Kennedy: The Classic Biography (113 page)

The chief focal points of the debate within the administration were the proposals for shelter legislation and a public information booklet. In time both were toned down to a low-key level. The legislation in 1962 simply requested a long-range program of Federal incentives for the construction of community shelters in schools, hospitals, libraries and similar public centers, the cost to be shared by state and local governments and nonprofit institutions. These would supplement the sixty million existing shelter spaces identified in a quietly successful Defense Department survey, but made no pretense of covering everyone or offering protection against blast and firestorm.

The original draft of the Federal booklet contained terrorizing pictures, fatuous assurances, useless instructions and an expectation of nuclear war. It even praised the “new market for home shelters…in keeping with the free enterprise way.” It was scrapped in favor of a blander, more realistic pamphlet, which deleted references to shelters as part of our national defense, inserted material on how grim a post-attack world would be and made a series of similar alterations. Instead of being sent to every American household as first planned, it was simply made available in post offices and local civil defense offices for those who requested it.

The internal administration debate over the bill and the booklet helped clarify the President’s own mind. Civil defense, as he had said in May, was simply a matter of insurance, not deterrence. It had no direct bearing on either defense or disarmament and was not a new weapon in the cold war. No reasonable shelter program could help discourage an enemy attack, prevent an unacceptable loss of life or strengthen this nation’s position at either the summit or the brink. But neither was such a program provocative, cowardly or unnecessary. He still bore the responsibility in an age of thermonuclear weapons for the lives of 180 million Americans and the survival of this nation as a nation. Nuclear war was improbable but not impossible—“And I don’t want the survivors, if there are any,” he said ruefully to me one day, “to say we never warned them or never did anything to save at least some of their families while there was still time.”

He did not give the shelter bill a top priority—reducing it in 1963 from the level of a major Presidential message to a departmental request—but he continued (in vain) to put it forward. “When the skies are clear,” he told his news conference in 1962, noting that public interest had subsided almost as suddenly as it had spurted upward, “no one is interested…. Then, when the clouds come—[and] after all, we have no insurance that they will not come—…everyone will wonder, why wasn’t more done? I think the time to do it is now.”

THE RESUMPTION OF NUCLEAR TESTING

The fallout shelter controversy in the summer of 1961 was heightened by new fears of nuclear testing in the atmosphere. Since 1956, when he had followed the lead of party nominee Adlai Stevenson, Kennedy had believed—as he said at that time—that “the United States should take the leadership in bringing these tests to an end.” In 1959, as a Senator and national contender, he had strongly opposed Governor Rockefeller’s call for resuming underground testing, which along with all other tests had been suspended on both sides while negotiations at Geneva sought a formal test-ban treaty. In 1960, as a candidate, he had pledged not to resume testing in the atmosphere first and not to test underground until he had had time “to exhaust all reasonable opportunities” for agreement. In January, 1961, his first announcement at his first Presidential news conference had disclosed the commissioning of a special group to prepare a new bargaining position and an actual draft of a reasonable and effective treaty. His private belief was that a better prepared, more reasonable U.S. position in 1960 would have secured a test-ban treaty then, and he regarded this as the most promising area for him to begin “anew” with the U.S.S.R.

But when he sent Arthur Dean to Geneva in the spring with a new treaty, carefully designed to meet all legitimate Soviet objections, he found that the Soviet position had moved still further away from ours. Events in the Congo, they argued, had convinced them that they could not rely on international operations governed by either a neutral or a majority, and no test-ban inspection system in which they did not reserve a veto would be acceptable.

At Vienna Khrushchev insisted to Kennedy that no neutral could be trusted not to authorize American spying, that more than three on-site inspections a year of seismic disturbances would be espionage, and that the whole subject should be relegated to an unimportant part of his elusive disarmament plan. Kennedy pressed him hard on the dangers of other countries developing nuclear arsenals; but Khrushchev, while agreeing that there was some logic in this, stated that the fact that France simply spat on the Geneva negotiations and continued testing proved his point.

The Soviet Chairman did state at Vienna, however, that his country would wait for the United States to be the first to resume testing. Gromyko said the same to Rusk. Both agreed with Kennedy that the negotiations at Geneva should continue. The President told his news conference that “the stakes are too important for us to abandon” the effort. In August he asked Dean to return to Geneva for one more try, “with our hopes and prayers, and I believe with the hopes and prayers of all mankind.” He asked Dean to outsit, outtalk and outlast the Russian negotiators (in what Dean had once privately called “the bladder technique” of diplomacy) until he could find out for certain whether any glimmer of progress was possible.

But ever since he had taken office, Kennedy had been pressured to authorize a resumption of U.S. testing. Renewed American testing, according to the military and the Teller wing of the scientific community, was indispensable to the development of new nuclear weapons. It would provide a necessary hedge against the possibility that the Soviets were secretly testing underground. The Joint Chiefs urged him in February to resume testing if no agreement could be reached after sixty days of negotiations (implying that they agreed to his test-ban proposals only if he agreed with their position). They were for atmospheric testing; the Defense Department was for underground testing; the State Department was for putting off a decision; and a variety of nuclear scientists said that no agreement was in sight, the moratorium had dangerously slowed our technical progress and the United States should test while continuing to talk.

A Gallup Poll in July, 1961, showed public support, by more than a two-to-one margin, for America’s resuming testing on its own. The Joint Atomic Energy Committee of the Congress, almost always a force for bigger and better bombs, favored resumption. Similar pressures came from various parts of the Congress and press. Dr. Teller maintained publicly that the Soviets had been testing underground steadily since the moratorium began. The President convened in June a special scientific panel to examine the latter possibility and that panel concluded in the negative. Finally, early in August, despite a new recommendation from Maxwell Taylor and the Chiefs that testing be resumed immediately, he decided to order preparations for underground tests but not actually to resume them until it was absolutely clear—not only to him but to the world—that he had done everything possible to obtain a treaty, that the Soviets had not bargained in good faith or really wanted such a treaty, and that the security of the free world required this country to test.

At both Vienna and Geneva it had seemed to Kennedy at times that the Soviets were attempting to goad us into resuming testing first. The appealing logic of the U.S.-U.K. proposals seemed only to make them more indignant. Nevertheless, asked at his August 30 news conference about continued Soviet objections, the President refused to acknowledge the cause as hopeless. Shortly after his return to the White House that afternoon, he was handed the grim news: the Soviets had announced a resumption of atmospheric tests.

His first reaction is unprintable. It was one of personal anger at the Soviets for deceiving him and at himself for believing them. For their tests had obviously been under secret preparation even before Vienna and throughout the Geneva negotiations. His second reaction was one of deep disappointment—deeper, I believe, than that caused by any other Soviet action during his tenure.

But anger and disappointment were not panic. As a two-month series of enormous Soviet explosions went forward, Khrushchev boasted of a hundred-megaton bomb.
²
“No super-deep shelter,” said the Russian Army newspaper
Red Star
, “can save [one] from an all-shattering blow from this weapon.” His hope, Khrushchev told two British visitors, was to shock the West into concessions on Berlin and disarmament. But if that actually was his intention, he was doomed to disappointment.

In a series of emergency meetings which followed the Soviet announcement, Kennedy was the calmest man in the room. His advisers were filled with suggestions, including a “fireside chat” detailing our nuclear superiority, a prompt announcement of our own test resumption, the explosion of a test bomb immediately to show we weren’t unprepared, and knocking out the Soviet test site with one well-placed nuclear bomb. But the President, rejecting all these answers, was filled with questions: Why did our intelligence not detect their preparations? What kinds of weapons will they need to test? How thoroughly can we monitor their tests? Can we now maintain our superiority by testing underground only? When should we test and when should we announce it?

One of the most thoughtful pieces of advice, in the President’s view, was that of his United States Information Agency Director, Edward R. Murrow. Murrow urged no precipitate action that might throw away this opportunity to consolidate our leadership of the non-Communist world and isolate the Communist bloc. The voices on the right “who today urge you to resume testing immediately,” he said, “will tomorrow contend that the decision to do so was merely another belated reaction to Soviet action.”

What emerged from these meetings was a controlled and deliberate response that made the most of world-wide antagonisms toward the Soviets without compromising our own freedom to test:

1. On that same night of August 30, a White House statement denounced the Soviet tests as a hazard to health and peace and as proof of their hypocrisy and duplicity, leaving the United States “under the necessity of deciding what its own national interests require.”

2. The following day, after a formal NSC meeting, another statement called the Soviet action “primarily a form of atomic blackmail, designed to substitute terror for reason…testing not only nuclear devices but the will and determination of the free world.” That statement reassured all allies—and a subsequent full-scale briefing reassured the Congress—as to the adequacy of our nuclear capabilities.

3. Over the Labor Day weekend various statements on and off the record made clear that a hundred-megaton bomb was “far too large for military objectives,” and that the United States could make one if desired but could accomplish the same impact with two well-placed ten-megaton bombs.

4. On September 3 Kennedy—joined by British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan—gave Khrushchev a chance to draw back by proposing an immediate three-power ban on atmospheric tests.

5. On September 5, having “taken every step that reasonable men could justify,” and having waited until the Soviet bombs were actually exploding to the dismay of people the world over, the President ordered the resumption of underground testing in the United States. Those tests began almost immediately thereafter.

6. In the following weeks, in his talks with spokesmen for the Belgrade conference of nonaligned nations (which had timidly refused to censure the Soviet blasts) and to the General Assembly of the United Nations, he indicted the Soviets for “secretly preparing new experiments in destruction…while we were negotiating in good faith in Geneva,” defended the necessity and safety of U.S. underground tests, and denounced the use of terror as a weapon “by those who could not prevail either by persuasion or example.” He publicly appealed to the Soviets not to test a fifty-megaton bomb which could serve only to pollute the atmosphere, and then announced the explosion when it occurred—as our government had announced most of the Soviet explosions. A White Paper, reviewing the Soviet’s negative negotiating position and detailing the fallout effects of the fifty-megaton bomb, was distributed to all UN delegations and others.

7. Finally, as the Soviet test series came to a close on November 2, the President issued a brief statement more carefully rewritten than any of similar size on which I worked. In addition to making clear that their tests had not ended our over-all superiority (“In terms of total military strength, the United States would not trade places with any nation on earth” was deemed by the President to be the most positive way of saying this without being provocative), the President made his first specific statement on the possibility of this nation’s resuming nuclear tests in the atmosphere.

Despite all the cautions and conditions he attached to it—which were aimed at his own military as well as the world (some of the Joint Chiefs, for example, wanted all kinds of tests immediately)—it was widely assumed that the decision had already been made with absolute finality to resume atmospheric tests. It had not. It was, in fact, one of the closest decisions the President ever had to make. While believing he had little choice other than to resume, he at least wanted to keep the door open. He had no intention of being stampeded into so serious an action merely because the Soviets had done so first. He made clear to the Pentagon that preparations to test did not commit him to test; that his personal approval would be required for each test proposed; that no test would be conducted to provide information not strictly essential and otherwise unobtainable; that no test would be undertaken which could not hold fallout to a minimum; and that several of the tests that were proposed would have to be combined, others deferred or held underground and some excluded as unnecessary. Having been told before August 30 how much progress could be made by merely testing underground, he was now skeptical when the same military and scientific authorities told him only atmospheric tests could do the job. He wondered whether our nuclear superiority and weapons development had not already reached the point where they were adequate, regardless of Soviet gains. Inasmuch as Soviet progress had not ended our deterrent, and U.S. tests could not give us a pre-emptive first strike or an anti-missile missile capability, did we need to test? Talk about a neutron bomb which destroyed only people, not buildings, struck him as foolish in the extreme.