War and Peace in the Nuclear Age; Interview with Jerome Wiesner, 1986 [2]

Interviewer: CAN YOU TELL ME THAT LAST STATEMENT IN A SHORTER FORM? WAS KENNEDY'S INAUGURATION SPEECH A REACTION TO SOMETHING KHRUSHCHEV SAID? Wiesner: I believe Kennedy's reaction.... Interviewer: (INTERRUPTION) Wiesner: I think that Kennedy's inaugural speech was tougher than it might have been if Khrushchev hadn't just a few days before made a speech about the right of wars of liberation and the fact that the Soviet Union would support them. It was something that Kennedy, I think, had to respond to. Interviewer: DO YOU THINK THAT WAS AN UNFORTUNATE WAY TO START A PRESIDENCY? Wiesner: Yeah. I think it was very bad; I think we already had a burden...which the President had to unravel, which was the campaign on a missile gap that didn't exist, and he went forthwith to try to correct it, but if he hadn't... had... been told he had to make a tough inaugural speech it might have been easier for him to deal with all those later problems. Interviewer: WHY, WHEN IT WAS CLEAR THAT THERE WAS NO MISSILE GAP, DID THE KENNEDY ADMINISTRATION GO AHEAD WITH THIS MASSIVE BUILD UP?

Wiesner: Well... They... probably wouldn't admit it was so massive, since I was on the other side, trying to cut it down, they thought that they were being constrained. For example, uh, in the case of the missiles, um, I had initially thought we should stick to the Eisenhower limit of 200, and in, in the give-and-take Carl Kaysen and I finally decided we'd stick at 400; uh, McNamara eventually came to a thousand; and when we finally argued about it in front of the President, uh, trying to decide what to do... McNamara said essentially that "I don't believe we can go to the Congress after all the missile-gap talk and ask for less than this and not get murdered." And Kennedy accepted that, and he may have been right. Now... if... the facts are that the Air Force was asking for very much more than, uh, than the thousand that McNamara settled for, and the Joint Chief was asking them for less than the Air Force but more than McNamara's number, so McNamara's number was a considerable compromise with what the Defense Department wanted. Interviewer: ARE YOU SAYING THAT WE SHOULD CHECK THE BACKGROUND?

Wiesner: Is there anything like that? Interviewer: I GUESS YOU'RE SAYING THAT THE BUILD UP WAS MORE A RESULT OF DOMESTIC POLITICS THAN MILITARY? Wiesner: Yeah. Well, it was very complicated, because at... for example, at the time of the Gaither Panel, which was in '57, we believed, or at least we started out believing, the estimates of the Soviet, uh, missile capability, and... looking ahead, in the fall of 1957, the Russians fired their first intercontinental ballistic missile. We asked the CIA to make us an estimate of when they would have an operational force, assuming that that missile was a prototype, and they said they could have a very large force, several hundred or more, by the early 1980s, if they wanted to. The US, at that point, didn't have a program aimed at that, so we were concerned. When the U-2 began to fly, it became evident that the... Soviet Union was not deploying its missiles, and, but that was held very secret; there's a strange fact about intelligence: the more important it is for everyone to know it, the more highly classified it gets. And very few people, except those people around, very close to the President and the CIA special project, knew that there was growing evidence that there were no ballistic missiles being deployed in the Soviet Union. And in fact the Gary Power episode came about because people thought they had spotted the first operational, uh, Soviet missile. But the campaign had started.... The Eisenhower administration, in the... mid to late 1950s, before the U-2 and Discoverer satellites, believed there was in fact going to be a missile gap, that the Russians had a development lead and therefore ought to have a production lead and a deployment lead. And they had told this to the Congress, and particularly Symington and Jackson, who were Democrats, had fed this to the, uh, uh, campaign people. And so it was an important part of the campaign. Uh... I, I knew, I began to know... know about this in the summer of 1950; I knew it as a very highly classified piece of information; I tried to get Kistiakowsky to get who was science adviser to get Eisenhower to brief the Kennedy team... they were reluctant to do it. I felt that I could not violate security; I tried to discourage them from heavy emphasis on defense and missile gap, but it was the most popular campaign theme, as it always seems to be, and, uh, so it continued. Now, right after the inauguration, Rostow and I told — not Rostow.... start over again. Right after the inauguration, Kaysen and I told the President that there was very substantial evidence that there was no missile gap? we gave, had the Air Force and the CIA brief him; he then had McNamara briefed, and then McNamara held a press conference saying the data shows that we were wrong. Many people believe that this was a cynical, uh, operation; I think it was an honest operation, that is, they were, Congress was informed by the Eisenhower administration of the problem. It was never informed when the facts began to change, and the few of us who might have been in a position to change it were constrained by the, uh, security laws. Interviewer: WHAT WAS KENNEDY'S ATTITUDE TOWARD NUCLEAR WEAPONS?

Wiesner: Well, Kennedy, I think the attraction between Kennedy and myself was that he did, he was really genuinely opposed to nuclear weapons in all forms. Now he was particularly concerned about fallout. But fallout was also the issue of, of the day; every morning there'd be a bunch of women marching around the White House, and he'd occasionally say to me, "Your ladies are out there again." One day we were sitting in the Oval Office. It was raining, he was rocking. He said, "Where's all this fallout go?" and I said, "It gets washed out by the rains, usually it falls on a field somewhere." And he looked out the window and...it was raining, and he said, "You mean it's coming down there?" and I said, "Yes, I guess so." And... then he just sort of went on rocking without... saying anything for a long time. Interviewer: BUT THAT WAS THE FIRST TIME HE UNDERSTOOD THAT THE RAIN WILL RADIATE TOO?

Wiesner: I don't believe so. Interviewer: HOW IMPORTANT WAS THAT TO HIM? HOW DEEPLY CONCERNED WAS HE? Wiesner: Well... I think he had a pair of concerns: he was concerned, he was being made aware daily, by the women's strike for peace, and SANE and others, of, of the health hazard, so that that was a real problem. But he also was very concerned about nuclear war, and its destructive effects...He was very disappointed, for example, when we didn't get a comprehensive nuclear test ban; it was obvious to all of us that we'd succeeded in doing something very important from a public-health point of view, but we hadn't done anything to arrest the arms race, and that was a dis—, that was a real sadness for him. Interviewer: WHY DO YOU THINK THE SOVIET UNION STARTED TESTING AGAIN IN '61?

Wiesner: Um... Now, I, it's all conjecture, obviously. One of the arguments that we made to ourselves in both the Eisenhower administration and the Kennedy administration, and to the Joint Chiefs, and even so we got a lot of resistance, was that the United States' weapons were so much better than the Russians' that... a test ban now would have frozen us into a position of uh, considerable superiority. Now, the Russians obviously knew that; the Russians had had to live through the campaign, um, the, the Kennedy adminstration added to the nuclear forces... instead of holding to the Eisenhower number of ballistic missiles, we went to a much larger number, a thousand instead of a couple hundred, we did something which I've never adequately understood: we increased the number of Polaris submarines from 29 to 39. These were all, I would imagine, aggressive acts I, whenever I'm facing a question of this kind I try to ask how it would look if I was a Russian; that's a dangerous question 'cause you can get into trouble with it, but I think if you want a, want to have a serious negotiation you have to ask that question. And... I think the Russians... had the right to be frightened by that rather substantial buildup... US forces. Um…there's a lot of evidence that they had made up their minds that they were going to test, early on in the Kennedy administration, because reports from the first negotiation, first meeting, were really very negative, the Russians had lost interest, and it was perfectly clear. Some time later, I don't remember exactly the date, I went over just to get a sense of it, and the President suggested that I go and see what the Russians I might know thought; I came back, uh, convinced that we weren't going to get anywhere with them. I wasn't absolutely convinced they were going to test, but it was perfectly clear that this was a moment when they were not intending to, to deal with us on, on the test ban. Interviewer: WERE YOU AROUND KENNEDY WHEN THE DECISION WAS MADE FOR THE UNITED STATES TO START TESTING AGAIN?

Wiesner: Yes Interviewer: CAN YOU TELL ME WHAT WAS IN THE PRESIDENT'S MIND THEN? AFTER WHAT YOU'VE TOLD ME ABOUT HIS WORRIES ABOUT FALLOUT, WHY DID HE START TESTING AGAIN? Wiesner: I think that Kennedy's decision to start testing was more political than technical; he was under very, very heavy pressure from, from the military and from the laboratories, from the Congress, ah, from the newspapers, uh — we had a lot of talks about it; I took the strong position that we didn't have to resume nuclear testing and I was usually, me and some of the people around me, who worked for me, were convinced that the Russians had made progress, those...our monitoring told us that, in some cases, they'd drawn... up to us, maybe in one or two cases they were slightly better now; they'd set off this very large bomb, which we could have done, and didn't do, we hadn't; in fact I was bitterly attacked by the Air Force for not allowing us to do a 60-megaton test. But there was nothing in...the series that we were going to test that was an essential military weapon that couldn't have been built, maybe a little less efficiently, and therefore the decision. It would have been very healthy for the world and for our moral position if we hadn't tested, and Kennedy knew that; but domestic pressures were such that it would have been very costly for him, or at least that's what he concluded, and I must say I didn't disagree. If he, he didn't test. Interviewer: CAN YOU GIVE US A SENSE, THEN, OF THE MOOD IN THE UNITED STATES IN THE LATE SUMMER OF '62?

Wiesner: Well, you have to remember, the, the public mood was affected... Let's start over. Yes, the public mood in the early '60s had a continuity that came from the Sputnik, in which the... United States... people, the United States had become convinced that we were technologically inferior to the Soviet Union, and so had much of the rest of the world. And so... there was a... great deal of apprehension, both about space and about the military, things which set a mood, particularly for the Congress and the press, that was, made it very difficult for the President... to, to be restrained. In fact after the nuclear partial-test—ban agreement, he... went around the country; he went intending to talk about the environment and he found that people weren't very interested in the environment, and he switched over to the success of the partial test ban and his hope that we would move on to a comprehensive test ban; and he found a...an enormous wave of, uh, support and enthusiasm for that; and he came back to Washington with a sense that, had he known there was that much support out in the country, he probably would have fought harder for a part-, uh, comprehensive test ban. Interviewer: DO YOU HAVE A SENSE FROM YOUR CONTACTS WITH SOVIETS WHY KHRUSHCHEV PUT THOSE MISSILES IN CUBA?

Wiesner: I really don't, um; I've often wondered about it... One can say it was a reckless act; we had put missiles in Turkey and Greece earlier, uh, 1954, '55, '56, and, uh, may have just given them an idea. Um, but strategically it was much more serious when seen from our point of view than it was from the Soviets — the Soviets were already surrounded by bombers, long-range bombers, short-range bombers, therefore... so that, uh, whereas, so that...the, the Thors and the, and the Jupiters, while a threat, were a small increment to the major U. S.... strategic force, whereas this really put the United States in a vulnerable position for the first time. But it was done... at a time when they were beginning to deploy intercontinental missiles, so it's hard for me to understand why they thought it was important strategically. Uh... it's possible that they took the potential invasion of Cuba by the United States very seriously, uh, the second invasion, and did it for that reason — I, I just don't know, I... Interviewer: YOU SPOKE LAST TIME ABOUT A "CHEAP FIX" AND ABOUT THE PROBLEMS WITH THE SOVIETS DEVELOPING TECHNICALLY THE ICBM. HAS THAT PERHAPS GOT SOMETHING TO DO...THEY DIDN'T HAVE THEIR ICBMS UP TO SPEED...

Wiesner: Yeah. They had more... what was... The... Soviets may have had a serious... gap between their ability to make the IRBMs and the ICBMs; they clearly -- or at least it's my belief, not substantiated by any Russian — that they didn't actually manufacture and deploy very many of their first missiles. It turned out to be a very good space vehicle and made launching Sputnik possible. But they were, above ground they were very soft, they were vulnerable, uh, they were designed before we had a reconnaissance capability that would spot 'em, and so they were depending on secrecy for protection. Um, once that was blown, these missiles were really pretty bad, as a military device; they were also liquid-fuel, and therefore took a long time to get ready, several hours, and they couldn't stay ready for many hours, so it was a pretty, pretty bad missile; in fact, some of the even-more-recent ones have been that bad. So it may very well be that they felt a few IRBMs in Cuba would be a more assured, uh, retaliatory f--, uh, capability than anything they could build within the Soviet Union. They didn't have the advantage we had, uh, uh, allies, except for Cuba, that would allow them to have bases... of the kind we had all around the Soviet Union, and they may have too casually viewed this as the equivalent of a base. They may very well have been surprised by the US response. Interviewer: HOW FRIGHTENED WERE YOU DURING THE MISSILE CRISIS?

Wiesner: Well that's a hard question to answer. But logically I didn't think they were on the brink of a nuclear war because I knew that Kennedy was very, very aware of the danger of weapons and I had a kind of confidence in Khrushchev, a judgment that is I thought he had a respect for him. On the other hand I did go home one night, and had a night—nightmare about a nuclear war. So I might have been more frightened than I was prepared to admit it out loud. Interviewer: DO YOU THINK THAT SAME ARGUMENT, THAT DOMESTIC POLITICS WAS MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE SOVIET THREAT WHICH YOU HAVE SAID EARLY PART OF THE KENNEDY ADMINISTRATION MIGHT ALSO BE SAID FOR KENNEDY'S HANDLING OF THE MISSILE CRISIS. Wiesner: No, I think that—it was generally believed by everybody including Kennedy that would be the make of a very major change in our strategic position. That this was a serious military threat. And I think it was a genuine concern for our security that motivated that. I've never felt at any point that we were responding to a uh, political pressure. The fact that political pressure tends to be needed. I think we were also responding to the fact that the general feeling that the Soviets had lied to us about what was going on.

Interviewer: THERE WERE SOME MILITARY PEOPLE WHO WERE ON THE JOINT CHIEFS AT THE TIME OF THE MISSILE CRISIS WHO WERE UPSET WITH KENNEDY AND FELT THAT HE SHOULD HAVE BEEN MUCH TOUGHER AND GONE MUCH FURTHER. Wiesner: Well, there were, yes I think that's correct although I was not personally deeply involved in the discussions or arguments so what I heard was really reflection of people's views but uh, there's always people who think we should go further, be tougher. Uh, I think that Kennedy handled it superbly, and the fact that we came out of it looking resolute, that while Khrushchev lost some face it was sort of minimal for him. Uh, there are people who insist that Khrushchev was thrown out because of this. I don't whether it's true or not, I've always felt that his domestic values were probably more serious than his international. Interviewer: HOW MUCH DID THE MISSILE CRISIS—THE RESOLUTION OF THE MISSILE CRISIS LEAD TO THE TEST BAN?

Wiesner: Well, I suspect that it created a receptivity on... Interviewer: CAN YOU START THAT ANSWER AGAIN. Wiesner: Well I think that the missile, Cuban Missile Crisis really set the stage for a serious discussion of test ban or arms limitations because both sides had stared at the possibility of a real nuclear war and had to realize what a catastrophe it would be and therefore at the risks of, that people worried about of a test ban for example or cut limiting numbers was nothing compared to the risk of a real war. Interviewer: YOU THINK THAT KENNEDY AND KHRUSHCHEV IN A SENSE GOT CLOSER TOGETHER AS A RESULT? Wiesner: It's hard to say... I suspect that the missile crisis did bring a deeper understanding between Kennedy and Khrushchev uh, a deeper respect for each other. Uh, I gather that at the early Vienna meeting uh, Khrushchev had sort of showed his disdain for the young president. I suspect by the time we were threw with the missile crisis he'd gotten over that. The correspondence that came back and forth was uh, tough but friendly uh, and uh, so, I think it I think um, I think the missile crisis played a very important role in setting the stage uh, for the arms limitation discussions. Interviewer: WHY WEREN'T WE ABLE TO GET A COMPREHENSIVE TEST BAN? I KNOW THAT'S AN ENORMOUS QUESTION BUT IF YOU CAN TRY TO ANSWER...

Wiesner: Well, we were not able to get a comprehensive nuclear test ban because it meant stopping testing. The uh, atmospheric uh, test ban still permitted people to do weapons development under ground and even though they thought at the time it would be more costly uh, uh, as in fact turned out to be more effective than the way we used to do it, it did not stop military weapons development, uh so that they opponents who were just naturally opposed to anything that were opposed to this test ban, partial test ban but not violently opposed were very, very strongly opposed to anything that would have restricted the development of new weapons. And I think the same thing was true in the Soviet Union. After dust had all settled and we had uh, a partial test ban uh, Khrushchev expressed this to an American reporter his regret that we hadn't uh, succeeded in making a comprehensive test ban and he said well, let's ask why he hadn't, what should have been in his power. He said, I didn't dare go back to the Politburo again, they'd have said, Kennedy's playing me for a fool. What we got within, the Russians were saying two or three or four inspections we were saying six or seven or eight. The fact of the matter is most of us didn't believe you'd ever carry out one and the most important purpose was for a domestic deterrent so opponents to the test ban couldn't claim the Russians were testing and we had no way of proving that they weren't. So the exact number really didn't matter. And a good number would have been a compromise number of five. But neither side was prepared to make that move. Kennedy because he'd been threatened by members of the Senate about the possible non-passage of the treaty and I don't know what threats Khrushchev had faced but it obviously had opposition. Interviewer: IS WHAT YOU'RE SAYING THAT THE DOMESTIC PROBLEMS WERE OF GREATER CONCERN THAN THE PROBLEMS BETWEEN THE COUNTRIES?

Wiesner: Well, I think there are problems between the countries and one has to be concerned about Soviet weapons if we are American and the Russians have to be concerned about American weapons if you are Russian. On the other hand I think the power of these weapons is so great that you can have big disparities on both sides and it doesn't really matter if you don't believe it's possible to carry out a first strike which I don't. By that I mean an attack on the other's force so complete that the retaliatory blow won't destroy a half a dozen or a dozen or two dozen cities. I think that's an impossibility. So that we're stalemated on both sides and you might as well be stalemated at a small number as a big number and the disparity of, if you also believe what I just said, that a difference in numbers of 2-to-1 really doesn't make all that difference. Interviewer: BUT IN REFERENCE TO THE MOOD IN '63, AT THE TIME OF THESE NEGOTIATIONS, IS WHAT YOU'RE SAYING THAT THE DOMESTIC PRESSURE ON THE TWO LEADERS WAS MORE IMPORTANT IN NOT GETTING A COMPREHENSIVE TEST BAN THAN THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE TWO COUNTRIES?

Wiesner: Well, I don't really know that, I'm saying that we never had a chance to find out because the domestic pressures on the President were so great that we were never able to negotiate rather wide ranging searches for an agreement and I think the same thing was true in the Soviet Union. Uh, in fact, situation very different today, I mean the pressures are for building more weapons-all for building more sophisticated weapons, even though there's no evidence that we need them on either side.