To Move the World (21 page)

After the fact, historical events have an air of inevitability, because we forget the many contingencies—personal leadership, luck, timing, and accidents—that made them possible. Yet we must remember: there was nothing inevitable about achieving a test ban treaty. Here is how the historian Vojtech Mastny described the policy scene as of early 1963:

The Partial Test Ban Treaty was signed and ratified for one overwhelming reason: Kennedy campaigned for it. He was a gifted campaigner: in six campaigns between 1946 and 1960, he had not lost a single one.
^‡
And he triumphed again in the summer of 1963.

When the treaty was adopted, both Kennedy and Khrushchev believed that further easing of tensions would soon follow. This was to be, as Kennedy said so frequently, the first step on a journey. In a short period of time, there would be others: cultural exchanges; the famous “hotline” for direct communication and crisis management, agreed upon ten days after the Peace Speech; the sale of $250 million worth of wheat to the Soviet Union;
²⁴
potential cooperation in space, as Kennedy had offered in his September 1963 address to the UN General Assembly.

But the world’s hopes were followed by despair just eight weeks later when Kennedy was assassinated. The outpouring of grief was beyond any easy reckoning. For all of the limitations of his brief time in office, for all of his missteps and incomplete work, Kennedy had touched the hearts of people around the world, had caused them to share a goal of peace and to move irresistibly toward it.

In his condolence letter to President Johnson, Khrushchev wrote that Kennedy’s death was a grievous loss for the United States, and “that the gravity of this loss is felt by the whole world, including ourselves, the Soviet people … it was an awareness of the great responsibility for the destinies of the world that guided the actions of the two Governments—both of the Soviet Union and of the United States—in recent years. These actions were founded on a desire to prevent a disaster and to resolve disputed issues through agreement with due regard for the most important, the most fundamental interests of ensuring peace.”
²⁵
Jacqueline Kennedy wrote to Khrushchev:

Not long after Kennedy’s death came Khrushchev’s political demise. Kennedy’s bond with Khrushchev had certainly helped to sustain the Russian leader in 1963 even after Khrushchev’s missteps in Cuba and elsewhere. With Kennedy gone, Khrushchev’s hold on power soon weakened. Within four months, Leonid Brezhnev began to plot Khrushchev’s ouster, which occurred in October 1964, eleven months after Kennedy’s death. The peaceful ouster itself reflected a forward movement of Soviet politics, as Khrushchev himself acknowledged to a confidant:

With the protagonists gone so quickly from the scene, Kennedy’s peace initiative was prematurely put to the test. Would the Partial Test Ban Treaty prove to be the first step of a journey toward peace, even one of a thousand miles? Or would it prove to be a fleeting moment, a brief Camelot in the
Sturm und Drang
of the raging Cold War?

Chapter 8
.
 

AS KENNEDY HIMSELF
had acknowledged, the treaty was not the millennium: it did not end conflicts, lead to peace, or halt the arms race. In many areas, the spirit of cooperation that began in 1963 was overwhelmed by the ongoing and intrinsic dynamics of the Cold War. Yet it made a lasting difference, one that inspires and challenges us in our own time.

Doomsday
 

In 1947, the
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
created the Doomsday Clock, which indicated how close humanity was to global disaster, or “midnight.” In 1947 the clock was placed at seven minutes to midnight; by 1949, humanity had given up four minutes of its margin, with the clock at just three minutes to midnight. The Soviet Union had become a nuclear power: the nuclear arms race was on. By 1953, humanity had given up another minute: the clock stood at just two minutes to midnight. Both sides had thermonuclear
weapons. “Only a few more swings of the pendulum, and, from Moscow to Chicago, atomic explosions will strike midnight for Western civilization.”
¹

Eisenhower had left the clock at seven minutes till midnight, the same position as in 1947, the start of the Cold War. Kennedy’s peace initiative pushed the minute hand back to twelve minutes before midnight in 1963, a new margin of safety. The treaty contributed to a decade of détente. Yet matters began to unravel once again after 1972, and the minute hand moved forward perilously over the coming dozen years, reaching just three minutes to midnight in 1984. Then, at a moment of high peril, the momentum shifted again toward peace with the accession to power of Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev’s reforms brought the Cold War to a peaceful end in 1991, pushing the minute hand back to seventeen minutes before midnight, the largest buffer of safety since the start of the nuclear era. Yet even that dramatic gain has proved to be evanescent. In our time, the minute hand has rushed forward once again to just five minutes to midnight.

Figure 1. Doomsday Clock: Minutes to Midnight, 1947–2012.

Throughout these ups and downs, the Partial Test Ban Treaty helped to keep humanity away from the precipice. Its most
direct
long-lasting impact was on nuclear proliferation, just as Kennedy had hoped. Yet its larger significance was as conclusive proof that cooperation between the superpowers was possible, a fundamental lesson and legacy of enduring significance.

The Partial Success of Non-Proliferation
 

The Partial Test Ban Treaty (PTBT) proved that agreements could be reached and honored by both sides, and in this way it gave a powerful impetus to a series of arms control treaties along the lines that Kennedy had outlined in his 1961 speech at the UN. Kennedy had suggested six steps: (1) a test ban; (2) a stop to the production and transfer to other nations of fissionable material; (3) a stop to the transfer of control over nuclear weapons to states that do not own them; (4) a prohibition of nuclear weapons in space; (5) a gradual destruction of existing weapons; and finally (6) a halt to the production of strategic nuclear delivery vehicles and their gradual destruction. Steps 1 through 4 were substantially achieved before the end of the Cold War, and the progress that was made owes much to the Partial Test Ban Treaty, while steps 5 and 6 have proved to be far more elusive until recently.

Most important, the PTBT made possible the signing of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1968, a treaty of profound significance for global security.
²
For both Kennedy and Khrushchev, the specter of a massive proliferation of nuclear weapons was the main driving force behind the test ban treaty. Their hope was that a ban on nuclear tests would slow or stop the ability of other countries to become nuclear powers. Kennedy famously worried aloud that fifteen to twenty countries would become nuclear powers by the 1970s: