketing and ban-the-bomb parades around the world. The Chinese Communists said the tests showed him to be “more vicious, more cunning and more adventurist than his predecessor”; the Russian news agency Tass called his last-chance offer to the Soviet Union a maneuver “strongly resembling blackmail”; the Young Americans for Freedom denounced him for waiting so long to resume; and the Students for Democratic Action denounced him for deciding to resume at all. But, as the result of Kennedy’s careful approach, both domestic and world opinion leaders were generally far more united on the necessity of our tests than they had been a few months earlier and far less critical of the U.S. than they had been of the Soviets.

It was John Kennedy who still had doubts about the value of his test series (although not about the necessity of his decision). He followed the tests closely, regarded their results skeptically and resisted constant pressures to expand them. Privately he speculated that fears of Soviet nuclear test progress might have been akin to previous fears of a Soviet “bomber gap” and “missile gap”; and he continued to ask just how much nuclear power beyond the deterrent level was really necessary. His ever-increasing mastery of these complex questions would enable him to make the most of the test-ban opportunity when it came.

CONVENTIONAL AND UNCONVENTIONAL FORCES

No degree of nuclear superiority and no amount of civil defense shelters would have increased John Kennedy’s appetite for nuclear war or his willingness to use nuclear weapons. It was a responsibility he was coolly prepared to meet, if meet it he must. But he deeply believed, as he once privately remarked, that any actual resort to nuclear missiles would represent not the ultimate weapon but “the ultimate failure”—a failure of deterrent, a failure of diplomacy, a failure of reason.

A superior nuclear deterrent, moreover, had a limited military value in the 1960’s. It could deter a nuclear attack. It could probably deter a massive conventional attack on a strategic area such as Europe. But it was not clear that it could deter anything else. And for at least a decade the most active and constant Communist threat to free world security was not a nuclear attack at the center but a nonnuclear nibble on the periphery—intimidation against West Berlin, a conventional attack in the Straits of Formosa, an invasion in South Korea, an insurrection in Laos, rebellion in the Congo, infiltration in Latin America and guerrillas in Vietnam.

Khrushchev’s speech on January 6, 1961, threatened not to destroy or invade new areas and populations but to impose his system upon them through continued “salami” tactics—through piecemeal expansion of the Communist domain one slice at a time—through limited warfare, subversion or political aggression in areas where our nuclear deterrent was not usable both because our security was not directly in danger and because massive weapons were inappropriate. If we lacked the conventional capacity to withstand these tactics effectively, we could be faced with a choice of launching a virtually suicidal nuclear war or retreating.

Unfortunately, in the 1950’s, as the Communists increasingly achieved a military posture that made the threat of massive retaliation less and less credible, the United States had moved increasingly to a strategy based on that threat. Kennedy inherited in 1961 a 1956 National Security Council directive relying chiefly on nuclear retaliation to any Communist action larger than a brush fire in general and to any serious Soviet military action whatsoever in Western Europe. “If you could win a big one,” Eisenhower had said, “you would certainly win a little one.” Because NATO strategy had a similar basis, no serious effort had been made to bring its force levels up to full strength, and our own Army had been sharply reduced in size.

This doctrine bore little relation to the realities. Frequently, when conferring about some limited struggle, the President would ask, “What are my big bombs going to do to solve that problem?” There was no acceptable answer. Even the tactical nuclear weapons supposedly designed for “limited” wars were not an answer. The Kennedy administration increased the development and deployment of those weapons worldwide, and by 60 percent in Western Europe alone. The President understandably preferred that we hold the edge in such weapons rather than the Soviets. But he was skeptical about the possibility of ever confining any nuclear exchange to the tactical level, and he was concerned about the thousands of such weapons theoretically under his control that were in the hands of lower-level commanders. For some of these “small” weapons carried a punch five times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Those ready for use in Europe alone had a combined explosive strength more than ten thousand times as great as those used to end the Second World War. If that was tactical, what was strategic—and what would be the effect of their use in heavily populated Europe on the people we were supposedly saving? Once an exchange of these weapons started, the President was convinced, there was no well-defined dividing line that would keep the big bombs out.

This analysis of our predicament produced the new Kennedy-McNamara doctrine on conventional forces—a more radical change in strategy even than the augmenting and defining of the nuclear deterrent. The essence of this doctrine was choice: If the President was to have a balanced range of forces from which to select the most appropriate response for each situation—if this country was to be able to confine a limited challenge to the local and nonnuclear level, without permitting a Communist victory—then it was necessary to build our own nonnuclear forces to the point where any aggressor would be confronted with the same poor choice Kennedy wanted to avoid: humiliation or escalation. A limited Communist conventional action, in short, could best be deterred by a capacity to respond effectively in kind.

Obviously this doctrine did not downgrade nuclear power. But Kennedy’s experiences in Berlin in 1961 and Cuba in 1962 demonstrated to his satisfaction that the best deterrent was a combination of both conventional and nuclear forces. At times, he commented, “A line of destroyers in a quarantine or a division of well-equipped men on a border may be more useful to our real security than the multiplication of awesome weapons beyond all rational need.”

The new approach began immediately upon the administration’s taking office. It was consistent with the President’s Senatorial and campaign speeches on a “military policy to make all forms of Communist aggression irrational and unattractive.” It was articulated in books he admired by Maxwell Taylor, James Gavin and the British analyst B. H. Liddell Hart. It was urged by Secretary Rusk as essential to our diplomacy. It was recommended by Secretary McNamara as a part of his build-up of options. It was represented in Kennedy’s first State of the Union Message authorizing a rapid increase in airlift. It was emphasized by the ammunition, personnel and other increases in his March, 1961, Defense Message. It was expanded considerably in his May, 1961, special State of the Union Message, in which all his defense recommendations were in the nonnuclear field. It was stressed in his efforts to strengthen local forces through the military assistance program. And it was, finally, the heart and hard core of his military response to the 1961 Berlin crisis.