A document from the CQ Researcher archives: Report Outline
Kennedy Administration and Arms Control
1960: Year of Stalemate on Disarmament
New Lines of Attack on Arms Problem Kennedy Administration and Arms Control Resumption of Negotiations in New Atmosphere Fresh Hope for agreement on a nuclear testing ban is evident as the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union prepare to resume at Geneva, March 21, the negotiations that were recessed last Dec. 5 to await the change of administrations at Washington. The United States will be represented at the three-power talks by a new team of negotiators, headed by Arthur H. Dean. President Kennedy said on Jan. 30 that this country would “resume negotiations prepared to reach a final agreement” provided the Soviet Union was willing to accept “an effective and enforceable treaty.” The administration considers the coming test ban negotiations of primary importance—as providing an indication of whether it will be possible to reach agreement with the Russians on actual disarmament and as a first step in that direction. Release of the RB-47 fliers immediately after President Kennedy took office, and mention in cordial messages from Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev of “disarmament …with strict international control,” have suggested a readiness on the part of the U.S.S.R. for serious negotiations on arms control and related matters. Americans who attended the Sixth International Conference of Scientists in Moscow last December, including two Kennedy advisers, noted a greater willingness than in the past to discuss arms inspection and control problems. It was reported, March 13, that the two Kennedy advisers—Jerome B. Wiesner and Walt W. Rostow, then private citizens but now occupants of White House posts. —while in Moscow informed Kremlin officials that voluntary Soviet release of the fliers was essential as a first step to improve U.S.-U.S.S.R. relations. White House Press Secretary Pierre Salinger, commenting the same day on this New York Herald Tribune dispatch, said it was his understanding that all two dozen members of the American scientific group joined in indicating to the Russians that release of the fliers would be “a healthy first step.” In any case, Soviet authorities apparently were in a mood to accept the counsel of American scientists as to how the way might be prepared for resumption under the Kennedy administration of arms control negotiations. Observers have pointed out that Khrushchev has avoided direct criticism of the United States in his attacks on United Nations action in the Congo, and that he has pulled back from the brink of unilateral intervention. The Soviets evidently are wary of local conflicts that might lead to general nuclear war. It is possible also that such domestic economic pressures as growing consumer demands and current crop shortages have made Moscow anxious to lighten the heavy burden of the arms race on the Russian people. The Kennedy administration is taking a fresh look at the whole subject of disarmament or arms control. During the presidential campaign Kennedy sharply criticized previous Republican efforts in this field. In his inaugural address, Jan. 20, he urged that “both sides, for the first time, formulate serious and precise proposals.” In his State of the Union message to Congress ten days later, he said he had “already taken steps …to make arms control a central goal of our national policy.” Criticism of Past Approaches to Arms Question The sincerity of President Eisenhower's support of arms control efforts has never been called into question. But his administration was criticized, by both Democrats and more objective observers, for treating disarmament as a relatively minor and isolated facet of American foreign policy. Some of the criticism goes back to the Truman administration. Despite the many international conferences since 1946 on general disarmament and on control of nuclear weapons, the U.S. government never has built up a permanent, expert staff to study arms control problems and formulate basic policy. A recent report of the National Planning Association pointed to the resultant handicaps for American negotiators: The record indicates that we have gone into each successive disarmament conference with positions hastily and often superficially prepared. Ad hoc groups have been called to Washington to prepare policies and positions on a “crash” basis. On occasion, differences between departments of our government, or differences between our government and our allies, have not been reconciled until mid-conference, so that our representatives have lacked the advantage of starting with basic policies and a definite program. Between 1948, when U.N. discussions of the Acheson-Lilienthal-Earuch proposal for world control of nuclear energy lapsed without result, and the first postwar summit conference at Geneva in 1955, the United States brought forth no fresh ideas. During most of this period the State Department seldom had more than four professional workers assigned to disarmament; as late as the autumn of 1960, when the State Department's disarmament staff was considerably expanded, there were fewer than 100 experts on arms control in the entire federal establishment. To prepare for the 1955 summit conference, Nelson A. Rockefeller, then a presidential assistant, organized a special panel of government and outside experts. While President Eisenhower's dramatic open-skies proposal came out of their work, the decision to present it was not made until the summit conference was well under way—nor was the plan accompanied by any specific suggestions for putting it into effect. With the exception of Harold E. Stassen, the President's special assistant on disarmament from 1955 to 1958, who represented this country at the U.N. Disarmament subcommittee meetings in London in 1957, and James J. Wadsworth, who negotiated for the United States at the nuclear test ban meetings in Geneva for almost two years, the American personnel at arms control conferences has lacked continuity. Not only technical experts but also chiefs of delegations have been recruited from outside the government, on short notice, with little time to acquire familiarity with the subject in hand. Unresolved differences within the government have made it difficult to formulate a long-range disarmament policy. In particular, the profound mistrust of the Russians felt by such men as Adm. Arthur W. Radford, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and by Lewis L. Strauss and John A. McCone, successively chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, raised serious obstacles to any international agreement. Their views—at least partly shared by the late Secretary of State John Foster Dulles—were reflected in an inflexibility in the American position and an insistence on airtight guarantees of security which would be virtually impossible to attain. This country's delegations at arms control conferences, one observer has written, were strictly forbidden to go beyond their specific instructions at any given moment, “The instructions were not to make our most favorable offers at the start but to demand an initially high price which the Russians could be counted upon to reject and to counter with a similarly impossible price of their own.” With the appointment of James R. Killian, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as President Eisenhower's assistant for science and technology at the end of 1957, and the recruitment of top-flight scientists to his advisory committee, the President was exposed to influences more favorable to arms control agreements. But over the next three years the Killian group's authority was not strong enough to overcome the influence of opponents of agreement or to make up for the lack of a firm over-all policy. Growth of Pressure to Come to an Agreement Nuclear physicists, political scientists and other experts who have been called in to advise government officials and congressional committees on arms control have become increasingly insistent upon the need for concrete steps toward actual agreement. Research groups at Harvard, Johns Hopkins, M.I.T., California Institute of Technology and other institutions have been at work analyzing the highly complex problems involved. Similar studies have been made by private organizations like the RAND (Research and Development) Corporation, the Aerospace Corporation and the Institute for Defense Analysis. In recent months a number of arms control researchers have published books and magazine articles, setting off widespread and sometimes heated controversies. A notable example of the small but growing body of literature is the special Arms Control issue of Daedalus, Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, published last autumn and containing essays by most of the prominent students of the field—among them Jerome E. Wiesner of M.I.T., who was a member of President Eisenhower's Science Advisory Committee and is now President Kennedy's Special Assistant for Science and Technology. The thick volume, roughly the size of the World Almanac, is on the desk of every government official and senator or congressman concerned with disarmament. Many lay writers assert, as do many scientists, that arms control agreements accompanied by not the ultimate but by at least reasonable safeguards would be in the national interest. They emphasize the need to take calculated risks if the United States is to reach agreement with the Soviet Union. William R. Mathews, editor of the Arizona Daily Star, declared in a recent magazine article that the new President's “big job is to prepare the American people to make peace.” They [the people] are prepared morally and militarily to make war, but they are poorly prepared to make peace. …They need to be told that perfection is not only impossible but dangerous. Although they accept compromises constantly in their everyday domestic lives, they reject them as “appeasement” in our foreign policy. …[They] must be persuaded that there can be diplomatic successes where each side profits by making mutual concessions. The people must realize, Mathews concluded, that it will be better for the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. to get along together than to destroy each other. Perils in Further Delay in Applying Controls In the expanding body of literature on arms control there is evidence, as Jerome B. Wiesner wrote in a foreword to the Arms Control issue of Daedalus, of a “general consensus that civilization is faced with an unprecedented crisis.” There is a growing realization …that if the arms race is allowed to continue its accelerating pace, our country will have less security, not more, with each passing year. …We have seen each of our advances matched by Soviet developments. …The only discernible result has been that both our nations have produced more and more destructive weapons against which there is no defense…. It is an unpleasant fact that almost any invention the weapons engineers can conceive of can now be built—and the logic of the arms race seems to require that any possible weapon be built, no matter how horrible. Furthermore) the Soviet Union and the United States already own enough nuclear explosives, and are fast getting the delivery capability, to kill each other several times over. Experts point out that the present “soft” missiles in the American and Russian arsenals, vulnerable on their fixed, exposed launching sites, raise a danger of “pre-emptive attack”—attack by one side because it fears a surprise attack by the enemy. This particular peril will be reduced as less vulnerable missiles of the Polaris and Minuteman type, mobile under the sea or on rails or concealed in heavy concrete emplacements below ground, become operational in the next few years, constituting a “second-strike” force. But the Soviets cannot be sure that the West would use these missiles only for retaliation, any more than the West can be sure that the Soviets would not attack first. There is still danger that nuclear missiles will be fired by accident or miscalculation. Russian technology has been catching up at such a pace, D. G. Brennan said in the Daedalus Arms Control issue, that “by the late 1960s the U.S.S.R. might be able to launch a strike that would extinguish 90 percent of our population.” The recent Soviet success in setting a missile-bearing satellite on a course toward Venus suggests that the Russians may soon be able to launch missiles from outer space. Developments in the field of chemical-bacteriological-radiological weapons compound the risks. As long as nuclear capabilities were limited to the United States and its British ally on one side and the U.S.S.R. on the other, it was possible to think in terms of a “balance of terror” which neither side would deliberately upset. But that balance, always precarious, is now threatened by spread of nuclear weapons to other countries. France tested three atomic bombs in the Sahara Desert last year; a fourth test has been announced for April and it has been hinted that a French hydrogen bomb will be exploded over the sea later this year. Israel has an atomic reactor, built in 1960 with French assistance. While Israeli authorities have insisted that this facility is strictly for peaceful use, the tiny state in the highly inflammable Middle East now has the potential capacity to produce nuclear weapons. A West German firm has developed an inexpensive method of turning out weapons-grade uranium. The Adenauer government has promised that the process will be kept secret but there is no concealing the fact that it would make weapons possible for small countries in Africa or Asia. Estimates on when Red China may have a nuclear arsenal range from six years down to two years. Sir Charles P. Snow warned in an address before the American Association for the Advancement of Science last December that, unless an all-out effort is made to halt their spread, “Within, at the most, six years, China and several other states will have a stock of nuclear bombs.” Within 10 years at the most, he said, “some of these bombs are going off.” The Soviet Union has as much reason as the United States and Britain to want to keep nuclear bombs out of the hands of other countries. Yet some experts on the Soviet Union think 1961 may present a last chance to negotiate an arms reduction agreement. There is a widespread impression that the Chinese Communist leaders have given Premier Khrushchev about six months to reach an understanding with the new American administration. It has been reported that Llewellyn E. Thompson, U.S. Ambassador at Moscow, cautioned while in Washington in February that Red Chinese pressure might force the Russians to modify their “war is not inevitable” line at the Communist Party Congress meeting in October. A party line which assumed even the probability of war with the capitalist world could be expected to spark a Russian armaments build-up and greatly to increase the danger that war would actually result. Go to top 1960: Year of Stalemate on Disarmament Hopes for progress toward disarmament were pinned, a year ago, on the ten-nation East-West conference, which began work at Geneva in March, and on the Big Four summit meeting scheduled for May in Paris. The two conferences were closely linked. The Big Four foreign ministers, meeting in Geneva in August 1959 to explore prospects for a summit conference, had agreed to entrust general disarmament negotiations to a ten-nation committee set up outside the United Nations. And in November 1959 the General Assembly had given its blessing to the prospective independent attempt by five Western and five Communist nations to break the disarmament deadlock. Meanwhile, American, British and Soviet representatives, who had been struggling in Geneva since the end of October 1958 to work out a treaty banning nuclear weapons tests, were starting a second year of sessions. Months later, in the autumn of 1960, when the nuclear talks were still proceeding at a snail's pace but both the ten-nation conference and the summit conference had collapsed, disarmament was still the chief topic of debate at the U.N. General Assembly. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, then chief U.S. representative at the United Nations, observed in the course of the debate that “If ever there has been a discouraging and frustrating year in the disarmament field, it has been the year since the General Assembly last considered this subject.” Deadlock in General Disarmament Negotiations On the first day of the ten-nation conference, March 15, 1960, the Communist bloc offered a three-stage plan for “general and complete disarmament of all states.” This was the plan which Premier Khrushchev had first advanced when he addressed the U.N. General Assembly on Sept. 18, 1959, three days after arriving in the United States to visit President Eisenhower and tour the country. The sweeping proposal, as submitted at Geneva, called for achieving complete disarmament within four years, but it offered little in the way of precise detail with regard to controls considered essential by the West. A counter-proposal submitted by the five Western powers likewise called for general disarmament in three stages. The Western draft detailed certain initial steps and stressed the need for verifying compliance at each stage. It suggested establishment of an international disarmament organization and proposed joint study of means of inspection and control. The Eastern delegates objected that the plan did not aim at total disarmament and did not fix a time limit for completion. The Western representatives retorted that the Soviet proposal was vague, that it said nothing about inspection in the early stages nor about ways of settling international disputes in a disarmed world, and that its four-year time limit was unrealistic. Discussions continued without perceptible progress until the end of April 1960, when the conference recessed to await results of the mid-May summit meeting. It reconvened on June 7, after the U-2 incident and Khrushchev's virulent attacks on the United States, in a decidedly un-propitious atmosphere—and without the guidelines which the summit had been expected to provide. The Russians, however, came up with a revised disarmament plan which contained some provisions for control at each stage. The revised version proposed abolition in the first stage of the means of delivering nuclear weapons (a proposal first advanced in October 1959 by France) and suggested a joint study of ways to maintain peace (including creation of a U.N. police force). The plan called also for liquidation of overseas bases in the first stage—a measure which the chief U.S. delegate, Frederick M. Eaton, said would leave Western Europe at the mercy of the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, certain of the Russian proposals seemed closer to the Western position, and the head of the American delegation flew to Washington for consultations. On his return he told the Soviet delegation that he had brought new American proposals. Before they could be presented, at a session on June 27, the five Communist bloc representatives successively delivered bitter attacks on the West, announced that they were withdrawing from the conference, and thereupon walked out. The latest U.S. suggestions were outlined to the Western delegates for the record (the chief new element being greater emphasis on preventing surprise attack and on eliminating means of delivering nuclear weapons). But appeals to the Eastern delegates to return were fruitless, and on June 28 the ten-nation conference breathed its last gasp. The problem of disarmament was back in the lap of the United Nations, whose full Disarmament Commission, consisting of all U.N. member states, met on Aug. 16. A large part of the three-day session—finally attended by Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Vasily V. Kuznetzov after a threat of boycott—was spent in East-West recriminations over the question of which side had sabotaged the ten-nation conference. An American attempt to break the deadlock was made with a proposal, which President Eisenhower repeated at the General Assembly meeting in September, to stop either immediately or gradually all production of fissionable materials for use in nuclear weapons. As a first step, the United States offered to transfer 30 tons of enriched uranium from weapons stockpiles to peaceful purposes, under impartial verification, provided the U.S.S.R. would do the same. The American share alone, Ambassador James J. Wadsworth later told the General Assembly's Political Committee, would represent “more explosive materials than have been used by all mankind in all wars in all of history.” Acceptance of this proposal would represent “the largest disarmament measure ever carried out.” The United States, Wadsworth said, was “prepared to undertake this major step without making it contingent on any other disarmament proposals.” Premier Khrushchev had commented before the General Assembly on Sept. 23 that it would be meaningless to remove a given amount of fissionable material from present stockpiles, or even to halt further production, unless all accumulated stockpiles were destroyed. They were now “more than enough to annihilate whole countries and peoples.” Disarmament Proposals at General Assembly Disarmament was the subject of 13 draft resolutions at the session of the General Assembly last autumn. Of these the most prominent were three plans for “general and complete disarmament”: one introduced by the U.S.S.R., one by the United States, Great Britain and Italy, and a third by 10 Asian and African nations with Yugoslavia and Venezeula. The first two plans were based on previous proposals; the third fell somewhere between the Eastern and Western drafts. The West proposed a six-part final goal, to be achieved in progressive, controlled stages: (1) Reduction of national armed forces and armaments to levels required for internal security; (2) creation of a U.N. international peace force; (3) elimination of all mass destruction weapons (chemical bacteriological-radiological as well as nuclear) and all means of delivering such weapons; (4) use of outer space for peaceful purposes only; (5) effective verification measures; (6) a secure, free and open world. The U.S.S.R.'s proposal was notable for having dropped the reference to a four-year time limit. It seemed to endorse an international police force under control of the U.N. Security Council, and, as in June, it provided for international control and inspection of all disarmament measures. Khrushchev asserted that the plan in many respects met the West's position half way—especially in its provision for “effective international control.” Since the Soviet Union had consistently maintained that inspection within its borders would be a cloak for espionage, this feature of the revised plan was welcomed as an important concession. But the concession on controls received less attention than another feature of the Soviet plan, namely the proposal to substitute for the U.N. Secretary General a three-man directorate representing Western, Communist and neutral states. This proposal, inspired in part by Soviet dissatisfaction with Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold's course in the Congo, drew outraged protests from the Western delegates, who insisted that such an arrangement would give the U.S.S.R. additional veto power. Ambassador Wadsworth, granting many similarities between the Western and Soviet proposals, charged that the Russian attempt to reorganize the Secretariat was intended deliberately to forestall rather than to promote disarmament. The General Assembly's Political Committee agreed, Dec. 10, to withhold action on 10 of the 13 resolutions on disarmament. Three less controversial resolutions were adopted by the Assembly. They appealed for agreement to prevent wider dissemination of nuclear weapons, for continued suspension of nuclear tests, and for early conclusion of a test ban treaty. Since the General Assembly, which recessed just before Christmas, resumed its 15th session on March 7, Adlai E. Stevenson, newly appointed head of the U.S. delegation, has been attempting to get the Russians to agree to postpone discussion of general disarmament and other controversial items on the Assembly's agenda until autumn. Stevenson observed on the opening day of the current session that “We think a period of relative quiet would contribute to a better international climate for serious negotiation on such vital subjects as disarmament.” However, after a week of behind-the-scenes maneuvering, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko, head of the Russian delegation, still seemed intent on bringing the touchy arms question up for early debate in the 99-nation international forum. It was understood that Gromyko would refrain from pushing for a full-dress debate only if the United States would agree now to let five neutralist nations join the five Western and five Communist nations in a new general arms conference. Points in Agreement and Dispute on Test Ban By Dec. 5, 1960, when the test ban talks in Geneva were recessed, the negotiations had been in progress for more than two years. Representatives of the three participating powers had met 270 times in plenary sessions and innumerable times in technical or informal sessions. In the first year they had agreed on such main points as the treaty's duration (as long as its terms were fulfilled); the principle of control and inspection; the broad outlines of a control organization; periodic review of the effectiveness of controls; consent to explosions for peaceful purposes; adherence of other nations. Progress in 1960 was less impressive. Agreement was finally reached in March on a U.S. proposal of the previous April for a partial ban—to apply to tests in the atmosphere, under water, and in the nearer parts of outer space, and to underground blasts of 20 kilotons or more. In sum, the suspension would be limited to tests detectable by existing instruments and already agreed-upon controls. This represented a concession by the Soviet Union (which had demanded a total ban on nuclear testing) to American reluctance to agree to a test ban without sure means of detecting violations. To the original American proposal, which would have prohibited only surface, under-water and low-altitude explosions, the Russians added the ban on larger underground tests. Three major issues remained unresolved. The first concerns improvement of detection instruments. In its partial test ban proposal the United States included provision for an intensive research program to improve the means of detecting underground explosions below 20 kilotons, with the aim of making a total ban eventually acceptable. Russian seismologists took an active part in a conference last May to plan joint research to that end. Since then, however, the Soviet government has been dragging its heels. The second main point of disagreement involves the number of on-site inspections. As early as the summer of 1958, at a technicians' conference preceding the start of formal negotiations, the Russians agreed hesitantly that all suspicious recordings on detection instruments, many of which would probably turn out to have been caused by earthquakes, should be inspected on the site. American estimates of an adequate number of inspections under a complete test ban have run as high as 100 to 300 a year. In connection with the partial test ban, however, the Soviet Union and the United States both accepted in principle a compromise, suggested by Prime Minister Harold Mac-millan of Great Britain, providing for a fixed quota of inspections. Within the specified number each side could choose which blasts on the other's territory it wished to inspect. But where Western scientists and negotiators proposed a quota of 20 inspections a year, the Russians held out for no more than three, a number which the United States considers wholly inadequate. The third unresolved issue has to do with the staff and authority of the control organization. The British and Americans have proposed an international force of technical experts. The Russians have agreed, after long resistance, to include experts from other nations, but they would make at least half of the inspection staff, and the chief of each control post and inspection team, nationals of the inspected country. They want the big three nuclear powers to hold a tight rein on the organization, greatly limiting the powers of the proposed neutral chief executive. No serious progress was made in the Geneva talks after the early summer of 1960. It was evident that the U.S.S.R. had decided to mark time until a new American President took office. The conference finally recessed on the suggestion of the U.S. delegate, who predicted that a thorough review of American policy toward a nuclear test ban would have been made by the time it reconvened. Go to top New Lines of Attack on Arms Problem The need for a thorough review, not only of the nuclear test ban negotiations but also of the U.S. approach to arms control in general, has been repeatedly stressed by President Kennedy. American negotiators, he said in his State of the Union message on Jan. 30, must be “better informed and better prepared—to formulate workable proposals of our own and to make sound judgments about the proposals of others.” One of his first moves as President was to request a six-week delay in the planned date for resuming the test ban talks, to allow time for adequate preparation and for consultation with the British. Scheduled to resume on Feb. 7, the parley was put off by agreement to March 21. Early Kennedy appointments included several of men particularly concerned with arms control. John J. McCloy, as the President's special adviser on disarmament, is the key figure. In the White House executive offices McGeorge Bundy, the presidential assistant on national security matters; his deputy, Walt W. Rostow; and Jerome B. Wiesner, the scientific adviser, are all expected to contribute ideas. The appointment of Paul H. Nitze as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs was in line with Kennedy's stated view that arms control is “a major part of the nation's problem of security, not an enterprise to be divorced from other aspects of the national security problem.” Proposal to Establish a National Peace Agency A basic question, on which the President has said he will make recommendations shortly, is that of a permanent, well staffed research and planning body on disarmament. Where this organization should be placed in the Executive Branch has been a subject of debate. Various alternatives have been proposed—the most likely being to give the organization the status of an independent administrative agency or to make it a major bureau in the State Department. Over a year ago the Democratic Advisory Council urged creation of a “National Peace Agency,” and in the early months of 1960 Sens. Kennedy and Hubert H. Humphrey (D Minn.) introduced bills to that end. A promise to establish a peace agency was included in the Democratic platform. During the campaign Kennedy developed the peace agency idea further. He called it an “arms control institute” which should have the double-barreled function of basic research on arms control and of planning “for the reconversion of our economy from war to peace.” In support of the bill he introduced last year, Kennedy had pointed out that peace had become “tremendously complicated and technological” and that, for example, “a workable plan to halt [nuclear] weapons testing requires detailed studies in seismology, atmospherics, acoustics and geophysics,” while “weapons of chemical and bacteriological warfare require still different inspection systems.” The argument for a separate agency is based on the fact that in the past the State and Defense departments, the Atomic Energy Commission, and the President's special advisers on science and disarmament have often worked at cross purposes. A new agency would avoid rivalries and centralize research and planning; it would also provide new leadership and dramatize the importance of world peace as a major goal of national policy. President Kennedy is said, however, not to be inflexibly committed to the separate agency concept. The State Department, which built up its disarmament staff to some 40 professionals in the last months of the Eisenhower administration, now has about 100 people (including technical experts) assigned to the subject. The existence of this group, some of whose members are already trained and experienced, supports contentions that the main disarmament operation should be kept in the State Department. It has been pointed out also that State should have primary responsibility for arms control planning and policy as an essential element of foreign policy, especially since its officers have to conduct negotiations on the question with other countries. But whether the ultimate answer is an independent agency or a State Department bureau, it is Kennedy's view that the operation should be sufficiently well staffed and financed to make certain that the talent and effort going into the struggle to maintain peace will be comparable to those going into weapons development. Factors in Shaping New Policy on Arms Control Some months are expected to elapse before the outlines of the administration's general disarmament policy emerge. At his news conference on March 1, President Kennedy said he hoped that “by this summer we will have completed our analysis.” Published writings of arms control experts, including administration advisers, suggest some of the alternatives which may be under consideration. A principal issue is whether U.S. policy should aim at the single comprehensive disarmament treaty for which the Russians have been pressing or should try to achieve the ultimate goal on a step-by-step basis, negotiating one limited measure at a time. Jerome B. Wiesner, the President's scientific adviser, is among those who are inclined to believe that a comprehensive system might actually be easier to negotiate than one-at-a-time limited measures. He wrote last autumn in the Arms Control issue of Daedalus: If there exists an agreed-upon long-term goal, a plan for reaching it by means of a sequence of arms limitation measures and a timetable for doing so, there will be an enormous interest in the ultimate objective, and individual steps will not have to be as finely balanced as if they were likely to persist for all time. Second, the inspection required to safeguard some limited measures absolutely may appear to be almost as great a breach, of Soviet security as the inspection required for a comprehensive system. In fact, really adequate inspection for limited measures may be more difficult to achieve because the various components of an inspection system will reinforce one another. Support is given Wiesner's argument by the Soviet Union's apparent willingness to accept more controls in connection with its comprehensive plan than at first proposed. Khrushchev has been quoted as emphasizing this point by interjecting, during Prime Minister Macmillan's address to the U.N. General Assembly last September: “You accept our approach on disarmament; we will accept your ideas of control.” American experts have suggested a number of inspection schemes designed to provide reasonable safeguards while allaying the Soviet fear that inspection may be a guise for espionage. One idea is “territorial” inspection, involving checks of one arbitrarily selected region of the inspected country at a time, on the order of a census sampling. Another is “positive evidence” inspection, which, rather than attempting to detect violations, would place the burden of proving innocence on a suspected violator. Its special value would be in preventing a pre-emptive attack or an arms build-up by the other side. Proponents of a limited, step-by-step approach to disarmament argue that a restricted agreement would provide experience with an inspection system and opportunities for improving it. For the present they would aim only at control of the spread of nuclear weapons, at a ban on nuclear weapons in space, and at a stabilized balance of East-West nuclear and conventional forces, perhaps with some reductions from current levels. Some experts doubt that total disarmament can ever be safely achieved. Because potential enemies would know that the adversary could achieve overwhelming military superiority by concealing only a few missiles, it would be almost imperative to cheat. To avoid a situation of this kind, Henry A. Kissinger has suggested that the goal of arms control measures should be, not to eliminate retaliatory forces, but to establish an equilibrium between them. The United States and the Soviet Union might agree on retention of an equal number of invulnerable missiles—a number large enough (Kissinger suggests 500) so that a violation of the limit would give no decisive advantage unless it were so great as to risk detection; also large enough so that an attack, even if 90 per cent successful, would still leave the victim in position to threaten the aggressor with an unacceptable degree of retaliation. This theory of “mutual stable deterrence”—which could conceivably be achieved by informal understanding—is reported to have strong support in the Air Force. Consideration of Indirect Obstacles to Disarming Resistance by economic interests in the United States has been cited as a possible obstacle to general disarmament. The defense effort employs some six million people, accounts for more than half of the federal budget and represents almost 10 per cent of the gross national product. “Fear of disarmament can affect the stock market like the fear of war,” Kennedy wrote in a campaign statement. An example of the economy's dependence on the arms industry was afforded by the 1957 recession, which was laid in part to a brief, temporary slowdown in the rate of defense spending. Although the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee on disarmament has begun studies on the possible effects of arms reduction on various industries, the surface of the problem has barely been scratched. “No plan for disarmament can be complete without planning for the reconversion of our economy,” Kennedy said last year. Provision to meet long-neglected public needs—school construction, slum clearance and urban renewal, metropolitan transportation, soil conservation, large river basin developments—would be one obvious way of overcoming the effects of steep cuts in defense expenditures. The underdeveloped nations hope that some of the money now going into armaments would be channeled into foreign aid. The fact is that arms control arrangements would not necessarily save money—at least not in the beginning. The elaborate devices for inspection and control would be expensive. A system of stable deterrence, requiring a sizable number of invulnerable missiles, might cost even more money than is now being spent. Assuming a disarmed world, a persisting problem would be how to control conflicts and settle disputes. In his first public utterance after becoming the President's chief disarmament adviser, McCloy declared that the United States “cannot accept the single slogan of general and complete disarmament in four years without …agreed and reliable procedures for the just settlement of disputes” as a necessary concomitant. So far the U.S.S.R. has not been willing to accept the Western proposal of an international police force under the United Nations except on conditions which would render the Secretary General powerless. But neither has the United States yet set forth its ideas on more effective procedures to settle disputes that threaten resort to force. A serious problem for the Kennedy administration may be the widespread American distrust of the U.S.S.R. Many who doubt the worth of arms control agreements, including members of Congress, feel that Moscow cannot be trusted to abide by treaties that may not serve its purposes. The President will have the task of convincing the country that a calculated risk on arms control may be no greater than the risk now inherent in the arms race, and that the Russians can be expected to comply with a treaty which is to their interest as well as in that of their opponents. During the 1960 campaign Kennedy emphasized that “any effective arms control system requires changes in outlook by all parties,” and that “acceptance of these changes may be more difficult for the Russians than for ourselves.” In any case, he added, the United States will never find out whether the Russians are serious about disarmament “unless we try by seriously offering concrete workable proposals.” Influences Favoring Agreement on Nuclear Testing A number of American experts think the country has more to gain than to lose by taking some degree of risk on a nuclear test ban treaty. Hans A. Bethe, Cornell nuclear physicist and a member of President Eisenhower's Science Advisory Committee, is one of these. He doubts, in the first place, that the Soviets would go to “all the trouble of negotiating a treaty only in order to violate it.” He finds it hard to believe that they would undertake the enormous labor and expense of “decoupling”—muffling a large explosion in a deep cavity such as a salt mine—as American scientists have suggested would be possible; they could cheat by testing small nuclear weapons. Bethe says there is reason to believe that “we are far ahead of Russia in …small nuclear weapons …[and] it would take them a long time to catch up.” He maintains that “further nuclear development will be limited by the laws of physics.” In his opinion, the United States would not gain much by further tests—a view contrary to that held by former Atomic Energy Commission Chairmen Lewis L. Strauss and John A. McCone, by Adm. Arleigh A. Burke and other opponents of a test ban. If testing were resumed legally, it would bring the Russian capability closer to that of the West, since in that case they would choose to test hydrogen weapons in the megaton class. “If we stop nuclear testing now, we may keep at least the little bit of military advantage in nuclear weapons that we possess at the present time.” Cautious hope for a test ban agreement in the renewed negotiations at Geneva is being expressed in Western capitals. This guarded optimism is based in part on the fact that the Soviets have actually made several concessions during the past two years, in part on the somewhat improved atmosphere, and in part on Russian differences with Red China, The latter differences suggest that the U.S.S.R. might be as anxious as the West to discourage nuclear development by its great Asiatic partner. While there would be no guarantee of adherence to a test ban agreement by either Communist China or France, those countries might rather adhere than risk outraging world opinion. The Kennedy administration does not consider agreement on a nuclear test ban the sole test of Russian sincerity. But even a limited or partial agreement might break the deadlock on general disarmament negotiations. Although test suspension is not of itself arms reduction, a treaty providing for an inspected ban on testing would establish the principle of arms control under international inspection and would mean establishment of control stations on Soviet soil. During the campaign Kennedy said he would set a reasonable but definite time limit for progress in the test ban talks. But he added later that “we must display great patience” in negotiation. There is no fixed deadline for agreement, but the British and American experts who have been meeting in Washington to work out a joint policy think six or seven weeks of further negotiation should make it clear whether the Russians are ready to take this first step toward general disarmament. Go to top
Footnotes
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Document APA Citation
Pringle, K. (1961). New approaches to disarmament. Editorial research reports 1961 (Vol. I). http://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/cqresrre1961031500
Document ID: cqresrre1961031500
Document URL: http://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/cqresrre1961031500
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