The Eisenhower Administration and NATO Nuclear Strategy: An Oral History Roundtable

Conducted by David A. Rosenberg and Robert A. Wampler and Participants: Robert Bowie, Andrew Goodpaster, Uwe Nerlich, Robert Richardson, David A. Rosenberg, Jennifer Sims, Robert A. Wampler.

10 May, 1989 [Transcribed by Dan Addess]

(c) Copyright 2001 by the National Security Archive

 

Note on The Nuclear History Program

The Nuclear History program (NHP) was an international program of training, research, and discussion concerning the development and deployment of nuclear forces, the elaboration of policies for their management and the possible use, and their role in the evolution of relations among the United States, the Soviet Union, and the countries of Europe.

The Ford Foundation, the German Marshall Fund, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the Stiftung Volkswagenwerk generously provided initial support.

This oral history transcript was produced for the American national group of the NHP by the Center for International Security Studies at Maryland. The views expressed herein are the views of the authors and should not be construed to be the views of the Nuclear History Program or its funders.

Transcript

Rosenberg: Since Uwe Nerlich doesn't want that sort of thing, I'm sort of senior officer present afloat at this point and so I'll just handle mostly the introductions. We're here to discuss essentially the foundations of NATO nuclear strategy, and as you know, Bob [Wampler] has put together, with a little bit of my help, a rather extensive collection of documentation. He's [also] put together a very, very extensive paper. It discusses the evolution of NATO nuclear strategy as we've come to understand it, based on the material that's been released in the last few years. The problem is that as Bob has pointed out on a number of occasions, the documents don't tell all the story. Not even Andy Goodpaster's memo's of conferences with the President necessarily tell all the story. And what we'd like to do is try using the questions that were laid out to get behind the scenes. We're hoping, in particular, that with the three of you gentlemen that we will be able to have a memory jogging synergy effect at work, [where] one memory will jog another. As a result, we're delighted you're here and I'm going to turn it over to my prosecutor, Bob Wampler. This is in large measure for his dissertation at Harvard so he gets the highest priority, and then the rest of us will have the opportunity to chime in when and where something strikes us that we would like to see expanded upon.

Bowie: Could I say just a word. Let me say first, I've never seen anything as beautifully prepared as this Oral History. It ought to be a model, and I think that the Nuclear History Program ought to make it known that it is possible indeed to do something of this sort. The second thing is that because of the fact that I've been out of play a bit, more than two weeks, I have not had a chance to take full advantage of the materials, and I'm terribly terribly sorry. Its not for a lack of diligence but for a lack of capacity. And so maybe later on, if you hold a second session, I may try to come and contribute a little more than I can now.

Goodpaster: I guess we've all got some caveats to produce. I have really been overoccupied for the past several weeks -- largely of my own making, so I can't complain about it. But I share the view as to what is put before us. It's a very revealing piece of work. I hope (and I ought) to be able to contribute something. This contributed a lot to me but I'm not sure how much that is going to be in reverse. Finally, I must leave by four o'clock today. We are a small group who will exhaust you and [ourselves] on the subject well before that.

Richardson: I certainly second what Andy said. I have not followed...the NATO issue very much since the late 60's. For the last ten years I have been solely and uniquely on the space issue and on strategic defense, so my memory is somewhat dull.

Wampler: Well, I'm not sure whether we will exhaust everything during this hour; we will exhaust ourselves perhaps. We do want to do some sort of follow up. First of all, I think I should let you know we talked beforehand about the people who wouldn't be here. Some of you may know that Gordon Arneson's got pneumonia and he's not here on his doctor's orders, which we fully approve, given the weather. I talked with Gerard Smith's secretary last week and apparently he's doing well; the surgery went well and he should be coming home this week and all prognoses are good. We are going to try to do follow-up discussions at the convenience of all of the people who are involved. We are going to prepare a transcript which will be sent out to you first -- the rough transcript of the recording for you to look at, to approve, to decide if its accurate, in the way in which your statements have been recorded. After that the primary use will be for the people who organized this, David Rosenberg and myself. There is the possibility that, if everyone is agreed that it is worthwhile, we may try to publish some sort of edited section or portion of the transcript, if we feel that there is enough revealed in these discussions, which we hope will be the case. Because of the change in the people who are taking part, we are going to be playing around somewhat with the agenda. Without Gordon Arneson and Paul Nitze, the potential for discussing the Truman Administration from the inside is greatly diminished. So there will be sort of a bringing together of the first and the second agendas as we start. Talking it over with Dave, it seems the point to start is to look at the situation facing Eisenhower and his advisors as they came into office in 1953, in terms of the legacy of the Truman administration, and there are three factors to look at here. FIrst: where did high level policy stand at the end of '52 in terms of national security policy, NATO policy, the problems facing the alliance, that was passed on to Eisenhower? Second: what had been going on within NATO, within SHAPE, the organizational developments in '51 and '52 to lay a basis for dealing with the problems integrating nuclear weapons into NATO planning and strategy and force requirements? Third: the very specific sort of political- military approach to this that gets pressed very much in '52 that nuclear weapons can in some way favorably affect force requirements and ease the political economic problems of defending NATO. Here the main point of discussion would be the Ridgway study. But we also want to see how the Ridgway study perhaps is ahead of, or constrained by, certain assumptions and viewpoints within the Truman administration over what nuclear weapons can do and how quickly they can do what they can do. So this is where we want to begin, and to see what the situation was when Eisenhower came into office, and how did you understand what Truman turned over to you. Dr. Bowie, you did not come in until a little bit later...but you would have gotten briefed in some way, [and] you would probably have seen documents that were turned over. We're interested in what you've seen in the documents and whether the papers tells you things you may have wished you'd known when you did come in.

Bowie: Well, there is certainly an awful lot in that latter category. I was impressed with the number of papers which I don't remember ever having looked at or seen.

Perhaps I ought to start with my picture of the way in which the NATO issues were handled in the department. There were a number of different people who were primarily involved. One was Livie Merchant who was the assistant secretary for European Affairs, [and] was certainly a center of much of the discussion. Under him there was a group called "RA", Regional Affairs I guess it was...which is the predecessor of Political-Military group. I believe Ben Moore was in charge of that. Then there was the special advisor to the secretary for nuclear affairs, who was Arneson...[T]hen of course there was the Policy Planning Staff. Most of the direct contact with NATO was definitely through EUR and more intimately through RA. The other person who was involved was the counselor MacArthur, who had a certain number...to a certain extent military contacts, with good contacts with the military.

So the fact was that S/P as such (Policy Planning) wasn't much involved in what you might call direct discussions and negotiations between our NATO representatives and the department, nor did we have much direct contact with the Pentagon. The latter was harder to do than before Radford. We had inherited from the Truman administration and carried on for a few times a regular meeting with members of the JCS joint staff.

As I remember, Murphy used to lead the delegation for the department; we could go over and have a good round of discussion, very sensible, very useful. As I remember, this atrophied, or it was not allowed to be pursued. Personally, I had no knowledge about any orders, but my personal view was that Radford did not favor this. Radford was a man who was very much an operator and he liked to manage things, control things, and he felt uncomfortable when there were people below him who were having too much contact with what he saw as the opposition. I don't think he favored this sort of thing at all...in any event I had taken part in a few of those while they continued, but they ceased to be -- as far as I know they were dropped.

Well that's essentially the cast of characters, and therefore my perspective on it was the result of the following sorts of contacts. In the first place, I was in on whatever I wanted to be of the decisions that had to be taken by the Secretary, so when things got to the level of the Secretary involving NATO and similar issues I was perfectly free to take part if I thought they were of a sort which involved more or less basic kinds of issues. Second, whenever the Secretary was going to one of the NATO ministerial meetings, he always had meetings ahead of time, and I normally took part in those. Normally I accompanied him on those meetings, so that I was aware of what was being discussed and carried out at the talks. And finally, and more intimately really, I was the representative on the planning board -- the NSC Planning Board -- and we were the ones who were responsible for preparing the drafts of the National Security papers, all the NSC papers, and therefore [I] was intimately involved in NSC 162/2, which was the first of those papers.

I make all this elaborate explanation because I really don't have a lively memory with respect to a large part of what you have in the papers about the details, the workings of the relations with NATO, NATO SACEUR and NAC Military Committee. I simply don't remember concerning myself with the papers of that sort normally unless they came up in one of the contexts which I described.

Now, coming to your question, I only have a very general recollection, because I came into this reasonably cold. I had been in Germany for two years, in '50 to '51, so I had seen NATO things from...that perspective. In that connection, in '50 McCloy had been very much interested in the form of the German participation, and in fact Al Gerhardt and I had been asked to go back to New York [and] Washington to prepare for the New York meeting in 1950 for a contribution from the perspective of McCloy. He very much favored the idea of a European army well before that was put forward by the French. Al Gerhardt took a different view; he favored more the Pentagon approach, of a national capability in Germany. I was much a protagonist of the integrated solution.

So I was quite aware of what had taken place in 1950 and shortly thereafter in the way of decisions in NATO with respect to the Supreme Commander, with respect to German contributions, etc. And I followed it in limited degree from the German perspective up to December '51. And I was aware also of an effort to create the Lisbon goals and then the falling away from that. So..I came into [it]...in about early May or late April of 1953 with a very limited or fragmented picture of the whole situation.

I, of course, tried to acquaint myself as quickly as possible. My impression was as follows as to what the Eisenhower administration saw as it's problem, it's military strategic problem. First off the president I think at once rejected, or came in office rejecting, any idea of some critical date of danger, which I think was a very central factor in the planning of the Truman administration. He took the view that this was something which would be a long haul. And that therefore it was essential to establish a level, a basis of military spending which could be sustained indefinitely. He said there was no question he could get any amount he wanted, if he wished to press for that, but then the result would that we'd go up and down in defense spending, whereas he felt it was essential that we should try to keep it steady for what he saw as a deterrent. The second thing I remember was that there was pretty much acceptance of the by that time that the NATO European members were simply not going to devote the resources to defense which would be required by the Lisbon goals or anything like it. I came in May, [and] Stalin had died in March. And while NATO had already begun to fall away from these goals before Stalin's death, [his] death and then the obvious change of leadership, and the fact that [the Soviet Union] didn't look anywhere near as menacing as they had, and the strenuous peace campaign that [the Soviets] made, all had had their effect.

But I don't think they were the primary reason. I think the primary reason was that the Europeans were not willing to devote the resources to defense which had been called for by the Lisbon goals. And therefore, and the third thing, was I think Eisenhower felt that the nuclear weapons were there, they were going to be there, they were going to be a major element in the whole picture no matter what we did, because it was taken for granted even then that the Soviets would eventually, gradually build up the nuclear weapon stockpile to get the moral equivalent of parity. Also...one of the first things that I can remember was that the Oppenheimer report had been submitted in late January, before I even came. It had been named, as you remember, by Truman...but [Oppeheimer] didn't deliver his report till the day Truman left, or the first day of office of Ike. This committee was supposed to look at disarmament proposals...[I]t didn't really make very many disarmament proposals, but it did analyze the strategic situation that was going to face the World and the US over the coming years. And in a sense, if it didn't use the phrase, it essentially developed the notion of the two scorpions in the bottle -- in other words each would be able to kill the other, destroy the other -- and that was the world we were going to be living in.

Now one of the things that they stressed was the importance of candor to the American people with respect to this fact of life. All through the year up till the speech to the UN on Atoms for Peace, the President was using people like C.D. Jackson and others to try to developone or more speeches which would meet this suggestion by Oppenheimer. He took the Oppenheimer Report very much to heart and liked it, talked to Oppenheimer, encouraged Oppenheimer to write an article in Foreign Affairs in June, as I remember, giving the main lines of these arguments. So, I don't think Ike embraced nuclear weapons as a great thing, he just saw that they were there and they were going to have to be faced, lived with, dealt with. I think I remember that at some meeting when people said these were indispensable, he said that they're the only thing that can really threaten the United States. "If I could get rid of them completely I would be just delighted. But there's no way I can see to do that, so we've got to find out how to work with them, live with them."

The second thing I think was this: I'm sure it's contemporary, but I can't document it. I felt very early that Ike drew the conclusion...that he couldn't figure any way to conduct a nuclear war which wasn't a disaster, and that therefore the deterrent must be the absolute center of your strategy and purpose, and therefore I think he sought in every way possible to make the Soviet's feel what I think he felt. Namely, that if you got into a large scale war it was inevitable that, if either side was losing, nuclear weapons would in fact be used, and therefore that any major war between the United States and the Soviet Union would start as or become a nuclear war -- whatever you said, wanted, did, or otherwise. That being so -- now this is partly my extrapolation, but this is very definitely what I thought he thought at the time -- it was essential to make that prospect as certain and as graphic to the Soviets as possible. And I think he felt that if we could do that, the likelihood of war was very very small indeed because he did not think that they were crazy or madmen, or Hitlers; he thought they were fairly cautious, if aggressive or assertive people. Therefore, if he could make it clear that any major violence between the United States and the Soviet Union was going to end up in their [own] destruction, then they wouldn't start anything.

So my own feeling is that much of what he did was intended to underscore this belief of his. Not because he felt that if he then had to go forward with it; that it would be anything but a disaster; I think he thought it would be a disaster. But...he didn't see any other way to deal with the problem. Therefore, he was concerned that nothing might fudge up this bleak prospect for the Soviet's as a means of deterring...I've talked longer than I meant to but those are the broad lines.

Oh, one other thing: I remember very early being convinced that Ike was greatly interested in disarmament, arms control -- very early. I think that speech he gave in April 1953 was actually prepared and given just before I came, to the newspaper people. He thought it ought to be possible, despite hostility on the part of the Soviet's, to cooperate...[to] mitigate this terrible disaster which would face both sides if you got into a war. And I certainly think his view was quite receptive -- contrary to that of the Pentagon, for example -- to possibilities, if there were any, for agreements with the Soviets, very early on. I don't think that he was very hopeful or optimistic, but he nevertheless...felt an obligation to really try to see whether there wasn't an opening or possibility.

Now, Andy you knew him from a different perspective. You weren't in Washington but you still knew his thinking.

Goodpaster: Maybe the best thing would be to start in mid-1950 or so and then work forward through the early days of SHAPE into '52, '53 and '54.

Richardson: I mean to go back to 1947.

Goodpaster: Why don't you take us through, if this is suitable?

??: Absolutely, absolutely.

Goodpaster: That's what I would feel most comfortable doing, and maybe Bob [Bowie] as well.

Richardson: First of all, I think you have to understand that at the time those at my level were not seeing the whole picture, by a long shot. We weren't sitting up in the front office. We were sitting down below writing the papers. Also, I apologize in advance if I'm cynical. After forty years of this planning I'm pretty cynical about how things are done in the real world. My first involvement in strategic planning was in 1947 when I was sent down from Air Force plans to the new Joint Staff that had just been created under General Al Gruenther's direction. In those days we had three teams. They were playing the battle of services on organization, roles and missions.

Our team had the NATO problem. There were three of us, one Army colonel whose name I don't remember, an Admiral, then Captain, Wallace Beakley and I. We were given the NATO problem in late 1948 or early '49. Before that we were involved in trying to write --and maybe this is the genesis in any real nuclear history in trying to write the first strategic plan for a war with Russia. How would we fight a war with Russia? This plan was known as Pincher, do you remember Pincher? It involved 23 studies and substudies. Pincher was rather well done from the point of view of the approach taken. I've never seen any since that [which] was done that way.

We then put people to work with ad hoc teams from the services and elsewhere because we only had three teams on the Joint staff. We looked at 23 basic areas and possibilities, such as whether the primary effort should be in the Far East or in the West. Had the decision been in the Far East, there's a good chance that the Joint Chief's, and everybody, would never have pushed for NATO; but it turned out that the main effort was to be in the West. We also looked at the soft underbelly, the main effort through Iran. How would you handle this from a logistics point of view and all that? Basically the end product of Pincher turned out to be in the U.S. the Strategic Concept that the JCS used for years. The main effort was by strategic air forces, and from Western Europe. There were five or ten Basic Undertakings which I would be hard put to recite. But the documents should now be available.

Rosenberg: Yeah, they're all available.

Richardson: That more or less formed the background. Now I think you have to recognize that having very few nuclear weapons, the Joint Staff was more concerned with problems like doing the paperwork on the Pearl Harbor investigation than on figuring out how to use nuclear weapons.

Rosenberg: Did you know the number of weapons?

Richardson: At that time?

Rosenberg: Yes.

Richardson: Yes, I did in 1947. I recall a Captain, later Rear Admiral -- I can't think of his name -- but he was on the White Team, (we were the red team) who was responsible at that time for nuclear planning. One night he left his papers under his desk; the cleaning woman in the Joint Staff found them and brought to Gen. Gruenther. The list included all of the then atomic targets, all twelve of them I think. Needless to say that there was some little concern over security in the new Joint Staff. I don't know whether this meant anything as to number of weapons and I don't remember the exact numbers, but I think it was below twenty.

Rosenberg: Yeah.

Richardson: They were all strategic weapons. There was, to my recollection, no nuclear involvement anywhere in the Pincher papers, other than in the strategic offensive.

Rosenberg: Right. And even the word nuclear was not specifically used.

Richardson: They were not used below the strategic level, but that was not really spelled out in any detail in the Pincher papers that I remember, but I wasn't working on that particular part of the study [and] I don't recall any nuclear consideration other than strategic.

Okay, so while we're at it I seem to have failed to mention a few of the problems that one runs into in this business. We were given the NATO proposal. It came from State or higher up and we were asked to staff for the military. Frankly, the general opinion of NATO in the Air Force -- and on the rest of the Joint team which no doubt reflected that in the other services -- was that this was nothing but an Inter-American Defense Board type of effort. It was going to be a tea drinking operation on Massachusetts Avenue. In fact I actually went over and looked at the Cosmos Club -- then Ben Wells' father's house -- as a possible home for the NATO Standing Group. That was the opinion held by most Service people at the time.

We did the preliminary work for the regional planning groups reviewing the guidance for them, none of which we actually wrote that I recollect, only reviewed it.

The Regional Planning Group had absolutely no role, that I recall, in any sort of nuclear planning. So nuclear operations didn't come in at that point at all. Our general perception of NATO then was that it wasn't serious from a defense planning point of view and we had other problems. I didn't really see that perception change until it began to look like NATO might have an influence on the service budgets. Then our people begin to get a little interested in the NATO planning! Before that it was a State Department project. As far as those other problems the Joint Staff having as I said, done the original paperwork on the military organization, there was an office up in the Secretary's office that General Gene Beebe was in and that was under...what was his name?

??: Frank Marsch.

Richardson:: Frank Marsch? There was someone else.

??: Gebe Hallaby

Richardson: Yes, Gebe Hallaby and Beebe and Marsch were there. They were the principals behind the NATO effort in DOD, more so than the Services who had little interest in it.

Bowie: This is in the Sec Def Office?

Richardson: The Sec Def office, yes, at least when we put together our proposal for what we thought, at the Joint Staff level, the situation should be with respect to the U.S. military role in NATO. As a side bar, my team having been two years or more in the Pentagon, had aspirations that were more attractive than staying in the dungeons of the Pentagon. We wrote in a JCS paper that we felt that the ideal location for the North Atlantic Treaties Standing Group headquarters would be Estereal, Portugal. It was safe, centered, secure, in Europe, not in a large capital. We made an eloquent case for it and we included a paragraph in the JCS paper that said that since the only military people that even knew what the silly State Department's NATO idea was all about was our red team, we should be posted to the first Standing Group in Estereal. That's when we learned never to volunteer. The Chiefs took our paper and packed off, at President Truman's direction, to visit all of the potential NATO countries.

??: When was this?

Richardson: In late 1948 early 1949. They visited all of the NATO countries. Now mind you, they had approved our paper and put a red stripe across it. That was not hard to do on paper's like ours because we had at that time what was jokingly called "closed cycle guidance" on NATO actions. The Joint planning system was then very rigid.

The Joint Staff was not trusted by the services in those days. Our studies were under General Gruenther and General Al Leudeke who was the chief of the Plan Section. Most papers then went, in draft, up to the individual services where they were thoroughly vetted. They were then sent back down for rewriting and then sent to the Joint Plans Committee. Again the Service views were introduced before they went to the JCS.

But, on an issue like NATO, the services paid little attention. I would write a NATO position paper and send it up to the Air Staff. I'd then get a call from the Air staff Action Office asking me what the hell it was all about. I would tell them, then they would say "what do you want to do with it?" I would say well, on my team I won every argument, except this one, or that one, where the Navy or the Army view prevailed so you guys take my position, the one that I'd lost, on those two issues and send it back down as the USAF view. "Yes sir, you're the expert," and it came back down that way. In other words this was a closed cycle system, where no one was really going to pay attention to it seriously. The service staff left it up to us. So literally we got 99% of the NATO papers through we wanted and we only used our service to fight the battles we lost against each other on the Joint team.

So, as I said, the Chiefs took our paper and they went off to Europe and came back. They then approved it with one major change: the Standing Group would be in Washington and in the Pentagon, not in Portugal. Unfortunately, they approved our recommendation we be assigned to the first Standing Group. This stuck us with two more years in the Pentagon when we had tried to write ourselves into a nice overseas assignment. That's the way it goes! So, as a result, I did go over to the first team on the Standing Group. It consisted of Slim Beecher, Harry Stork and I with Admiral Fausket as director. The Standing Group members were ACM Tedder, General Ely and Bradley who was the U.S. principal, but to get out of doing all of the work he had General Crittenberger sitting in most of the time. Crittenberger did the daily work. Bradley was the actual U.S. representative.

Coming to your subject, the first time the issue of the nuclear weapons came up was when we were instructed to try and come up with a strategic concept and basic undertakings for NATO similar to the JCS one. The regional groups were working on the force requirements in their area. I can't remember whether we had any inputs from them, I think not at that time. What we did, and I'll be frank with you, we pulled out the JCS strategic concept, had a secretary double space it, and nitpicked it. We stuck in "international" where it was appropriate and sent it back up as the proposed NATO document. So it is all the same thing.

Richardson???: Yes, and that paper was taken, as I recall, to the Defense Minister's meeting in Paris. Up on the place de la Concord --the meeting was near there.

Bowie: When was that?

???: And that would have been after the meeting of the defense ministers -- I'd have to go back and look it up. It was around '49, some time in late '49.

Richardson: Yes, December 1949. At one point there was an unexpected big hassle started by the Dane's over the first basic undertaking -- that we would use strategic nuclear weapons from the onset. "Strategic" wasn't used that way, but it was worded exactly the way the JCS undertaking was in "U.S. strategic concept." We hassled for two days, for they didn't want the word "nuclear" mentioned. The final compromise was that "any and all" weapons would be used as necessary. And that's where that phrase came from. It may be still there for all I know. "Any and all weapons as necessary," with the understanding in the record that that meant the US would use strategic nuclear weapons in support of it's European allies if necessary.

Bowie: What was the...do you remember what position others took, other nations?

Richardson: Everybody was on our side but the Danes. In that particular meeting there were just defense ministers. Everybody was on our side but the Danes. And they were very insistent.

Wampler: Now is this based on the JCS allocation of the retardation mission?

Richardson: No, no there was nothing that finite. There was an overall strategic concept. Basic undertakings were to defend the homeland, defend Europe, America, undertake a strategic offensive, and that's where that came in, very general wording as I recall.

Rosenberg: No discussion of actual American war plans were then provided to NATO.

Richardson: Hell, we didn't have anything but the Pincher plan.

Rosenberg: Well, you had OFFTACKLE which, basically, by that time called for essentially evacuating Europe in the event of....

Richardson: Well yes, but that wasn't a joint plan. I don't recall that one being writing in the joint staff.

Rosenberg: It was the Joint L-1 Emergency War Plan and was approved at the end '49 by the JCS.

Richardson: End of '49, now this was coming along in parallel you see, it was a JCS operation. It wasn't part of the Standing Group at that point.

Goodpaster: I think the retardation concept came in later.

Rosenberg: It's approved OFFTACKLE in December '49, partially as a result of the results of the Harmon report of May that says that...

Goodpaster: Did they use the term retardation?

Rosenberg: Yes, yes.

Goodpaster: I didn't see it till later, to be more accurate...

Bowie: Would it be useful, just to make sure that the record shows, that at this point we're talking about [a] US budget aggregate [of] about $13 billion...

Goodpaster: Less than 13, less than 13 -- 12.6 I think.

Bowie: And that Truman was adamant about holding it at that. He was determined that it should not exceed that. Second, as I recall it -- again this is from seeing it from Germany -- the whole conception was that the NATO at that point was nothing more than a promise that the United States would be there in the event of a threat to Europe, with no idea of forming a solid combined force. And the whole reliance was on the US nuclear capability, whatever it was -- nobody really, certainly not in Germany, had any clear notion of what it amounted to...but it was somehow horrendous, much, much exaggerated probably, certainly. But nevertheless, the conviction was that since the Americans had the nuclears their commitment would be the source of security. I don't think there was any serious thinking on the part of the Europeans about what kind of war. They were just thinking that this would be sufficient.

Goodpaster: That came a little later I think.

Richardson: Yes, that came a little later. There was no real war plan -- I would agree with what you said -- there was no real thought of NATO being more than an alliance. It was an agreement. It being peace time we'd go ahead and commit ourselves to support these guys if war came about.

Goodpaster: Let me throw in just a couple of things. I don't want to interrupt this but I threw in a couple of things because I think it ought to be tied to some dates. 1948 was the Czech coup and you know by 1948 you had all these different groups. You had the Brussels Treaty, you had Fina Bel, you had all these acronyms coming in and then, I think it was in '48, the interest in forming the North Atlantic treaty was generated and the Western Union was established down at Fountainbleau at about that time. After the shock of Czechoslovakia, you had the generating of a military response to the threat in Europe. I'll just leave it there.

Bowie: Not in the sense of much in the way of actual creation of forces.

Richardson: If you want to go back to the first force approach, it was when the regional planning groups sent to the Standing Group their regional papers. Those were just put into essentially one big paper and played around with in a nitpicking fashion. And as I recall that paper was called DC-28. Defense Committee 28, it was nothing but a list of available capabilities collated by the Standing Group.

Goodpaster: Well, to jump ahead a little bit, I think maybe that's right, because that was one of the documents we looked at when we formed SHAPE.

Rosenberg: Yes, yes DC-28.

Wampler: Ah..that was the first or second document in the document collection.

??: Yes, SHAPE transmitted a conclusion that the force requirements which were reported in DC-28 in August 1951.

Richardson: But the one thing that began to emerge at that time in all of the discussion was the point you made. That there wasn't going to be any way that we were going to get any sizable forces out of the European countries for some time. The proposal on the German rearmament was first made at the UN, wasn't it?

Bowie: No, that was in September '50, at the NATO meeting in New York.

Richardson: Okay, September of '50 was when that came in, I thought there was an earlier proposal in '49.

??: That was all prompted by Korea.

??: Yeah, that was prompted by Korea.

Bowie: To my mind the watershed was Korea. Up to that time, the general notion that I described was, I think, what was basically in everybody's mind. American guarantee, American nuclear capability, no war.

Goodpaster: It was a "scrap of paper" until Korea.

Bowie: That's right, it was an assurance, it was just a promise. And then Korea for everybody totally changed the situation. In Europe the Europeans really panicked. And then in the United States, it was in about August '50 that Gerhardt and I came back. And it was in that period that Adenauer began to press that we must do something for defense. We're exposed, we have no capability, what will happen to us. And he began to suggest all sorts of devices like border troops and other things. And McCloy became very much -- he had of course been in the Pentagon in the war -- he became very much [involved] in this problem. Particularly because of the political impact in Europe and in Germany of the feeling of exposure to what was seen now as a really aggressive movement by the Soviets which might very well happen in Europe, as it happened in Korea.

Goodpaster: Let's take that as a benchmark, and let's work up to that. Okay now I'll go back as an earlier member of the Red Team of the Joint War Plans Committee.

??: Give us a date.

Goodpaster: Late 1945.

Richardson: That was before the joint staff.

Goodpaster: That's right, before the joint staff was formed -- it was the old Joint War Plans Committee. I was on the Red Team. And when the war ended in the Pacific, one of our tasks was to prepare a plan for the defense of the United States, which we did. I wouldn't rate it very high, because...

Rosenberg: Was the codename BROADVIEW, does that ring a bell?

Goodpaster: BROADVIEW was the plan, that's right. And we worked up this plan and we said that's not really the way to do it. The way to do it is if you're thinking about an attack, go after the attacker in the only likely place from which an attack could come. By that time, we were beginning to see what the nature of the post-war Soviet nation and policy would be. Especially in what happened in Rumania, Bulgaria, Hungary, where these Commissions were set up and the Russians said, "get lost, we're in charge, we're not sharing authority." Cort Schuyler and others, you know, were reporting that we really had a new situation here. I just mention this because out of this came a recommendation that what we should be looking at would be a plan in case there should be aggression or an attack using force by the Soviet Union.

Now let me jump ahead if I may, to the spring of 1947. Eisenhower was chief of staff, and Norstad was the Deputy Chief of Staff for Plans and Operations. Eisenhower wanted to have somebody look out well ahead to see what would be the nature of the future security challenge issue for the United States. He asked Norstad to set up a small group of young officers. And Norstad asked me to set this group up and work with them to get started. That was Don Zimmerman, and George Wheeler and I've forgotten the third man. We got that thing going before I went off to graduate school in the summer of '47. The reason I mention this was that as we began our initial look, we asked what is it that is going to really shape the future security situation. On the one hand you had the nature of the Soviet system, and their policy. And even more it was going to be shaped by the emergence of the nuclear weapon on the world's scene. So this group -- taking some work that had been done by Tick Bonasteel and Ted Parker in OPD, an analysis of how many nuclear weapons we might have or might be contemplated in the future -- this group, taking that as background, went on to find that as many as a thousand or perhaps even five thousand might be contemplated as part of our military strength. At that point their finding was deemed to be so absurd in the entirety by the Army staff, Eisenhower having gone now, that the Army decided it couldn't accommodate this group of free-thinkers and converted it into the Joint Advanced Study Committee of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They passed it to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

I came out of graduate school in 1950 and was assigned back to the Pentagon, assigned to the Joint Advanced Study Committee. And we went into this, let's see, Doc Pervis was the Navy man, I've forgotten the Air Force man, and myself. We went around to Los Alamos, we went out to SAC. And we studied the nuclear weapons, not just the strategic use, but possible tactical use, in connection with the Korean War. General Gruenther, who was the Deputy Chief of Staff of the Army called us down to talk about that, at that time. So that's all part of the background for this thing. The study of the Joint Advanced Study Committee indicated that this would be the driving consideration for achieving the future pattern of security.

??: Did you actually do this in 1950?

Goodpaster: This was in the fall of 1950. And then on the 15th of December 1950 I received a call from Bob Wood. And he said, we need help, can you help me. And I said yes, I think I can -- what can I do, Bob, I'd be happy to try. He said you can be on a plane tomorrow at noon going over to Brussels, because General Gruenther has been asked to prepare to set up a headquarters for this organization called NATO, and it's likely that General Eisenhower will be asked to take the command. On the 16th of December 1950, I was on the plane with General Gruenther and we flew over to Brussels. It had all been canned in advance -- Eisenhower was invited to accept command and he wired back that he did accept it. General Gruenther put Bob Worden and me on the train going down to Paris that same night. He told us to get started setting up a headquarters there. He came down to visit us a day or two later, and said General Eisenhower wanted us to go down to Fountainbleau and get acquainted with their planning there, and to read ourselves in to what had been done in NATO, in the NATO framework. What had triggered this phase -- the idea of creating a collective force in being -- was the attack in Korea which was then read to be really initiated by the Soviet Union. There was tremendous fear and concern in Europe that Europe might be next.

Bowie: Let me just fill in the summer when, as I said, Gerhardt and I came back on behalf of McCloy. We worked both with the State Department people and, because Gerhardt had very good connections in the Defense Department, we also had very good...discussions.

Goodpaster: Al Gerhardt had been McCloy's military assistant, when McCloy was Assistant Secretary of War under Stimson during the war.

Bowie: Right. And he had taken Gerhardt to Germany with him when he went just shortly before the...just at the end of '49. And he was there when I got there January of '50. And so it was a very good working relationship, although we had different views. Nevertheless, I can still remember the tense atmosphere, which had been generated by Korea. And what had happened was that the Europeans, I don't know how, had essentially formulated a request that we must have forces in being. And that we must have an American contribution. And in August there was all this hemming and hawing about how and whether we should respond affirmatively, because it was also assumed or asked that there be an American in charge, commander. And the chiefs essentially were determined that this not be done unless there was agreement to a German military contribution.

Now McCloy regretted this because I think he felt it was, politically, [too] soon. But I think he also concluded it was essential and unavoidable, and therefore the question was, "how"? So our contribution was to try to shape the "how". And to some extent, as I said, we were playing both sides of the street: Al tended to favor the Pentagon view that the right way to go was to recreate some kind of German national capability and integrate that into NATO. I had persuaded McCloy at least that the possibility of an integrated European force ought to be explored because that was a better way politically, less dangerous, and more likely to be palatable to the French who were very uneasy at that point about rearming the Germans.

But the chiefs considered that the integrated idea, what later became EDC, much too complicated, and that if only you would tell the Germans that they were going to have forces, you could get started forming them. They really did think at that time that German forces would be like dragon's teeth, that they would spring up, [that] really within a matter of six months you would be able to recreate a very effective German contribution. And it was...(end of tape)

The NATO meeting was in September. I remember well, it was in the Waldorf. The US position had been worked out finally by the State Department and the Defense Department, through the President of course. But it was essentially 1) more US forces; 2) a US commender; 3) German forces. The French were very very much torn: they wanted desperately to have the first two parts, but they didn't want to have Germany arming.

Richardson: I recall very well the meeting that followed. We were hit almost out of the cold, out of the blue, with the German rearmament idea. It came out of New York meetings. We read about it in the papers. The staffs in the Standing Group were not apprised of the proposal and there was no prior service planning on it.

Bowie: It was very closely held because of the debate about what we should insist on, and the disagreement going on between these different perspectives.

Richardson: Shortly after the NY proposal on Germany, we had the Defense Minister's meeting down here on Constitution Avenue. Eisenhower was in the chair. And we put...together a sort of rough paper on this German rearmament. The proposal led to a fantastic outburst when Jules Moch, the French Minister, made a speech attacking any idea of rearming Germany. The Danish Minister sitting next to him rose to defend the proposal and attacked Moch's motives, accusing him of not giving a damn about any other country's security -- only his personal biases. It was very embarrassing. The debate continued for two days, I recall it well because we joked about it a lot, due to the fact that the State Department administrative people had budgeted for a short meeting, the meeting kept going on and on. The Ministers didn't want to break up without agreement and they couldn't get it. Meanwhile State ran out of money to feed the guests. But it is worth looking into, for I think the Dane's speech was a magnificent one. I don't know if any of you were at that meeting. After Moch got through and the other Ministers were getting bored with the issue, the Dane who had already been voted out of his job at home -- I remember he had flaming red hair -- had asked to speak. He sat next to Moch and got up and made the most vitriolic attack against anybody you have ever heard in public. Against Moch. "This Jules Moch, looking at his background it's clear why he doesn't want to do anything to defend Europe or the Germans." The Danish Minister defended the rearmament proposal while everybody sat there aghast. He was already out of a job, he told us afterwards, so he didn't care. That was when at the meeting people began to realize that we had a very, very sensitive issue. But if you look up that speech by the Danish minister, nobody knew what to do about it. A compromise was finally agreed to. The Standing Group would look at the military aspect of rearmament and how to solve the key integration level issue, and a group under Ambassador Spofford in London and Ambassador Alphand of France was set up to solve the political aspects of the problem.

Goodpaster: Let me just say one more thing to get us up to this benchmark, and that is the Berlin airlift. I believe it was 1948, if I remember. And that was triggered, as I recall, by the action of Britain and the United States, with France joining -- but it was Britain and the United States -- of breaking West Germany out of the Four power control, taking it out from under the Soviet veto. This was then the Soviet response. You've got a buildup here and that's what I'm trying to recount. You've got that action in Czechoslovakia at that time, and that's one stage out of which came NATO, in fact came the treaty. Then you've got the attack in Korea, out of which came the collective military force in being. So now we're at the point where SHAPE is being formed in January of 1951. The adjustment within NATO has to be faced. I've forgotten when Pleven came forward with his EDC but it was...

Bowie: Let me fill that in just a little bit; it's worth perhaps doing. In general, as I said the Joint Chiefs and the other military people wanted to pursue essentially a German rearmament of Germany and some form of controlled national capability. The French were adamantly opposed to this and had the picture of the general staff and something that was ominous and so on. And so in October of 1950, after the September meeting, Plevin made a speech proposing the EDC. This really got short shrift in the beginning. The Spofford group, by about December of 1950, put together a proposal for a German organized contingent army, as a contribution to NATO. That was then passed to the Allied High Commission to negotiate with the Germans about this proposal. There was a military man who was a deputy to McCloy who did the negotiation. I can't remember his name. And they negotiated for about five or four months. And it ended up in a proposal in which the Germans couldn't have units above a certain size and they couldn't have certain weapons; and no general staff and other things of that sort. No general staff and other things of that sort.

And in the end, after they'd got this agreement, Adenauer said I will not ask German forces to fight as second class soldiers. And this really, absolutely blew out of the water the entire effort which had been made to create this German army. So then, attention shifted to the Plevin idea which had been organized as a conference among the Europeans but really was going nowhere. Alphand, as I recall it, was the representative of the French. And he was very much interested in it. Alphand was not a strong man, but he somehow got religion on this issue and did try to make something happen. But really nothing happened until about June of '51, and when the route toward a German national capability seemingly had been closed off because of Adenauer's rejection of this compromise.

And now, as I recall it, somehow or other Monnet and Eisenhower got together. And Eisenhower decided to give his backing to trying to make the EDC into a workable arrangement. And my recollection is that Richardson: was the fellow picked by Ike -- was that right? -- to more or less be the liaison between...

Goodpaster: You and Mike Michaelis and Louis Kunzig.

Richardson: You know this is really not part of the nuclear project, but if anybody wants to get into that I have the day by day history on German rearmament -- on what happened after the meeting in Washington. After [the] meeting broke and had assigned the military job to the Standing Group, General Bradley called in his three air planners -- Col. Brohon (French), me, and Group Captain Zulu Morris who was the Britisher. The principal military issue was the level of integration. The French were willing to accept the notion that the Germans could be integrated at the regimental level but not above. All of the military people said it was "utter balls" to expect to have a tower of Babel with divisions made up of different nationalities. "We've got to have them integrated at the division level." That's where the agreement on rearmament locked, right there on the military issue. So Bradley called us in and said that since this was primarily an Army issue he figure three airmen could probably come up with an agreement on it! We did. We came up with a proposal to solve the thing in about a week and a half. It was agreed to by the French, General Ely, the British, Lord Tedder, and General Bradley.

Our compromise was very simple. The Plevin proposal was on the table at the time for a European Army. We said it's going to take a couple of years to bring German units into being. If the French can sell the other members of NATO on the idea of a European defense force (EDC). Fine, the military will buy it. If the French cannot sell their idea, and/or the Germans will not accept to join, then all would agree to integration at division level. Now it's up to you French. You either sell it or you don't. If you sell it you get it your way (EDC) at Bonn and subsequently Paris. If you don't sell it you buy it our way at division level.

The French military bought that. The Germans bought it because while they weren't party to the Standing Group they were being felt out by some of our people. The Germans bought it also for the simple reason that all they had to do was not agree to the Plevin plan in order to automatically get the US plan under the compromise.

The amusing part of this was that while we quickly reached agreement on the military side the politicians in London could not agree on their side. The Brussels meeting was coming up and there was no decision out of Spofford's group in London. After we had agreed on the military side we went to General Bradley and said "look we think that we can make a proposal that we've got here stick." They're still hung up in London. So Bradley called up Spofford and said "I'd like to send over a couple of my people to propose a possible solution." Spofford said fine but it won't do any good. Meanwhile General Ely called up and Alphand, the French Representative in London, and said: "I'm going to send one of my people to help you. Ely then sent Jean de Rougement. He wasn't on the Standing Group but he was senior advisor in the French intelligence here. Bradley sent me over. We sat in on the London meeting and listened for about two days. Then Jean de Rougement and I went up to our room in the Hotel Connaught, got out a bottle of whiskey at 6 o'clock in the evening and wrote a compromise political agreement. I went back and I said to Spofford, "I think sir if you propose this it'll be accepted by the French." All of his advisors, I've forgotten their names told him no, no way, it absolutely won't work. Of course I didn't tell them that de Rougement was saying the same thing to Alphand- to his people. Finally, after an all day discussion Spofford brought up our plan in frustration. Spofford said: "well there is an idea that some of my people came up with" and he proposed the compromise I outlined. Ambassador Alphand looked up brightly and said "J'accept". Shows how those things can be made to work in case you just use common sense.

Wampler: One thing that come's to mind, is that this issue arose out of an issue that's further back, that might lead us back into the nuclear issue. That is while the German rearmament problem was addressing political issues, there's also the fact that you wouldn't be pressing for a German army if you didn't have established military requirements for a forward defense. Most of '51 is spent fighting this out, in trying to come up with a requirements paper for carrying out a forward defense. The main center of this battle was the "Three Wise Men"- The TCC, the Lisbon force goals. But even before that there was a Nitze exercise that went nowhere in the summer of '51. The interesting thing is that at the very same time that they're arguing about the Lisbon force goals in the fall of 51, Eisenhower, Norstad, Gruenther and other people are taking steps to try to get more information to SHAPE to carry out planning and to integrate nuclear weapons into the planning. The interesting thing to me is that some of the JCS documents dealing with this whole issue of briefing Eisenhower have the subject of "closing the gap." It seems to me that nuclear weapons are seen as a way to close the gap and SHAPE is moving ahead of the Truman administration in this regard.

Goodpaster: We're now at SHAPE and SHAPE is activated on the 2nd of April after a very intense period of preparation and organization in 1951. Our plans and operations division and Air Vice Marshall Hudleston, the deputy chief of staff for plans and operations are put to work on the development of a defense plan. Ethan Allen Chapman and Bill Rossen and George Anderson from the Navy and Bob Worden from the Air Force under General Bodet are some of the people involved in this planning. Field Marshal Montgomery heard about it after a short while, and called them down and told them that he wanted to be as close to them as that (gesturing). Bill Rosson's famous remark was "Field Marshal I assume that we are these people down here below." But they prepared this plan, they drew in all of the planning that had been conducted and came up with a 90 division requirement. That was rather startling.

It was based on the famous 175 Soviet divisions. We then were in a situation that simply was viewed as unmanageable through the summer of 1951. The Ottawa meeting of NATO in September of 1951, the decision was made to set up the Temporary Council Committee, the so-called "Three Wise Men". Their job as assigned was to reconcile on the one hand the requirements of military security with, on the other hand--it's either the "economic capabilities" or the "politio-economic" capabilities; Link Gordon says it's the economic capabilities but I remembered it as the politio-economic capabilities of the member nations. But that charter I think is a very significant one. Monnet, Harriman, initially Gaitskell and then Plowden, who took Gaitskell's place were the members. I was Eisenhower's representative to this TCC. Joe McNarney headed the screening and costing apparatus--he was a retired four star air general--which operated under this group. That work went on through the fall of 1951 and it culminated in the Lisbon meeting at Esterid in February of 1952. ----------------[???] learned as much as they could and I would say that Bob Worden was the source of information about US Air Force strategic nuclear planning. But none of that could be passed into NATO at the time. It was carefully...

Rosenberg: Who was that?

Goodpaster: Robert F. Worden, Air Force, retired as a Major General as I recall from the Air Force ultimately.

Rosenberg: But there was no thought of integrating nuclear weapons into that 90 divisions at all...

Goodpaster: None, none whatever this is the point I'm going to make...

Rosenberg: Everything that came out of that was SAC...

Goodpaster: That was entirely in the hands of SAC and SAC was jealous as a mother bear..

Wampler: But at the same time, they were working out provisions to have SAC support SACEUR.

Goodpaster: We'll come to this. Because when Eisenhower accepted the appointment, after Truman told him he would like him to do it, Eisenhower conditioned his acceptance on having command authority over all elements that would be engaged in defensive operations. His rather searing experience with the strategic bombing during the War was a part of that. That was in the letter that Truman sent to Eisenhower. I didn't go through your documentation and I don't know whether you have it, but that's a very important document.

Now, that was one bit of planning that was going on. Then you had planning in EUCOM, to the extent that there was planning in USAFE. EUCOM was supposed to have authority over USAFE but at that time had practically none at all. EUCOM was really the Army headquarters. It was down at Heidelberg and their plan essentially was a plan of evacuation, which is all the capability they had because they were essentially an occupation force. If you added it all together it was probably the equivalent of two divisions, or something like that. It was a constabulary type organization. Eisenhower's immediate activity when he took the command was to make a tour around all of the NATO countries using Dick Walters as his interpreter, because he managed the language in each one of them. He put to them the question whether they were prepared to contribute to this collective force. He pressed them to increase their commitment. You may remember that when he pressed the Dutch, the Dutch agreed. But this went beyond the parliamentary agreement and the government fell, as a result of the Eisenhower visit.

??: This is the spring of 51

Goodpaster: The spring of 51, immediately after he got there while we were getting organized.

??: January, February.

Goodpaster: Yes, February.

??: Still in Paris at the hotel?

Goodpaster: Still at the Astoria, that's right. Then he came back here to the states--and this is significant--to press for the return of four US divisions to Europe. He made what he regarded as a commitment to the Congress that they would be there only to cover the period of European rearmament. This stayed in his mind I can tell you, very strongly all through his presidency. So you had the planning of SAC; you had the planning of EUCOM; you had the beginning of planning in SHAPE: and you had Eisenhower working on force commitments early in 51. On the force commitments you then had the TCC, which sought to reconcile that. Over at EUCOM their term was "we'll let those free thinkers (that was the term they used) over at SHAPE do whatever planning they want but our plans will remain EUCOM plans." Until we got the four additional divisions, the EUCOM unilateral plans remained in effect. They were under Eisenhower's authority but he was not yet directing them out of SHAPE. Also the SAC planning went forward quite independently. He was briefed and Gruenther was briefed. Some of our senior people were briefed and several of us at the staff level received a partial briefing by Air Force, by SAC people...

Richardson???: Viccelio, when did Viccelio get there? That was after we moved to Galily[?].

Goodpaster: Yes, I think Viccelio came in the fall of 51 or the spring of 52 and he of course came in with full knowledge of atomic planning.

Richardson: There was a team that was sent over by the US. In the SHAPE headquarters there was a liaison with the Strategic people at SAC under General Viccelio and Jack Morse was on that. That point was in your paper so I called Jack yesterday and I said "look you were on that Atomic Group with Viccelio what did you do? You had all of that targeting data and information right there didn't you available for Eisenhower. He said yes we did, from day 1 when Viccelio came on Board so it's not entirely correct to say that that liaison was just through Norstad although he was AIR deputy. The Viccelio group was a direct pipeline between LeMay at SAC and SACEUR and was exercised accordingly.

Goodpaster: Yes Brigadier General Viccelio.

Richardson: The guy who knows as much as Viccelio and he's still around because he works with us all the time, is Jack Morse who was Assistant Secretary for NATO Affairs back in the Nixon days.

??: Is he out in California now?

Richardson: Yeah. He's in the Stanford area.

Bowie: I would underscore a couple of things which have come out here because I think these things are already present in people's thinking all the way through the period into which we are now coming. The first was the figure of the Lisbon goals was treated as what would really be necessary if you were going to in fact defend. Nobody brushed those off, as I remember, as being a proper assessment of what was required. Second, almost immediately it was accepted that they in fact would not be reached and therefore there was this sense of gap at once. Third, the assumption early on had been that the German forces would be available almost instantaneously, or rather very quickly. And then of course all through this period right up until 1955 you didn't have any beginning of German forces. And so you had not only the shortfall resulting from what the others wouldn't do, but from the absence of the German contribution as well. So this sense of a very large gap between what was required and what was available created almost like a vacuum into which the nuclear weapons were just bound to come along. Because, you ought to remember the fourth and final factor, which is that at the time of the Korean war, Truman had finally approved this enormous increase in the facilities for the making of nuclear weapons. So you began to have what amounted to a flood of weapons not immediately available but in prospect.

Richardson: Let me add a point. I was still on the Standing Group at Lisbon. I went over with Bradley and Admiral Foskett and the U.S. team at that time. When we came back the summary and the briefings that we put together for our people on the impact of Lisbon was basically, in simplified version, along the lines, you said. We said the force requirements established by the military and presented at Lisbon collided head on with the economic realities of the TCC. The difference was not 10 or 15% it was more like 2-300%. Now the conclusion was that while you could claim the military could be wrong by 20 or 30% or you could screw around with the intelligence to bring it within acceptable terms, everybody in Europe, and the man in the street in the U.S. recognized that you couldn't sell the idea that one division could beat 20 - not to people who'd just came out of World War II. On the other hand, you could hardly agree that all of the senior generals who had just came out of the war were all wrong on the figures. Whether they were right or not.

This being true I was told that Eisenhower came back to SHAPE and supposedly said something to the effect that: "Unless we find a way of bridging this gap in a credible manner we've just witnessed the end of NATO. The other ministers will now go back and tell their political masters; 'Sir, NATO was a great idea for our security but we just proved we can't get there from here - it won't work.' We've got to find another solution, or the alliance will start to unravel." That sort of thinking at our end of the business, in the Standing Group, told us we had to look at something else. So, we started to look at another way of doing the business. Of course this led to nuclear war plans after going through effort to close the gap with improved intelligence. The first intelligence effort was drafted by a fellow named Donnelly as I recall.

Goodpaster: It was Sam, it's not the one, it's not C.H. Donnelly. It's Sam Donnelly.

Richardson: Sam literally looked out the window with a misty eye and dictated the Soviet O.B. [Order of Battle] as 175 divisions. He threw in all the Poles and all the Czech's and everybody else who had anything on paper. And that was it. So there was a lot of slack in the just their assessment where we could reduce forces.

Bowie: And yet for quite a while it was taken very solemnly...

Richardson: They established requirements and established budgets and people don't give those up lightly.

Goodpaster: Let me say two things about this. One is a famous quote from Harlan Cleveland, down there at Lisbon, on the subject of the gap. He said, "to have a gap like this is like trying to cover an 18" manhole with a 16" manhole cover". And we told him that the analogy is not that severe. The other thing that was pressing us was that this thing had to be solved and it had to be solved now, because we were supposed to be faced with this date of maximum danger. That's when we took on that issue of the date of maximum danger and went into that to see what was behind it. And that was largely a budgetary pressure, I would say, a budgetary device...

Bowie: That was a part, absolutely, it was a part of NSC-68. Because that was essentially a brief approived by everybody else in the administration to try to force Truman off the $13 billion ceiling. And in order to make him act I think they took this idea, that there was a point of maximum danger so that he couldn't say well we'll do it next year.

Goodpaster: Bob, I can't speak to the actual formulation we had there. But that was a message Gruenther conveyed on behalf of Eisenhower to the Lisbon meeting. And we then turned to the nuclear capability as a make weight. We made the point at Lisbon that they shouldn't leave with a sense of failure because we simply had not taken account of the nuclear capability, and that was enough to provide a viable deterrent when added to the forces that we were creating. But that was in very general terms. I want to record that point because we're going to come back to that point, it was only in the most general terms.

Wampler: And also in the long term, you know this wasn't going to help immediately. I mean you've got Bradley and the Standing Group saying these weapons aren't going to help us and you're going to have these requirements up through '56 anyway. We're not going to have these weapons on line. And this is the background to the Ridgway study that you discuss in your [Richardson's] article...

Bowie: But, there was a second aspect to that, I remember little bit later, from the budgetary presentations in the NSC. And that was as follows. The army in that period, tended to picture the nuclear exchange as only something which took place and then you had to have the capability of virtually refighting a conventional war. This was what really got Eisenhower very angry in the early stages. Because he felt that just isn't in the books. If you have a nuclear exchange you're not going to have any kind of a basis for restarting World War II.

Goodpaster: This was the theory of the broken back warfare. Sir John Slessor I think was the author. But this now takes you about to the end of Eisenhower's time at SHAPE, and the arrival of Ridgway. At that point, I guess we had the follow on to the TCC operation which was called the Annual Review...

Rosenberg: Could I interject one, that I'm curious about ... back it up just a bit because, it relates to, I can't remember which of you made the comment about how CINCSAC had essentially all weapons. First of all he had ?? capability. He was the only one with the capability to deliver them. And he jealously guarded that. Now you've got a change now beginning to take place in terms of smaller lighter weapons and so on. But it must have been clear to people who had access to the Harmon report of 49. And said 133 bombs on 70 Soviet cities will not in fact stop the Soviet's from taking Western Europe or just anybody looking at it. NSC-68 says the atomic bomb alone will not solve our problems or prevent the Russians from taking Western Europe. Was there anybody in your memory who was at least trying to work on SAC to say you should be thinking of doing something else, something other than retardation. I mean I know that it's Navy arguments but that's that's different...

Richardson: I don't think that up until that time SAC was even working on retardation. It's true clobbering, using the few weapons we had and fighting the Navy not to steal what there was out of the stockpile. SAC was not remotely interested in the retardation. It was deemed to be incidental to the strategic effort.

Rosenberg: The army did a number of studies including one in 52 which said the retardation mission is not being attended to and in fact the Russians will get to Western Europe and will be able to do things because we haven't been able to slow them down even with the air offensive going off as planned...

Richardson: Do you want to hear an amusing incident in this regard? LeMay came in and briefed us in the Joint Staff on SAC's nuclear plans. Following the briefing he showed a viewgraph of his bomber force going over Sweden and Norway into the Soviet Union. Some smart admiral got up and said "general, what makes you assume that you can fly with impunity across Sweden and Norway." General LeMay looked at him, and at a whole roomful of senior officers, and bit his cigar off. He said I'll answer that question by telling you about one of my last sorties in Europe. I was bringing my Air Division in over the Fredwigshaffen and decided it was safer to come in from the south so I swung out over Switzerland. The Swiss flak started firing at me and they called me up on the RT and said, "do you know you're over Swiss territory?" I called them back and I said "yes I know I'm over Swiss territory. Do you people know your flak is firing 100 yards to my right." They said yes; yes we know our flak is firing 100 yards to your right.

Bowie: Did that really happen?

Richardson: I don't know, but LeMay used to tell it as a story...

Goodpaster: Okay, all right here we are at, now we're coming...

??: Finally gotten to your agenda.

Goodpaster: ... we're now to say, May of 1953. The last act that Eisenhower was called on to perform as SACEUR came from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They felt that a confused situation was developing because you had what had become essentially an army command, EUCOM at Heidelberg; you had an air command, which had separated itself from the previous over all command; and you had the sixth fleet in the Mediterranean. It proved extremely difficult to work out organizational arrangements, particularly with the British command arrangements in the Mediterranean. And the chiefs felt that there was not enough control, that they simply didn't have the command competence that was needed. They called on Eisenhower to establish a US command. Their instructions were very much tailored, to give him some authority, but to withhold some authority. And so on. It was not the kind of thing that was very attractive to him. I knew him because I worked with him in this. After analyzing this, it was clear that we would have to go back with a counter proposition. Which we did, and generated something that was very much like what finally came into existence.

The Chiefs then came back to Eisenhower with an instruction saying that they couldn't do what he had in mind in his calling for modifications. At that point he said that he was so close to his departure that he would have to turn the problem over to his successor, General Ridgway. Well, the chiefs apparently briefed General Ridgway pretty hard in Washington when he was on his way. And he came and I think his initial disposition was to try to do what the chiefs had indicated to him that they wanted. But he went thoroughly into the issue, read all of the documentation and talked it out quite thoroughly. Then he came up with essentially the same solution that Eisenhower had had, and that was put into effect. As a result you now have the new command headquarters which is called USEUCOM. The old EUCOM becomes USAREUR, the army Europe. An air force general was established to be the deputy US CINCEUR with headquarters you recall at Camp Deloge. Although Ridgway would be both SACEUR and US CINCEUR, the day to day operation--the real running of the US side of the thing--would be done by this senior deputy, four star US air force officer. Now this goes to the point that you were raising. During 1952 and early 1953 we knew (and I knew of course from background and from my own work) that these other weapons would be coming on. But there was intense rivalry--I'll put it this way--between the Army headquarters and the air headquarters, the Army at Heidelberg and the air at Wiesbaden. General Norstad had taken over USAFE. I think he was still there, I don't think he had yet moved to Fountainbleau.

Richardson: He was commuting.

Goodpaster: This thing was not pulled together. And so, out of this comes the need for someone to pull the nuclear planning together and that, then passed to General Norstad. As I recall in his capacity as commander air force central region. CINCAFCENT, the NATO command, with his NATO hat on...

Richardson: When he got that job, I was working for him at the time. I came over with him from the Standing Group in his plane with Dick Yudkin and Roy Allison. That's was when the Bonn conference was taking place. By virtue of having had the German rearmament issue in Washington, I had to go cover the Bonn conference. And then after the Bonn conference, when the JCS were asked to designate somebody to be Ambassador Bruce's military advisor at the Paris EDC conference, guess who got picked!

A few months after that SHAPE rained on my parade. Before Gruenther moved the headquarters to Paris I had the neatest job on Earth. I was a bachelor speaking fluent French, with an Air Force French staff car sharing a B-26 with one other officer at Fountainbleau in which I could fly myself anywhere in Europe. I was then working 4 hours a day, 3 days a week, going to the EDC meetings at the Quai D'Orsay and reporting on these to the JCS. Needless to say when you [Goodpaster], Eisenhower and Gruenther got there, I got a call from Gruenther, who said: "you're supposed to be the Ambassador's advisor on the EDC." I said Yes sir." He said: "well you're not anymore. General Eisenhower and I will be the advisor, you come to work here from 8 a.m. to 10p.m. from now on!

Wampler: You're talking about the follow-up to the one described in the paper where Eisenhower relied on Taylor and Carney put together the atomic annexes, as a sort of a followup that Ridgway established later in '52?

Goodpaster: You'd have to check out in terms of, when Norstad was given this job. I think maybe the Carney Taylor thing was prior to the establishment of USEUCOM, but you'd have to go back and look that up. I guess I was back a time or two to Washington and stopped in at the chairman's office. I learned from his staff that there was a feeling that the thing lacked organization. And with the nuclear business coming on, something more had to be done. So we had some alert that Eisenhower would be called on to really activate a central command. But you'd better check the exact sequence and the players. You mentioned Taylor and I saw that in your paper, but I didn't remember that it was Taylor. I'd forgotten who was the USAREUR commander. Well, it was General Handy and then he became the USEUCOM commander. The USAREUR commander wasn't Taylor though Taylor may have been on his staff at the time. I don't think it was Tony McAliffe, it was whoever it was before McAuliffe was the USAREUR commander. You can probably get that. Things were somewhat at sixes and sevens. You had the Army's 280 mm cannon which was coming over and arrived sometime during this period. So you were now going to have Army nuclear weapons, Air Force nuclear weapons, and nuclear weapons in the sixth fleet.

Wampler: I'm wondering how this sort of shifting situation affected the way in which the Ridgway report was carried out and studied. You had changing lines of responsibility, you had differences in view, you had the problem of getting information that they could rely upon. I'm concerned with who is doing this in '52 and '53...

Richardson: I was there at the time and my impression is that the Ridgway effort is played up a little more than it should be in this study.

Goodpaster: Yes, I agree with that.

Richardson: ...The Ridgway plan was a first cut, with atomic weapons. The planners looked at it as if they were not really interested in the facts and figures. It was broad theory. What they did, was only to add on nuclear capability to whatever as sumptions they were given and to the existing order of battle and draw conclusions.

Bowie: I was going to say, I had nothing to do with this, but my impression is, again from just the atmosphere of the time that the reality was that they were taking the conventional defense and adding an overlay of the nuclear as somehow filling a gap by that means. But it wasn't really thought through...

Richardson: You have it right in your paper. When you add nuclear weapons to conventional forces without changing their posture (vulnerability) you come up with more losses and greater force requirements instead of less.

Goodpaster: That they were being protective of the requirement to the extent that they, I do remember came up with a conclusion rather amazing to me. That this was not going to reduce the requirement for forces, it was going to increase the requirement...

Richardson: I'm not sure Viccilio was even at SHAPE when they did the Ridgway plan. I think he and Norstad were still down in Fountainbleau...

Bowie: I think you have to read that in the setting that followed the clear failure of the Lisbon goals and the sense of gap. The British in particular, as I remember, but maybe I'm wrong about that [but] in general I think there was a feeling [that] nuclear weapons are going to give us our out. And the fear was that this would then open the gates for even further attrition of the conventional capability. And so I think that Ridgway surely must have been somewhat influenced in order to show that that was just hopeful thinking...

Wampler: Well, that was Bradley's approach to this issue. You know, Bradley said we've got to show NATO that these weapons are not going to be a panacea. That it's more complicated than that...

Bowie: Well, I was just going to say that, just as I think you have to read NSC-68 in light of what they were trying to accomplish, I think you have to read some of these reports in the light of what they feared might happen about people's excessively optimistic view of what the nuclear weapons could do for them.

Goodpaster: And now, at the close of this in mid-53 Ridgway is going back to the States to be chief of staff of the Army and Gruenther takes over. And now Gruenther tries to attack the problem...

Richardson: That's right, that's the first time that serious considerations was given to a real land/air atomic war.

Goodpaster: That's right and that is the New Approach Group in which Bob and I were working...

Richardson: The only thing that wonder's me, is what was the date of the Beaufre Group? Do you remember?

Goodpaster: Andre Beaufre.

Richardson: In Heidelberg...

Goodpaster: Yes.

Richardson: To understand what went on here, you have to understand that there were two ways to go. There was the way of adding nuclear firepower to the existing and historical methods and doctrines of the system. And there was the way of looking at it and saying if you introduce a change of this magnitude in the firepower, you're going to have to change one hell of a lot of other things. That's a paradigm shift on everything from force posture to vulnerability to deployment. Now when at first people looked at this, none of these so-called guidance papers existed. They had not been worked out. Nobody had rewritten Clausewitz for tactical nuclear weapons and there wasn't any book to go on. So everything that came out until an effort was made to look at it from that other point of view came out with this kind of conclusion.

Goodpaster: Yes, it was appliqued.

Richardson: Eisenhower appointed the Beaufre group didn't he? I think he did. He appointed the Inter-allied group headed by General Beaufre. They worked at Heidelberg to determine what would the impact of really using tactical nuclear weapons on the battlefield. Their findings were so outrageous, from the point of view of the traditional establishment, that they were almost laughed out of court. But they turned out not to be all that dumb.

Rosenberg: What were they?

??: What do you remember them being?

Richardson: The findings? They came out with things like the atomic vulnerability will require that we place two men in a jeep in every square mile, make firepower the queen of the battle and get rid of every concentration in Europe. And you know, it was like going from Napoleon's close order of formation to trench warfare. Nobody understood at that time what the hell they were talking about.

Wampler: Lord Carver said that when he came there with Montgomery in '52, Beaufre was already in business.

Richardson: But you have to go back to that Beaufre group, because that is really to my knowledge the first serious attempt to define the nature of atomic combat.

Goodpaster: ...international, defensive...

Richardson: ..and there have not been very many efforts since.

Bowie: Beaufre was actually a very imaginative officer...

Richardson: Of course the people that were associated with it continued to sell it. This said "hey this is right." But other people said you're too far out, too radical.

Wampler: We were thinking we might want to take a break here...

Bowie: When we reassemble I would love to hear Andy give his impression's of Eisenhower's view regarding nuclear weapons just at the point that he left SHAPE.

??: Yes, Yes very much so...

Rosenberg: Including the question of did he feel at the time he left SHAPE that there really was a lot wrong with the Truman...that the implementation at least of the way Truman was going about doing things. I mean there is the large issue that Bob discussed, and then there is the other side of it that he was part of that Truman administration carrying out policy.

BREAK

Tape 2

End of Break

Goodpaster: I'm going to go through. I mentioned to you Eisenhower's view on this date of maximum danger, which he felt was artificial and was leading us to negative conclusions that weren't justified. There were a number of other things. It raised repeatedly some of the issues of logistics that he thought had not been taken into account particularly with regard to the Soviet capabilities--that they would, that there were logistic limitations and logistic problems that would limit what they could do. He cited his own words and war experiences as to what happens when a force outruns its logistics.

But one of the things that I recall becoming involved in-- it may have been in Eisenhower's time, but it may have been during the Ridgway period, I can't recall what triggered this-- but I went down to inquire of the intelligence people and really dig in to the intelligence input that was being given to our military planning. We were tending to shift from so-called requirements planning to capabilities planning-- how would you use existing forces or the forces that we see becoming available, and what would be the expected outcome of an attack if it should occur. As I mentioned, I talked to one of the key officers in the intelligence division, Colonel Jack Nicholas, to inquire about this, and particularly asked about the states of readiness of the 175 Soviet divisions, as to what was their state of readiness, what was their state of logistic support and so on. And it turned out that the basis on which they had formulated their intelligence annex, the intelligence input for the planning, was that the Soviets would not initiate this aggression, unless they were at a high state of readiness and unless they had logistical support and logistical supplies that would enable them to conduct this.

But that was really not the question if you're doing the capabilities planning and the capabilities analysis. What you have to look at is what is their actual state of readiness and what is their actual state of logistic support. Now there was a lot that we didn't know about that, but there was a fair amount that we did know. And when you put that together, then it looked as though the NATO deterrent was much more credible and much more effective than we were in fact taking into account. I think that view of the deterrent and the notion that we could have more confidence in the deterrent even though we did not have the full forces to do the job in just the way we might want to do it was helpful. I know it was helpful in enabling us to get over these, this very negative, almost defeatist view that arose from time to time-- that we simply couldn't handle the job. That may be an aspect of the maturing of the planning process that we were going through at this time. I think this was before the establishment of the new approach group, which I think was established in maybe September, October of 1953.

Bowie: When were the numbers revised? Soviet capability.

Rosenberg: The revisions I think come about '55...

Bowie: Not until then?

Rosenberg: Right. On Soviet capability, I don't think, and I don't think they're reflecting what General Goodpaster is talking about either. I mean you're talking about actual reductions in forces, Soviet reductions. Rather than the issue of readiness and building...but I think what you've just mentioned is a crucial part of understanding the planning of how you go about thinking about this problem and actually working against it. To move into the new approach group....

Goodpaster: I've got one more thing we ought to put on the record. Bob, I don't know if you came over. Remember Hoyt Vandenberg made a study after Eisenhower asked if the Air Force could make a study of air requirements in Europe. I think he was Chief of Staff of the Air Force, by this time. He brought a group over early in 1951 to talk about tactical air requirements, and I mention that because I think you will find some reference in there to the use of these aircraft to deliver both conventional ordnance and nuclear ordnance. Okay....

Richardson: I have all of those papers by the way, written at varying stages, I haven't looked at them in years.

Goodpaster: Now, the New Approach Group...

Rosenberg: The fact that you have all of those papers they're interesting. If you'd like us to help you look at them...

Richardson: Thanks. When I upgrade my computer and finish five other articles, I'll get to them.

Goodpaster: Okay, on the New Approach Group, there were Bob and myself and then Col. Pierre Gallois of the French air force; a Navy Captain, French, Francois Picard-D'Estelan; from the British army, Charles Harrington; and from the Italian air force, Otello Montorsi, who later became the chief of the Italian Air Force. That was the group as I recall...

Rosenberg: And you were appointed directly by...

Goodpaster: By Gruenther, yes. And our mission...

??: Who was it on the British side?

Goodpaster: On the British side, Charles Harrington. I think he's dead, I lost touch with him, I think he became a major general and commanded one of their divisions-- very fine, very soldierly chap. We were put to work really to form the concept and the basis for a plan employing nuclear capability as well as the conventional forces.

Richardson: As I recall, the original effort was supposed to look at three things taking the projected annual review force possibilities for planning date. First what would be the impact of the concurrent strategic effort to the extent we could get the necessary information on SAC plans -- impact on the force should gap, basically. Second was, the intelligence you used. Should you really count all the Czechoslovakian divisions as equal to first line French divisions? Russian divisions? that sort of thing. And lastly was to examine in depth the impact of the use of tactical nuclear weapons. Those were the three points but the main effort, wound up being on the last. The first two only helped us pick up a few nickels on the side.

Bowie: Now was it assumed then that SAC wouldn't do anything which could be called tactical. I mean in the sense, it wouldn't be addressed to delaying or interrupting...

Richardson: No, no, no, anything was. Let me make a point here will you, because a lot of people don't understand this and in fact at the time we didn't understand it. Sorry about that, we did studies of this later on in the 60's and reduced it down to a fairly simple situation. There's just one simple point that I think lets one understand a little bit why some of these confusions exist.

There are three basic factors in any posture. What you do, defend on the Rhine, the task, the mission, okay. How you do it, with nuclear weapons, conventional forces, standing on your head, cavalry -- the method or the strategy. And your Resources, what you have to do it with the money, men, and machines. Now the sum total of those three basic elements has to equal any given, or fixed threat. You've got to balance it out.

This is equally true for most plans and planning today as it was for the problem of the Ridgway effort. It always works for there are three types of plans. Requirements plans, capabilities plans - which are very confused by some people with emergency plans - and emergency plans. In a requirement plan the job you've got to do is given. It presumes you'll do it in the way that's approved, established, written and taught. And the variable is what it takes to do the given job in the given way. Okay, this is very straightforward, very simple and it maximizes the forces required to do the defense job. This is basically the approach that was used up until and through Lisbon. That was how the DC28 requirements were established.

But forces aren't the only variable in the equation. What you do, the strategy, how you do the business, is also a variable. When what you do is a variable, you can say, hey, you know, I can't meet these requirements, but I can cut the job down to one I can do, like England did after World War II when she got out of Greece, of the Middle East, etc. I'll cut the job down to the size of my resources. Lastly which is least done, and most difficult to sell, is to change the method of doing the business. You can say, well, you know, I'm stuck with the job. I'm stuck with the resources- in broad terms, like dollars. Therefore I'm going to change my method of doing the business to see if I can't do this fixed job in some different way. Your planners and your people are always going to say: "no way," I can't do the job sir, if I don't have the resources. And then somebody will come in and say: "well you mean to tell me that you can't destroy Russia if I let you build a 100 gigaton bombs and blow the Atlantic Ocean over it?" "Oh well yes if you let me do that." "Now you're beginning to think the way I want you to think." So then you begin to make the foot fit the shoe.

The difference between the three types of plans, is which one is the variable. In the New Approach we were given the resources as being whatever the NATO goals were that we had to work with. We were told what our job was supposed to be - "defend forward in Europe" against the intelligence threat which we had sweated down as best we could. The questions was how to do it? In this case you go in and you say: "well, sir, if you're willing to let me use nuclear weapons and change the order of battle and introduce all sorts of other changes then- yes maybe there is a way I can do it with the resources I have. But of course, once you do this you're asking everyone to change their religion and that's very hard to do.

Goodpaster: But that's what we did, for about a year...

Richardson: ...but that's what we did, and that's basically why it never really stuck in a way.

Goodpaster: That did enter into planning and I think it entered into the sense that it was a strong deterrent. And I think it entered into the Soviet view of what they would face or what they might face. They could never be confident that that would not happen to them.

Richardson: They copied all of the stuff we wrote on it and our intelligence people brought it back to us three years later.

Rosenberg: You mean like those articles that you wrote in the Air University Review...

Richardson: Yes, published in Russian and brought back.

Bowie: I think that [is] something that creeps in here, at some point along the line, [but] I don't know how [it is] articulated. But planning traditionally looks at capabilities. More and more as people's attention focussed on deterrence they began to think not in terms exactly of intentions. They assumed the Soviets, if they could get away with it, would be willing to go ahead and overrun and so on. But in a different sense, they asked how Soviet thinking would be affected by the situation they would face. And, in other words, there began to be a recognition that when you had this kind of a nuclear situation, you were thinking in terms of deterrence. You had to think about, begin to put yourself in the opponent's position and think about how he would see the chances, the odd or the risks. Rather than exactly how he would figure whether or not he had more capability than you had. I'm not articulating this very well, but it seems to that...

Goodpaster: Eisenhower did this repeatedly at SHAPE and then as president when I worked with him. And it was part of his principle, always to try to see the problem through the eyes of the other man. How does it look to him, what is this going to mean to him...

Bowie: And I think gradually it came to be realized that you were dealing with a different equation than in familiar, more traditional military computations. Because you weren't talking about defense in any normal sense in the end. If you let your mind focus on what would be the consequences of any one of these strategies which we supposedly were living by, it would end in devastation and not defense. Therefore what you really were constantly doing, it seemed to me was, trying to create a situation in which the other side would think exactly in those terms.

Goodpaster: Now, let me. You're not thinking of defense but you are thinking of a defense capability...

Bowie: Oh yes, that's an essential element in creating the conditions which will cause him to turn his thoughts not to what are my capabilities to do them harm but rather what are my risks.

Richardson: But you have to jack up your mission first. So, your mission, now, is no longer to defend against an attack, but to see that you are protected against an attack. If you have effective deterrence you're automatically defended, by definition.

Bowie: Right, but all I'm saying is that I think that we continued to assert that the purpose was to defend on a certain line...

Richardson: But then you always have the fallback problem when you move to that arena- what do you do if deterrence fails?

Rosenberg: Okay, but the question is, what did the New Approach Group, how did the new approach group, approach this problem?

Goodpaster: Before I get into that, let me say that this is not an entirely new thought. General George Washington spoke of it as a respectable posture of defense. And I think that our aim must be a posture of defense that the other side will respect. And indeed they have respected it. And that's why people, that's why at least one SACEUR could sleep at night because I had an indication that they had a lot of respect for it.

Now, let's tell a little about how our analysis proceeded. We went right down into, quite close analysis of what the interaction of forces would be on the ground, air, air defense. Remember you mentioned the viewgraph business that Pete Gallois became addicted to. He developed really superb schematic representations of air defense for example. Made it clear, what had been a rather confused thing. And that then was fed into the headquarters. Incorporated in the planning of the main headquarters. The interaction of ground forces. We looked at the major areas of threat, the corridors through which the main threats could be generated. We did some analysis, then, of what could be done in the way of using nuclear weapons against elements of that threat. Either in contact or almost in contact. And we worked up little templates, as I recall. And there's an interesting point that will come in here. They were based initially on nominal nuclear weapons, because we couldn't get the data, the release of the data. I think by the time we finished our work, we were getting the impact areas of real weapons, which weren't all that different from the nominal ones, the notional ones that we had used.

Richardson: Harold Agnew was on board then.

Goodpaster: Yes.

Rosenberg: You worked with 20 kt's weren't you?

Goodpaster: Yes, we were using nominal 20 kt's. And we could do that because that at least had been written about, spoken about at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Now, what we found was that if forces were to be utilized on the kind of battlefield that we were talking about, they would have to be much more dispersed then had ever been the case in the past. That if they were that dispersed, then that meant that they would not have the capability of devastating attacks that would penetrate, tear up our defenses and so on. So we began to get quite a lot of confidence out of this, that just the existence of that nuclear weapon would impose a dispersion on the other side that would go far towards giving us a real defense capability. That was one part...

Richardson: You did the calculations, the enclosure "J" in the SHAPE New Approach Report.

Goodpaster: That's right, and that was a major conclusion.

Rosenberg: Would I be correct in saying, essentially what you came up with is that the idea in the New Approach Group which General Richardson wrote about was that you wanted, you make your enemy a good target for nuclear weapons, he has to be concentrated enough so that you can use your weapons against him. But in fact what the real conclusion is that by having nuclear weapons, your enemy becomes aware that he has to disperse and because he has to disperse, he can't break through, because he doesn't have the force.

Goodpaster: That is right.

Rosenberg: So you force him to a defensive nuclear posture even on the offense, unless he can't take the offense.

Goodpaster: That's right.

Richardson: Let me word it for you just a little bit differently cause we did a lot of research on it later on. In a theater situation somebody's got to advance or they don't do what they're supposed to do. The other fellow want's to occupy territory, he's got to advance, right. To advance you've got to get up and move. No way of advancing in a hole. Okay, now if you're a defender and you have firepower, you can put up a minimal barrier- a river, a stream, or anything- to force them to get up move and concentrate. By concentrate I mean just ten men in a squad, cross a bridge etc. than you've got yourself a target. Now in a random shot fired by both sides at the other one. He's up, he's moving, he's close to the fallout and you're dug in hidden and merely calling firepower down on his head. The odds are all with you. [That is] what happens in the real world. The real world is that the front line Lieutenant gets up and says we're going on the attack. He start's his concentration and his movement. He get's clobbered and he digs in to save his neck. He then calls to his command for counter battery fire: "Sir, I can't move forward until you knock out the enemy's nuclear firepower." But the nuclear capability introduced another element. With it you can offset your inaccuracy on the target with the yield, if you don't give a damn about side effects. In other words, if you know the squad is on the bridge you can knock the bridge out. But if all you know is he's in the woods, you can take the whole woods out. And if you're really hard up, you can take an intervelometer and lay down a fallout zone along the Elbe that the birds won't fly across for twenty years.

So you see, you can trade atomic area effects, for battlefield intelligence and accuracy to maintain a situation where this mobility becomes impractical, if not impossible. Now, once you exploit that capability- once you exploit that- your fight evolves into one of how to knock out the other guy's firepower so you can move. And since the other factors I described are so adjustable you can theoretically maintain a stalemate by working your way up the delivery ladder. As each element is knocked out you can go from Davy Crockett, through Honest John, all the way to ICBM's and you've got an effective defense or a permanent stalemate. If you've created a permanent stalemate you've met your mission, you have kept them out of Europe until somebody win or loses the strategic exchange. So basically that's it.

Goodpaster: And he has seen this; the fellow on the other side sees it. He's got to do worst case planning. He's got to say, not, well they may not do this. He has to realize well, they may do it. And if they do that I'm going to fail in what I'm attempting here. That is the power of the deterrent. Even today, I think there is a failure to understand the power of the deterrent, which is very very very strong. It's dependent on some of these calculations which are quite brutal in their implication. But the other fellow has got to see that in perspective.

Now the one thing I wanted to mention was that while we were going forward with this, and were doing our templates, studying our templates on what would be the consequences of a ground interaction, we got word that now a thermonuclear weapon has in fact been fired. When I was out at Los Alamos, I talked to Edward Teller out there in the fall of 1950. At that time they were deeply involved in the fight over whether there would be a thermonuclear weapon. But I was convinced by what they were able to show me that there would be thermonuclear device, and that it could in due time be weaponized. Of course it was weaponized more rapidly, I think than many people anticipated. But now you have a massive template. And since there would be a move by the Russians to develop a thermonuclear capability, they would understand the significance of the thermonuclear weapon. And, for what that did, again it is necessary to draw the distinction between the actual concept of using them and having them as a deterrent that the other fellow will see, and will realize that there is just no way that he could plan to accomplish what he's seeking to accomplish. We worked this all the way through. We retained, I think, good relations with the headquarters proper. There is always a suspicion when you've got a small group off to the side like this. But we were well tied into the headquarters and they were making use of some of our stuff. And then we went around to each of our major commands as I recall in the spring of '54, and presented it, and then finally came back and presented it to by now President Eisenhower.

Richardson: We briefed all of the Chiefs of Staff in all of the NATO countries. Remember how Gruenther set up a program to visit all of them.

Bowie: When? About what date was this?

Goodpaster: This would be mid-54. It's the last thing I did at SHAPE because I came back at the end of June of 1954. We briefed Eisenhower on this.

Richardson: We took the team to all of the NATO countries, every one of them.

Goodpaster: Yes, and to each of our NATO commands. And then out of this, and this is now after I left, this became MC-48.

Richardson: Now watch relying on MC48 for nuclear decisions because you see, you can't. Andy's saying, "You have to go back to the SHAPE plans. The resistance to our plan came initially not from within our own NATO people but the Standing Group and the people in the JCS and the services. When they realized its implications, all hell broke loose. CINCLANT, who had sent in his plan to integrate with ours had a classic plan. It was like putting an orange and a lemon in the same cup to marry at up with ours and MC48 emerged from this mixture.

Rosenberg: Why didn't it fit? I guess that's what I'm missing.

Richardson: It didn't fit, because we in SHAPE were in essence saying, that using nuclear firepower, we could do the job with less forces and forces in a different posture and a different format than that accepted then by the U.S. Once somebody discovers you can do a job, with less resources, nobody ever gets anymore. Therefore all of the Service budgets and plans would have been critically effected if they had bought the strategy we originally submitted.

Wampler: But I thought MC-48 was tied to the force goals of '56, which included a pretty sizable buildup.

Richardson: Yes. We started with these same goals but these were way below the minimums, in DC28, deemed essential to defend Europe under classic concepts.

Wampler: But you didn't reduce it.

Richardson: The problem was not to reduce them but to figure out how to make them adequate to do the NATO defense job regardless of the size of the Soviet threat.

Bowie: Do you remember what the numbers were that you were using in terms of forces?

Goodpaster: We used, as I recall actual forces. Actual force plans coming out of the annual review. Now there is a certain amount of imaginative, creative writing that enters into the third year of the annual review. Essentially that was what nations said they were planning on doing. In the annual review are firm plans for the first year, tentative plans for the second year, and forces for planning purposes for the third year. And that's what we really were working on.

Wampler: At the end of '53, there was an agreement on that three year span. And every time Gruenther would brief people on the New Approach studies and later on the problems of carrying out MC-48, he would say look, the assumptions were we would have the Germans on line, we would have the force goals that we agreed at the end of '53, that we'd have them in place by the end of '56. If you don't give me these this strategy doesn't work. He doesn't scale back the force goals. You don't really get a sizable force scale-back until MC-70 in 1958. Through that time you are still looking at those large force goals they were wanting to get in '56 but never came.

Goodpaster: I can't really speak to that, because I left SHAPE in June of '54. Now I have to say also, that we were aware, although not closely involved in the turmoil back here in the United States in Eisenhower's first year when he brought in the so-called new look. The Army really was very resistant to that and there was quite a clash with the Army. I can talk about that because that clash went on, I think. The Army was joined by the Air Force later in the clash with Eisenhower. The Navy also got into it, Carney got into it. My connection with it was at SHAPE until July of '54. I was then the very happy district engineer in San Francisco through July, August and part of September of '54. And then I came back into Washington into the White House in October of '54. Having participated in the Solarium study...

Bowie: You were in the Solarium for a couple of months, right?

Goodpaster: ...in mid-1953. But on detail back from SHAPE at that time. But Bob you stayed on in SHAPE, didn't you?

Richardson: Till the spring of '55.

Goodpaster: Till the spring of '55. So you would know how this was handled.

Richardson: Well, after you left, the battle was back here in Washington. You know at that point we were working on the Measures to Implement and getting programs for this underway. The Governments were debating the problems we raised by them. Remember we had a separate paper on Measure to Implement. I don't remember the number. It is important though for it was never implemented and show how drastic changes for real atomic warfare are.

Goodpaster: Yes, that's right, yes.

Richardson: It had some twenty or thirty measures like, abandon the Rhine General Depot; go to VSTOL aircraft; and all that kind of stuff. And those were the changes that scared to death everybody and their brother. We were getting down to moving on those at SHAPE. We actually got out of the Rhine General Depot, as I recall. And we were beginning to move the force posture into a purely nuclear posture. This made sense in keeping with the findings in your Enclosure J. It was underway when I left. Of course all that was attacked and later reversed by the people back here when the consequences of the New Approach became apparent.

There is one big lesson here. That's why I mentioned the Beaufre group. If you want to get a honest objective evaluations of any big new weapon or capability, you had better go back to the first two or three years when it comes out. At that time everybody is looking for the answer and nobody has felt the consequences yet. They haven't figured them out. After the third year the party line has backed down, saying oh my god, don't let that happen. After that point you'll get nothing objective from the services. And if you don't believe this, go back and look at SDI in the BAMBI days or go back and look at the arguments for space between '58 and 62. The best papers written on space, accessibility, control, were all done back in that period. After that vested interests came in, peace use ideas, etc. and the lid was on. Now you won't find views that aren't shot full of party line, protectionism and bureaucrat i.e. survival considerations.

Goodpaster: Maybe we could defer to Bob at this point, because Bob came back in '53 to serve with Eisenhower in the administration.

Rosenberg: Before we do that, I just wanted to ask couple of procedural questions as they relate to what happened under a new president. Was it briefed to NATO defense ministers as or was it, did it have restricted data in it. You changed the atomic energy act by that time. So it would have been possible to brief this information outside of...

Richardson: I don't recall there was any technical annex...do you, Andy?

Goodpaster: No, and the defense ministers, that forum was on the decline, I don't think...

Richardson: They were in the annex.

Wampler: There were 3 changes with the Standing Group. They did a report that went out to the joint chiefs of the Standing Group.----It came back again, with them saying you can't say this, you can't say that. It went out and came back again and finally on the basis of all these comments they came up with MC-48, which was a watering down of some aspects of it.

Goodpaster: And then 14/2 also came out of this, in '55, I'm not clear on the timing there.

Wampler: 14/2 is 3, 4 years down the road, in '57.

Goodpaster: Yes, it was MC-48. Really that was the document. Unfortunately where I sat in the White House as an assistant to Eisenhower, I didn't have occasion to get into the thing that specifically. From here on my knowledge will be from the more general position of Eisenhower policy and program.

Wampler: There's a couple of aspects of the New Approach that I'd like to talk about before we move on. One is, did you do this from scratch or did you have some input from what's going on say in the US Army? Because they're dealing with these same problems at the same time and coming up with a lot of similar conclusions.

Goodpaster: Oh yes, we pulled in as much information as we could get.

Wampler: And then there's a few points I see as important at least, in terms of political consequences of MC-48. The big thing about SACEUR's authorization to use the weapons, getting an atomic stockpile in peace time, getting prior arrangements with the base countries, those are the continuing problems. And were they as foremost in your minds back then as I seem to see them now.

Goodpaster: I think these were some of the implementing steps that we saw as being required. And since you were breaking new ground, some of them we could already see would be hard to swallow-- on air defense for example, the utter necessity of having air defense at a very high and continuing state of readiness. I recall that as one of our implementing requirements.

Richardson: There's only one thing you have to realize, this was not a case of everybody grabbing a pencil like so many of them are. There were separate studies done. In this way the senior staff had to approve or comment on each study (building block) before he knew what the collective effort would look like. As I recall, I can't remember the number but it was 9 or 12 that we had agreed on. We approached it with separate segments like Pincher. Different groups worked on each study and the so called New Approach Group just pulled it together. One group was working on the intelligence segment; somebody else was looking at tactical nuclear doctrine; another group was looking at the Mediterranean, and so forth. Whatever they were, I can't remember but they are in the paper. General Gruenther was smart enough to see that there was going to be a built in headwind. We had to brief our commanders. Admiral Carney and all the senior staff's and the F.M. Montgomery's. Each segment was reviewed and approved independently of the others. So that no one could see what the impact of the whole was going to be when we put the pieces together. (To Goodpaster:) Remember the final briefing when Admiral Carney actually said, "If I had known what these people were coming up with, I'd have never agreed to any of studies!".(1)

Bowie: Before the break, I said that I would like to hear you give us your assessment of Eisenhower's view of nuclear weapons as he left SHAPE.

Goodpaster: Even before he left SHAPE, he was using a specific expression about his. It was characteristic of him that when he was settled on these things they stayed with him. He would use exactly the same language. He said on a number of occasions, You have to realize if this war were ever to happen both sides would fight it with everything they had available to them. That includes the nuclear weapons. He himself felt that because of the existence of nuclear weapons and because of that likelihood, the likelihood of major war in Europe was becoming less and less and less.

Another thing-- I think this was in the spring of '52, but I could be wrong in my timing. We learned about the B-47. It could fly at 400 knots, at 40,000 ft. and nobody was going to lay a glove on it for a long time to come. And essentially there you had a weapons system, this was a long step forward from the B-36 and from the B-58. Now you had a system, the B-47, that quite obviously would be able to do that delivery job. We knew it and the other side knew it and he and Gruenther knew it, I remember Gruenther in particular, mentioning this in some of our briefings of the Congress back here. They often put on this long face, asking well general can you give us an assurance that if the Russians were to attack we would be able to hold there. And he would go through this and say first of all they're not going to attack-- he had very high confidence in that-- and that the outcome is by no means that sure if the nuclear weapons are used.

So that I think as Eisenhower came back-- I have this only indirectly, until I came back in 1954-- he had more and more and more questions about the picture of the massive conventional World War II type forces being involved in any future war. As you may remember he became more and more vehement on this subject-- that people simply were not thinking in terms of the new pattern. That thinking on his part went all the way back to the spring of '47, when I was involved in that first go round of the advanced study group first in the army and later in the joint advanced study committee in the fall of 1950. He was continuing to think about what this meant. I think I remember his saying, when we showed him what the effect of the thermonuclear weapon would be if it were ever brought into use and we put that big template on what the effects would be, he used that statement that he used so many times, well war has now become an absurdity. I would say those are the elements of his thinking that I would cite.

Bowie: Well, just to key in. As soon as I became conscious of his thinking, I felt that I understood it. It was really completely parallel; my feeling was that he was convinced that war could be avoided. There was not going to be a war if we could maintain the situation in which the Soviet's continue to see it in these terms. And I think that had a tendency, for him and for Dulles, to convert the problem to a considerable extent into a political problem of how do you keep the alliance firm, confident, and cohesive in the face of the inherent character of the alliance. In other words, all of this depended really on the American capability, nuclear capability. And therefore on the degree to which the Soviet's were convinced of the staunchness of the American commitment. The Europeans were, in a certain sense, absolutely dependent on us. And they were torn constantly between the two feelings. They wanted this US threat to be real, to to be effective as a deterrent.

But whenever, and this is inherent, it seems to me, in all of this whole thing, the minute you turn your attention to, well suppose deterrence fails and we have to fight, then you cannot honestly present any picture except one which is absolutely devastating. And so they've recognized the point that Andy made earlier [which was] that a deterrent doesn't mean a thing if it's a bluff, [and that] has to mean that somebody disregarding it will in fact reap what you've threatened, what you've said... They preferred always to talk deterrence, but of course you had to think of capabilities. When you started thinking capabilities, people's minds began to think as if there were a war. That [is] absolutely horrendous for anybody with any feeling. And therefore we were constantly on a knife edge so that their feeling would be that we were absolutely in control. They always were second guessing or thinking about whether we were or weren't reliable, whether we would or wouldn't do what Gallois said we would or wouldn't do, and so on.

At the same time if it was essential to constantly focus on deterrence, yet in order to have the deterrence you had to make them focus also on providing the necessary capabilities. And this was really a political dilemma which was, I think as much the, fundamental paradox, at the heart of much of what was done on the political front and even on the military front. I mean, many things were done militarily or positions were taken which were in part at least addressed to maintaining this sense of common consensus on the part of the allies. For example there were some dilemmas which were never resolved. This is the one you mentioned a number of times, [concerning] the use of nuclear weapons. If the allies were really going to be organized to be able to deal with it, you had to have some decision made to go to war. Well, if you really tried to talk about how 15 sovereign nations go to war, they all have a vote. On the other hand they all recognized perfectly well that that was disastrous in terms of a firm deterrent and that in the end the Americans would in fact probably decide what to do. And that's what essentially they didn't want to face in a certain sense, because they didn't want that to happen. But they didn't want the consequences of seeming to adopt a different position which might look as if the west could be stymied if the Soviet's attacked or started anything. And so the only way to do it was to keep it ambiguous. To simply not face it. And so in terms of any strictly adequate military strategy, you had a gap there which was just absolutely horrendous. In terms however of maintaining the coherence of the alliance, having people willing to keep on putting resources in, having them not raise questions that went to the cohesion, you had to keep some of these things essentially off the agenda. And there was a kind of a recognition of this all around. And so analytically, the strategy, in a certain sense is quite inadequate, you know it doesn't answer the question.

On the other hand, if you're thinking in terms of a deterrent, how you maintain the coalition, this was essential and effective. It was the only way, the only possibility, and so much of what was done at NATO meetings by Dulles and in speeches and other ways was attempting to walk this very fine line and the president was doing the same thing. They were essentially trying to cooperate in not creating the feeling of exposure to real war. Keeping them aware enough that you had to have a capability to have a deterrent and at the same time focusing heavily on the fact that what you're buying is a deterrent.

Goodpaster: In which you could have confidence.

Bowie: In which you could have confidence, and second that in terms of who was going to decide in fact it was going to be probably the US and that's what they wanted. But they couldn't possibly concede this explicitly because they were democracies and here they were leaving this life and death decision to others. And then finally you get to the question which theoretically was raised [which was] would SACEUR have the authority to move? Now, in my opinion, Ike never relinquished the final decision. He may have said yes SACEUR ... [would] have to respond at once. That means you can't have fifteen in charge, but that doesn't mean Ike be in charge. I don't think he ever once thought he had delegated authority. This is just my [opinion], absolutely out of the blue.

Goodpaster: I think you're absolutely right in that. He never...

Bowie: He thought he had it in his hands..

Goodpaster: He had it, that's right. And he intended to keep it there...

Wampler: Do you have a sense there was any kind of understanding between him and Gruenther. That isn't say written down in some way.

Bowie: I don't think there was any understanding which enabled Gruenther to move without...

Wampler: That's not what I mean. I mean that this sort of situation did in fact exist. That within NATO, SACEUR had some things on the books that would allow him to act in an emergency if he had to, without going through the consultation process. But that was just to make sure that he could act under US authority in an emergency, once he got that authorization from Eisenhower...

Bowie: In my opinion, that was absolutely clear, it was between him and SACEUR. Don't you think so?

Goodpaster: Yes.

Rosenberg: But never written down. But it was based on the individual relationship that in particular he had with Gruenther as a close colleague. And Norstad both of whom in effect might be considered...

Bowie: I don't think it was anything as ambiguous as that. I think that in his view it was perfectly clear, I am the one who will say yes or no and that was the situation at....

Rosenberg: But neither Gruenther nor Norstad would have any problem with that having worked with him for so long as compared to the problem that Norstad might have as we come up later in '61-'62, with Kennedy in terms of the major arguments and the paperwork that results that we still can't see.

[Question from unknown source.]

Goodpaster: I think that came from Norstad. Finding the ultimate source is pretty hard but I think Norstad was developing the idea of the NATO nuclear force This would be a two key affair.

Rosenberg: This is jumping ahead...

Nerlich: I'm talking about the '54-56 decisions NATO equipped....????

Goodpaster: We talked about that. The time we made our study, only the US had these. However, I think we were thinking that other countries would have them as well. And I can tell you Pete Gallois was surely thinking that...

Wampler: Dulles was saying it. Dulles was saying we need NSC-162. They were saying we are going to have to provide these weapons for our NATO allies....

Goodpaster: Yes. That was part of Eisenhower's desire but he ran continually against the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy who were adamant. He was finally was able to get the release of information and also weapons as I recall to the British. But he was never able to get that authority either for the Netherlands that wanted it for atomic submarines or for the French. He was never able to get that. He would fulminate against this because he said you can't work with allies on that basis. With permission...

Bowie: Again my memory is just like that. That very early on he was very clear that it was essential to be able to share much more with the allies. Again I don't think he thought this was a military matter, this was a matter of the politics of the situation. That you must give them too the feeling that they're not just sitting there with rifles while everything else is going on in somebody else's hands. And that they should therefore be equipped. And that's where you moved into the NATO stockpiles and all that.

Rosenberg: But, this I guess...

Goodpaster: Memoranda of cooperation were the means of trying to move toward doing this.

Wampler: But you say all of this is implicit, in approach. It all evolved out of this logically. It's not stated explicitly at the end of '54. But it's there and you're going to move towards it just because it was advanced of the strategy and the politics.

Goodpaster: His comment that you can't treat allies like that I've heard many many times, in talking about our having certain weapons. He didn't want us to have the unique capability because that puts the pressure on us that he thought the other should have to share.

Bowie: Incidentally, [it is my view that] you can't overstress the fact of how important he thought the coalition was. It was not just for the benefit of the Europeans. He thought that it was essentially for our security, and again he was always looking at security in a very broad sense -- was not merely fighting a war. He thought of it as necessary to keep the west together, keep the industrial countries working together.

Rosenberg: This afternoon, is spending time discussing essentially the ramifications of this issue, of how you work with the allies, how you use nuclear weapons as a means of maintaining the alliance. But as a final question on the new approach, would you say the new approach was a real turning point in terms of thinking about translating defense strategy from something more traditional to something that really does emphasize deterrent defense strategy so to speak in Europe. Or was it a missed opportunity. General Richardson's article a number of years back implies it was a missed opportunity. That the concept was there but the implementation never followed. So was it a turning point or a missed opportunity.

Goodpaster: It opened a new chapter. Whether that's a turning point I'm not sure. But I think there was an understanding of the role and significance of nuclear weapons after this that was quite different. We went far beyond what we had had before. But whether it fell short, whether the action fell short of what might have been, you can find a few reasons that it did. But even falling short, the world I think was different after this...

Richardson: I think it's a little of both in this sense. If you go back and look at it from the point of view of actual war fighting. What is the most cost effective way that we might be able to usefully use atomic weapons and are they able to prevail in achieving a military mission. War fighting was the goal and not deterrence then it's probably a missed opportunity, because by fully adopting new tactics with atomic weapons you could have done the NATO security job credibly. Until at least the whistle was blown. Now if you're looking at it from the point of view that you don't intend to fight in the first place. In other words what did it buy you in the way of a deterrent that you couldn't buy by other means without rattling the cage of the establishment as much as we did, then. Yes. But that's another point of view and another way to look at it.

But to go back to the basic problem, if you stood up in Europe and said, "don't worry fellows my 10 divisions can beat his 100, sleep tight." You would have lost NATO. It would have been only a matter of time- years- because every Joe lunch pail in Europe knew better than that. And he would say to his political masters, NATO is not the solution to my security. But whatever we came out with as a New Approach, the same Joe lunch pail went home and said; "well, I know 10 can't beat 100 but if the generals say this new nuclear weapon works, and as I look at Hiroshima I guess it does work, then I'll go home and sleep." In this case you achieved your basic goal of not having a rejection of the notion of the alliance being the prime instrument for security. So if nothing else was bought by the New Approach the perpetuation of NATO was, regardless of whether it was any good or not in terms of actual war fighting.

LUNCH

Rosenberg: We're going to get back to work obviously. Jennifer Sims had a question that she wanted to ask that relates to another ongoing project at the nuclear history project.

Sims: But, I think it also fits in to this discussion, because General

Richardson: spoke of the three elements of planning, what you do, how you do it and what your resources are. And one of the things I was interested in was what you knew about your machines when with respect to nuclear weapons. What the nuclear weapons effects would be that you're dealing with. What the dimensions of the envelope might be over the next 3 or 4 years. How these things might be delivered. And also, how and if you fed your interests in how these systems would evolve, back to the labs. Encouraging them, for example, to look at the ADM's or not look at ADM's. Were there formal channels, informal channels for this and how the labs were integrated in the planning process, if they were?

Richardson: At the risk of being flip would you like me to give you an honest answer? I would quote a well known movie Gone With the Wind, "frankly my dear we didn't give a damn" about the technical aspects. As planners, we figured the technical people would worry about that. Except for broad parameters which was all most of the people on the staff, needed to know, we gave those problems to the technical people. Once the plan was accepted then it went to technical levels and they made all of the appropriate adjustments and assessments.

Goodpaster: Could I add just a word to that. One of our main efforts was to pull it up out of the technical level and get it into a planning environment. For that you only needed to know a few key elements, a few key parameters. But I can add a bit on the second part of your question. Was Agnew at Los Alamos when we came over or was he the science advisor for...

Richardson: He was the science advisor, well before I met him he was at Los Alamos- It was back in the Oppenheimer days. I'm not sure where he was in between. And then when I had the nuclear R&D business at Sandia Base, he was back at Los Alamos as Director. But he wasn't their director before he came to SHAPE.

Goodpaster: Yes, I guess that's right.

Sims: Norris Bradbury?

Richardson: It was Bradbury who was the director at that time, maybe Hal Agnew worked there I don't know.

Goodpaster: But as I recall, we began to get visitors from the laboratory, and I've forgotten when Livermore was set up. But visitors would come over and see what our needs were and try to get tuned in with what the operational aspects were. We began to see that even during the time we were at SHAPE. In later years that was intensified, and other things were done, I guess it was Harold Agnew who set up after he got back to Los Alamos an advisory committee on which some of us who had had that kind of experience were asked to serve. And the same thing at Livermore after it came into existence. But those channels were very thin and you did not do it very much through the services themselves. The services gave guidance. As a matter of fact when they were at the old armed forces special weapons (AFSWAP) group they were service representatives who formed that old group. The services wished to maintain that control. So, I think those are a couple of things that would enter into an answer to your question.

Richardson: And part of the last part of it that always caused a great deal of confusion was called the lead time factor. We would get the experts in from Los Alamos to tell us all about the nuclear business. They loved that business and would tell you all about what they were designing and hoped to come out with, and all of it was light year's away from the stockpile. You'd be dead and gone by the time that stuff was usable.

Goodpaster: You're more anxious to find out what's actually in the stockpile now, what can it do, and what will be entering the stockpile. And we did get some of that, we began to break some of that information loose, in the fall of '53 and '54.

Rosenberg: Following up on General Richardson's comment about frankly my dear we didn't give a damn about the technical aspects. What I find kind of interesting about that is that, you look at strategic nuclear planning, technical aspects dominated very very much. Even before the days of McNamara the target planning, the timing etc. I was wondering if both of you might have some comments on what you see as the real difference between battlefield and theater nuclear planning as opposed to strategic nuclear planning. Because the problem is, I think it's a distinction that is very much lost on many people who have never done it.

Goodpaster: It's a major distinction too.

Richardson: You're looking at the difference between strategic planning, overall force and theater plans- like NATO plans- and the responsible operational commanders planning. Now sure they're [i.e., technical factors] important to CINCSAC. Because he's working with the day to day atomic delivery program. That's very different from working out a theoretical force requirements for 1965. To come out with those 1965 figures we don't really have to have that kind of detail. Because if the concept and the plan is bought then it will be refined into the subsequent operation plans, by operators who will get into that as they go to work. So, to compare SAC planning with say NATO or MC type planning, I think you're comparing apples and oranges to some extent.

Goodpaster: The distinction is very very great. The differences are very very great. As to SAC planning, although they have developed options and have give various amounts of weight to that process let us say that that planning is really what we would call set piece planning. It is specific as to time as to place, as to route, as to accompanying process and a few other things. It is quite specific and it's almost rigid in the way it will be carried out. For the tactical use, on some parts of that-- for example, going against major depots, going against major airfields, going against a few other targets, possible bottle neck targets, things of that kind-- you can be specific as to place. On fewer of those can you be specific as to time and even those would still require a decision as to time, on an individual basis rather than as some large package being acted on. But then on much of it, you can not be specific as to place and time.

Now it happens that you can be specific as to type of weapon, size of weapon, maybe the numbers of weapons for typical or assumed types of targets. That you can do, and some of that has been done. But you still have those major questions, of timing and place that remain to be decided. That is a difference that is so great that there are those who say that there are no plans for tactical nuclear employment. You know some of the authors of those statements I'm sure. But, that comes after the period that we're talking about here today. So I would like to put some emphasis behind the point that you make, that there is indeed a very major difference in the type of planning that you do. And I think Bob has put it well. Which is that the SAC commander, in a way, is an operational commander. You must think of him as such. He's got a big operation, but he's an operational type commander, whereas for these other things you have to get to a much lower echelon before you have a comparable operational responsibility.

Rosenberg: Did any, at, let's say the battlefield level by the mid 1950's, well we'll back it up to the new approach group. If you were not working with technical specifics then you were simply working with, initially nominal yields and then broadening it out but with no expectation of shall we say the delivery systems, that you would apply?

Goodpaster: No, we had the delivery systems.

Rosenberg: You did have the delivery systems as well?

Goodpaster: Yes, we finally had access to that and were able to incorporate that, as well as response times. These were major concerns in fact.

Richardson???: And the back side to that curve, which I've run into on numerous occasions, is when you get planners that want to zoom lens in on trees. You know, there's a fellow who's a division commander wants to run a mess hall because he know's they work. And it makes a mess because he tries to get into too much detail, when he should be designing the whole forest and let somebody else worry about the trees once he's laid out the forest. And you have that particularly in all types of program and planning. You have people that are all doing the wrong thing at the wrong level.

Wampler: I want to go back and try to exercise my historian's interest in chronology. MC-48, it seems, had a number of implications, consequences built into it that people just didn't want to face in December 1954 or misunderstood then. Through-out 1955 and 1956 these are faced, and they are military and political. One is this assumption that no matter what the Soviet's do, we're going to have to use nuclear weapons in response. There is really no viable option for a non-nuclear response to a Soviet attack. It's going to occur rather quickly. It's going to be expensive and all of these things seemed to be sort of shunted aside at least when MC-48 is agreed upon. But then through 1955 and 1956 all of these pigeons start coming home to roost. Gruenther is trying to deal with this, and to balance competing balances. SACEUR says, I've tried to give NATO a strategy that will reassure and work and give a viable military deterrent, but the political people are telling me well you can't do this or this is scary. The economic people are saying we can't do this, it's impossible to come up with these forces. The JCS is telling him he's got to plan with certain guidance about how the war is going to unfold. I discussed this somewhat in the paper. You get up to thirty days and then you don't what you're going to do.

I just wonder what you can recall about Gruenther's concerns through this period and how he dealt with them and how these things overlapped and had to be dealt with on the political side, because these are political-military problems. This is an ongoing question of how do you devise an alliance strategy or a military strategy that would be optimal in terms of what the people at SHAPE would like to have. Something the political people will buy off on without too much hedging that would undermine what the military people say you have to do.

Goodpaster: I can't throw too much light on that because I was out of that immediate connection. From late '54 on I would see it from the level of the White House staff and from my association with Eisenhower and his thinking on this. So I can't really put too much on that except to say that from Eisenhower's standpoint, although he was going to surely maintain control over whether nuclear weapons were used and control the initiation of their use, he was not at all disposed to try to be the operational commander. He looked to Gruenther and then to Norstad for that. And we did not get, some of what you had in your paper was quite fascinating to me because we really did not get much in the way of reverberation on some of these issues coming up to White House level. They were being argued out at the military level and between I think the defense dept and the state dept. Radford took a very active hand, and he repeatedly would bring up the issue, do we really mean it. Have we made the decision and do we stand by the decision that if we get into a scrap, we're going, these weapons will be as available as any other.

I would add just one more thing, again from Eisenhower's standpoint. He was as nimble as anybody that I have ever known in avoiding being drawn into what General Maxwell Taylor called brush fire wars. It was that issue between them, really that led, when Taylor completed his service as Army Chief of Staff, to his not being reappointed to any other assignment and did not wanting to be appointed to any other assignment. And then he wrote his book The Uncertain Trumpet out of conviction that we should have a policy that showed us readier to intervene in small scale affairs. All of that was anathema to Eisenhower! He simply did not want to do it, and was pretty nimble at avoiding it I have to say. He did put forces into Lebanon and of course he took an active role-- this was before I rejoined him-- in Guatemala, He held very much to this view that we would fight with everything that we had, although you had another, I could just see growing, a view, a conviction on his part that the emergence of the thermonuclear weapon meant that war, major war really had become, as he put it, an absurdity. It was no longer a continuation of policy by other means.

Wampler: What I'm wondering is, is this SHAPE planning irrelevant? Did this stuff only filter up so far and then settle back down again?

Goodpaster: No, not at all. He felt that Gruenther and Norstad had the plans that could and would be used if they ever were in fact called upon. But he also-- and this is the paradox again, in a little different formulation-- felt that having those plans, having that capability, he could have very high confidence he would never have to call upon them. But he was satisfied that the plans were there I think.

Wampler: Was there any realization that plans weren't complete?

Goodpaster: Well, only in the sense that he always said, quoting Von Moltke, Plans are nothing, planning is everything. The one thing you can be sure of is that you are not going to carry out your plans as they've been laid down. But you could not do anything unless you had those plans.

Wampler: Well, I guess what I was getting at was more the sense that all they ever got to was thirty days into a war. And then after that they just couldn't push any farther or say they knew what was going to happen; they could only say we were going to win.

Goodpaster: Precisely, and that's pure Eisenhower, because he says no one is capable of visualizing what would exist after that time.

Rosenberg: Is that the reason why the war objective statements that are developed during the Eisenhower years get in large measure increasingly general. There are only two statements of policy, one is in 1954 the other one is in 1959, which is remarkably enough approved by the middle, march of 1959 as the planning goes forward through the Berlin crisis. And while we don't have the final version, that statement is terribly general and simply starts off, to prevail and survive as a nation, disassociate the communist party from control of the people and the communist bloc, etc, etc. I mean he just didn't feel that you could actually lay out war objectives. And if that's, I guess what I'm getting at is this, did anybody think it worthwhile to impose war time political objectives on either the United States or the NATO alliance and if so, if not, why is it that there are such statements laid out?

Goodpaster: No, I don't think they did and I can cite my own experience when I once asked for political guidance I can tell you all I got was a resounding silence. On one occasion -- I guess it was when there was trouble in the Mediterranean involving Jordan, in particular, and Syria -- They couldn't provide it in an actual situation and never attempted to do it. And on your first point, I think that there was increasing tendency to realize, I'll put it that way, that it was not possible to foresee these circumstances. You could have some initial plans and then your best hope was to have a wide range of capabilities that would appear to be survivable and realize that you were going to have to make decisions in real time. As the situation developed it could be evaluated. Eisenhower himself said this goes so far beyond anything that anybody has ever experienced that it's simply futile to attempt to lay that down in detail. And that was a point that he made repeatedly when the press would try to corner him and get him to say what he was going to do. He would evade that with that famous statement, there is only one thing you can be sure of in war and that's that you can't be sure of anything.

Let me add one more point to that, if I may. Along about 1956 or so, because Radford was still in office and Dulles was still in office, they had a horrendous clash over just this issue. It related to reliance on the use of the nuclear weapons. And Radford said, that has been our policy, we have formed our forces on that policy, and if that is not our policy we're in effect going to have to go right back to the drawing board. And Secretary Dulles was trying to bring more flexibility into our response so to speak at that time. And I don't know if you were there, Bob, the day the president had to leave the NSC meeting for a short while, and there was a real clash on just this issue. Because that key document was under review and reformulation on this issue over the reliance on the nuclear weapon. That had been a matter of dispute within the chiefs. General Taylor, I think was in opposition to Radford on this. They came to see the president and in fact, it's probably reflected in my notes somewhere. It was very very sharp and bitter encounter. It was reflected, I believe in this NSC document as well.

Bowie: This was an ongoing issue. The New Look in Dulles' mind had two aspects and they responded also to concerns of Ike. One aspect was the degree of reliance on nuclear weapons. The other was his view as to how you avoid being caught up in a second Korea. That was based on, and I think Dulles felt he had himself made a contribution to this part of the New Look. And I don't know whether it's in the New Look as outlined by Radford, but it's in the New Look as it was conceived. And this was actually stated by Dulles in the January speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in '54 and when that was somewhat misconceived as being solely massive retaliation, I wrote him an article which was published under his name in February, in March or April in Foreign Affairs. And this stressed the point that there were these two aspects. That yes we relied on nuclear weapons, and all out nuclear weapons in case of a total attack in Europe. That was not the whole story, that we also needed flexible mobile forces which could be used at times and places of our own choosing. Now his theory there was not at all massive retaliation. It was that you won't necessarily respond at the point of attack, you may hit the person somewhere else. But it didn't mean hitting Peiping or Moscow. It meant doing something else that they would be, think of as costly or disadvantageous.

Rosenberg: But you never considered that in Europe. I mean by the end of the administration there was a clear statement, this is jumping a little bit ahead but it relates, it was a clear statement that there's no such thing as a limited war in Europe.

Bowie: In Europe. Now that was Radford, but now let me complete this ... Radford and Humphrey were the only people in love with nuclear weapons. Radford really embraced nuclear weapons. To him they were almost a cause; to make nuclear weapons the weapon, and anybody who wanted to continue on with some other additional collateral kind of capability was benighted. And he saw it really in those terms. In the policy planning staff, we felt from the beginning that some more flexible capability, even in Europe was desirable, [although] not with the idea that you were going to refight World War II at all. But because as we saw it there was the danger that as each side got nuclear capabilities which virtually were a standoff, it might open the way, a sort of a chink in the armor of deterrence, in which the Soviets could do something, primarily for political effect, some small incursion or something else, for which we would then have no reaction, no response. Because of some small incursion in Bavaria or elsewhere, Ike would never in the world, I believe, have launched total nuclear war.

We felt ,therefore, that it might at least possibly a temptation to the Soviets, for political reasons to make the whole alliance seem a facade, if they could do something and we couldn't respond. And later, Khrushchev tried to do this with respect to Berlin. So all the time we were trying to push Dulles to urge that there ought to be flexibility. Now Dulles did believe that for his dipomatic purposes he needed flexibility. But he never took on Radford in the first year or two, because of Radford's assurance that the greater includes the lesser. And Dulles did not want to take on a military argument, where the president was the expert. He knew the president respected him for diplomacy, and while he never said this to me, I think fundamentally he didn't want to get into an argument in which he was a total amateur, on the question of whether or not the strategy was adequate. And I think myself, that in that first phase, Ike went overboard too, because he was so put off I think by the Army's essential presentation that we must have the capability for refighting World War II. And he felt this so ignored the implications of any kind of a major nuclear exchange that he was angry I think at the Army and Taylor.

Goodpaster: Don't you remember, the day the Chiefs all came over, and I think it was General Ridgway still, before Taylor came in. And he made a proposal for 27 divisions. And Eisenhower, you could just see him reacting to this, asking what in the hell are you going to o with 27 divisions. Where are you planning to use them. And he said well you could bring them in through the Middle East. And Eisenhower said, is there a logistician in the room here, is there anybody in the room here who knows a goddamn thing about logistics. This was I think, of course the real point-- it went to his view that we were simply not going to have those very large forces...

Bowie: That's right, now however...

Goodpaster: That view was motivated by money, by the cost. And he was not going to buy into those costs.

Bowie: Nevertheless, we kept on pressing Dulles with the idea that there really [needed] to be some modest non-nuclear capability.

Goodpaster: And he edged right up to Eisenhower on that, but never tried to crowd him too far.

Bowie: That's right, but I believe we did get into the second of the NSC strategy papers -- national strategy papers -- something indicating the need for some degree of flexibility at that point. I can't remember for sure, but I think, what was it '54.

Wampler: Yes, well he says in 1953 ... Dulles is arguing you've got to have some flexibility.

Bowie: Yes, but I think you have to make a distinction here between two things. One, he always said you had to have flexibility with respect to the peripheral kind of things...

Wampler: Dulles said the same thing with regard to Europe, too.

Bowie: And then, well maybe we got him to say something even in '53. But all I'm saying is he was swimming upstream, because the president was not receptive and he heard these kinds of things as if Dulles were urging the Army case. And the Army case was simply not convincing. But Ike got mad at them because they kept on coming back with essentially the same concept. And then, to my mind, he did not, would not listen or wouldn't hear the fact there was a case to be made at least for flexibility. Which later was of course picked up by, well I don't know whether Gruenther did or not, but anyway Norstad did with the pause. In any event this was an ongoing battle and Radford took quite an animus toward me because he considered that I was trying to urge this notion which he felt was unorthodox or improper or something.

Rosenberg: Sort of like Gerard Smith in 1959...

Bowie: Well I was just going to say, Gerry continued on. I had made I think some real dent by '57, the middle of '57. And Gerry absolutely shared the same view. And Gerry will tell you when he comes about that, finally Dulles goes over to the JCS and says to the JCS, our strategy has been fine, but we've just got to see whether we don't need some more flexibility. But that was a continuation of a struggle which we had been carrying on from '53.

Goodpaster: Yeah, when did Dulles have an article in Foreign Affairs. It must have been...

Rosenberg: It was in 1957.

Goodpaster: ...beginning of the year of '57...

Rosenberg: That one that started a change about tactical weapons.

Goodpaster: That would be about the beginning of 1957 I think.

Bowie: The first article in 1954 was intended to show that we were not committed exclusively to massive retaliation for every possible contingency. That was the '53-4. And then the '57 article was the one we were just talking about which was for flexibility in a somewhat different form.

Wampler: This leads to the question of the origin of the shield forces, and how that played into flexibility.

Nerlich: Just before you get to the brief question on the other side, to what extent had you become aware that Malenkov was essentially adopting a new strategy and ....??? in the context we were just discussing?

Bowie: I'm not sure that we had a very clear picture at that point.

Goodpaster: I think we learned after the fact that Malenkov had come out with this. And he was opposed and he was deposed. In fact this was one of the things that got him into his being deposed, i.e., that he had shifted. Let's see how that was. Their mythology initially was that the imperialists would be destroyed. And Malenkov I think...

Bowie: In '54

Goodpaster: ...said that both would be destroyed.

Bowie: And then I think Khrushchev used that as much as anything to throw him out and then one year later adopted it. And I think Ike as I said from '53 on was convinced that there would not be a war in Europe as long as we had a kind of reasonable capability. And by the time of the summit meeting when they had actually met with Khrushchev, with Bulganin and Zhukov...

Goodpaster: In 1955.

Bowie: ...in '55. I think he was just absolutely sure that, except by mistake or misunderstanding that there just wasn't going to be a war in Europe.

Nerlich: It was the first time the cold war was over.

Bowie: Yes, well, but it was not over in the sense to which people mean it now. I mean it was perfectly clear that there was going to be a continuing contest. Khrushchev made no pretense that he wasn't going to be trying to expand Soviet influence, he said that.

Goodpaster: Later in the fall of '55 there was the provision of arms to the Egyptians. And that really was contrary to, not to any specific commitment, but it was contrary to the discussions that they had had in Geneva.

Bowie: But it was perfectly apparent that Khrushchev was expansionist, that peaceful coexistence meant just what he later said quite explicitly by about '59 and 60. He meant carrying on the struggle in every way except nuclear war. In my opinion after '55 he was absolutely sure he was going to avoid nuclear war and took every step to see to it that there was not a confrontation of that sort, but at the same time, I think he couldn't convince himself that there wasn't some political way in which you could exploit these weapons. That, to my mind, is the explanation of both Berlin and Cuba. Both of those in my opinion were his efforts to find some way in which he could get political mileage out of what he knew could not be used as a military weapon, to any advantage, I mean. That's my picture of it anyway.

But I would just stress though that the point that Andy makes that Eisenhower came into office determined that he was not going to have any reinvolvement like Korea. It was a very fundamental conviction. And this was fully shared by Dulles. And Dulles' notion about means, times and places of our own choosing was essentially his formula for having mobile forces, which he thought of as air and sea, which would supplement local forces which would have to do the land fighting. That we would not necessarily be uninvolved in local affairs, but we would not be involved on the land. But Ike, I think was even more determined not to get much involved at all. I think that Vietnam was the demonstration of that because I think that his advisors, or a number of his advisors would have gotten in in some form, had they had their way. And Eisenhower managed the situation in such a way as to avoid the impression that he had simply washed his hands of it. But nevertheless he made very sure that he was not going to get involved even by the kind of thing that Radford was urging, like the air strike on Dienbienphu.

Wampler: I'd like to try to move forward a bit, set something of an endpoint, and then try to figure out how we got there. It seems this sequence we're looking at goes from MC-48 to MC 14/2 in 1957. First of all I want to know...

Bowie: Now which period is this?

Wampler: ...from '55-'57. And the adoption of MC 14/2. First of all I'm sort of wondering why they had to adopt MC-14/2. Is it different from MC-48 and how? You get an agreement on the NATO atomic stockpile, you get agreements on IRBM's, you get talk about flexibility, you have a new concept of shield forces tied to flexibility that comes out of Gruenther and Norstad's planning. You have a great deal of ambiguity in MC 14/2, it rules out limited war but in the same breath seems to leave an opening for it. Well, I was wondering...

Bowie: But this, the sentence saying we have no concept for limited war in Europe, which is verbatim. Radford was scared to death that somebody would undercut his determination that there should be this commitment to all out response.

Wampler: But there were other people thinking different things. Even Norstad is complaining, saying, look, you talk to people about using nuclear weapons in Europe and they think automatically that means general nuclear war. We've got to show them that this isn't the case. Is flexibility tied to tactical nuclear weapons and this force modernization that goes with the new statement of concept? Is this some move by Norstad, Dulles and Eisenhower towards trying to get more flexibility in NATO planning despite this popular identification of MC 14/2 with massive retaliation?

Bowie: I don't have any doubt in my mind -- the other two can speak for this better than perhaps I -- but I knew Norstad pretty well. In my view Norstad shared the view I described that we were trying to sell Dulles. That it was vitally important to have some way by which you didn't immediately get forced into having an all out nuclear war if there was any way to avoid it. And his notion of the pause was one way of his trying to say flexible response, I think. That you had something which would hopefully cause the Soviets to realize there was going to in fact be a reaction. That in all probability, if it didn't stop it was going to escalate on up. And that therefore they ought to ask themselves whether they really wanted nuclear war. But nevertheless to conduct the reponse in such a way that there was some interval in which if they had made a mistake or stumbled into something, they would have a chance to sort of think it over as to whether they really wished to see the whole thing continue on up the ladder. Now that's my picture of what Norstad meant by the pause. It was a way by which you could hopefully avoid hitting the trigger at once no matter what happened, whatever might happen in Europe.

And I think he also saw the danger that the Soviets might exploit the niche that might exist if you had nothing but massive retaliation on both sides, because they might figure that they could put in a little chisel there and have political effects from a smaller scale incursion. So relatively soon, I I think it even was before Norstad. We managed to treat small incursions as one way of having some degree of flexibility even though it wasn't very extensive. I think one of the driving forces here, my memory may be wrong, was that the British were under terrible economic pressure. The British were as determined almost as Radford, to move toward almost total reliance on nuclear weapons and on massive use of nuclear weapons. And I think if they had had their way they would have gone totally to tripwire.

Goodpaster: Matter of fact, I think it was about this time that they had the term the plate glass window. That if that window were cracked that's all that would be required. That you then respond in this all out way. Now one other...

Bowie: And theirs was, I have no doubt at all, theirs was dictated by economic constraints.

Richardson: You were right so far as the flexibility was concerned as the evidenced by the situation we had when I came back to NATO during the 1961 Berlin crisis. The only option we came up with short of what we were doing was to apply a quid pro quo by mining and closing the straits in Turkey or in the Skaggarak. That was a big "chess game" that needed mobile forces. The "pause" I'm a little less sure about. At that time, yes, I think it was a factor. On the other hand it was beginning to reflect the anti-nuclear attitudes. The pause was more or less explained at that time to most of us as, needed to give the politicians a little time to see if they could stop the war. You know, it was less a flexibility concept than one to buy time to satisfy the anti-nuclear McNamara views.

Bowie: That's right, I would say it was an early model of flexible response.

Wampler: But there's another issue that is going to be coming in, which was if you're going to have to wait on SAC to be effective, how long is Norstad going to have to hold in Europe before SAC becomes effective?

Richardson: Remember if our tactical New Approach was followed, you could hold as long as you wanted to, as long as our firepower held up. We created a stalemate at the front with our system. Once you had the stalemate, the ball was in SAC's court to settle the war.

Rosenberg: But that new approach was never fully implemented.

Richardson: No, that's right, so as a result if you went nuke you lost the ball game.

Wampler: If you go from the New Approach down to the long range planning report that Gruenther did in '56, is it correct to sort of see him working throughout upon this problem. I mean, is there continuity, is he trying to find a way to carry out MC-48 and fill in the details?

Richardson: I left in 55 and didn't come back until 61, although I was in long range plans in the air force in 58-60. I don't know what happened between 55 and 61 in NATO.

Goodpaster: I wanted to mention one other thing that we have to tie in with, and that's the Suez-Hungary thing in November of 1956. And the necessity to try to restore cohesion in the alliance, to restore bonds in the alliance that had been very badly strained and broken during the Suez thing in particular. I don't think there was much stress within the alliance over Hungary. There was a lot of frustration and dissatisfaction, but I didn't see any volunteers to take any kind of military action against the Soviets. Essentially that was seen as beyond anything that we could or would engage ourselves in. But the breach between ourselves and the British I think was regarded as very very serious. As to breach between ourselves and the French, although the breach was severe, the implications of that were not seen to be so serious. But there was a need to try to rebuild after that time. I can't remember just what the sequence was but one of the things that came out of that-- I think this came during Eisenhower's visit to Europe, which would have been I guess late in 57, and probably you were involved in this, oh, you'd gone-- was the development of the so-called NATO nuclear stockpile idea at that time. I think that that was one of the items of discussion that he was able to take with him. Norstad came in on the first of January 57, so it then really was Norstad who had developed that idea.

Rosenberg: We've got a paper in there though, and this is one of the problems of being chronological in all of this is the fact that the same issues seem to show up, perhaps not publically but certainly now in the documents we have discovered. There's a January 1956 document in this collection by you, Bob, that talks about the inter?? issues that community controls of atomic weapons, essentially device of ?? these weapons can serve on the alliance and what needed to be done. I mean there have been large, significant portions of it excised out, but what is clearly obvious is the ...

Goodpaster: You'd better watch your language after this Bob.

Bowie: But you see the point I would make is that there were strains inherent in the alliance just by its nature. As a result of the reliance on nuclear weapons on the one hand, and the fact that these were controlled by the United States on the other, the others were utterly dependent on their confidence in the United States. Either to be prudent and not to get them into a war they didn't want to get into, or [to] be staunch and not desert them ... Now, that inherently caused from time to time, crises of confidence and that might be due to external factors. I mean a Sputnik or a Gallois asking what leader in his right mind would sacrifice New York for London and so on. But the basic tensions it seems to me were built right into the alliance and to the facts that I have described. And there was no way, no strategy which could escape these essential dilemmas.

Now what you did do though was try a variety of means, sometimes by strategic modifications, sometimes by things like the nuclear stockpile, sometimes like the idea of the MLF. Or, initially by putting US forces in Europe so that they involved the United States beyond just a promise. But in every event [the main] point was [providing] reassurance that the Americans were really going to be committed; [and] second assuring as much involvement as possible of the other [Alliance nations] in whatever was the strategy. And, so the question of control of nuclear weapons, the question of how you cause them to go off, the questions of whether the others had some participation, either in decision making or in weapons systems or otherwise -- all were part of the effort to mitigate what you couldn't solve. And of course these things keep coming up, they keep coming up now. They're built right in, there's no escape from them. And all you can do is handle them, bandage them, mitigate them, deal with them in some fashion at the time...

Goodpaster: Keep the view focused on deterrence.

Bowie: ...and keep the view focused on deterrence and on the fact that deterrence depends on our always sticking together. And so what you find in the papers is that sometimes you compromise things, sometimes you paper them over, sometimes you push them under the rug, sometimes you make a change. You may make changes, not because they make a real practical differences, you may make changes because they respond to some kind of an itch. And I think you really have to look at the whole era, whole period. And not just then, it goes right on through, it's inherent, its built in, its no escape from it. And it therefore seems to me, that's why such a large focus of the alliance is based on stressing, as Andy says, the fact that what you're in the business for is deterrence. Because the minute you turn your mind to fighting the war, you get essentially divisive elements brought to the surface. There's no way of avoiding it, because there's no good nuclear war. And as Andy says, the president saw this very early on. But I think he understood you have to have the capability if you are going to have the deterrent. And at the same [time] if you focus very much on the capability, you scare people to death. So you really are constantly, I think facing a series of dilemmas or paradoxes or whatever you want, and if you look for neat solutions they are not going to be there.

Wampler: Well, it seems that every solution you put out, raises two more problems. You try to create the atomic stockpile, to make sure the nuclear weapons will be there, and can be used quickly, and try to raise the means for them to be used. That creates a whole other range of command and control problems. What are these missiles for, what are they going to be targeted on, who is going to say whether you can shoot them off or not? Are you really going to let the allies tell you you can't do it if you want to do it? You sort of shift your focus back and forth from one side to the other. Sort of like you're juggling, or doing sleight of hand, a monte game or something. You're not really, but you've got to keep people's eye on one problem at a time.

Rosenberg: Before you, just a follow on to that a little bit. It's almost an impression, and I don't know if you want to give it, but it comes from what both of you in particular have been saying. That the technical aspects of the solution, in a way don't really matter. It's sort of like what you pull off the shelf to solve the problem. So on one hand it may be an IRBM, on the other it'll be the mobile MRBM's that Norstad's talking about, on the other hand it'll be the NATO atomic stockpile.

Bowie: That's, I think, a little too facile. For this reason, you've got professionals here. You've got professional military people, they're serious people, they want to feel that they're doing the best they can really, not just smoke and mirrors. And whether they say to their people, their politicians, yes we think NATO's doing the best it can. That's basically what they're going to have to say, they can't say better than that. But if they say that, the politicians are comfortable, the politicians are then prepared to make the case for the public, that we're alright, we're comfortable, we're safe. So I think you're a little too cynical, I think, or too facile. I think the necessity for the professionals to try to see the best answer they can get when the answer in the end is kind of absurd. I mean you can't avoid the ultimate absurdity if you get in a total nuclear exchange. And yet some sense of the part of the professionals and reflected through them, the politicians and others, must be that yes we've got, maybe not a perfect answer, but we've got something that's probably pretty good. Maybe rickety but it'll run. And...

Goodpaster: We go through this. We went through it over and over and over again, and you have to ask the question compared to what. There were those that were trying to drive us to the extremes, would you rather be red or dead. And my answer was always, I would rather be neither then either. I don't think we have to make that choice, because there's a wide space in between. You then ask, okay let's postulate alternatives, tell me what your alternative is and then we will evaluate that and see whether you are going to be better off than you are now. Because we here have a very high prospect of being able to maintain peace and security, where neither force nor the real threat of force can be used against us effectively. Now that's no small achievement as the saying goes. And that's what we can offer and that's what we have provided. And to satisfy the professionals in this they have to see how what you have done is going to look to the fellow on the other side. As he looks at that, he say's finally, Boss I'd just as soon not take that on, because I don't know where it would end. To put it in rather theoretical terms, the value to me of how much I destroy of the other fellow, is not commensurate with the value to me of how much of me he destroys. Now if you want to get to the basic theory that's what you've got to do. That's what you've got to argue and you've got to make that effective. But you've got this constant pull, my God think of what this war is going to be like. I used to call this planning in the subjunctive. You're planning a condition contrary to fact and you've got to go through that planning and you've got to have all of this. That is that ultimate dilemma, the ultimate paradox. As I often say, if you have it you don't need it, and if you don't have it you do need it. Now let's go to your point. How deep do you have to get into the technical specifics here. You have to get deep enough so that you will not be destroyed on the grounds of lack of professional credibility, or lack of technical validity. But if we learned anything, it is that you have to pull this up out of the hands of the technicians. Now if I just to jump ahead a few years, the fact that you can make a MIRVed missile should not necessarily lead you to do so. If you ask will a MIRVed missile leave me as an alternative in a safer situation then I was before, the answer, I think if you study that carefully, is no. You give a great premium to the other fellow of striking first and striking harder, and I've never wanted to do that. But that's the kind of analysis that you have to go through.

Richardson: It wasn't my intent in answering your question to include in the word technical, things like choices between missiles or airplanes or MIRVed or not MIRVed. But I thought you were coming at us from the point of view of did we have restricted data on whether the weapons we were carrying had what CEP, the KT of yields. Those are the things I generally didn't care about as long as I knew what could be done with them. I didn't go to the manual for any kind of planning for what we were doing at our level, that was academic.

Goodpaster: Well let me just mention, we worked out these templates. The template was an area within which the effects would be expected to be thus and such. We could provide the template, but at that time we could not provide the data from which the template was derived. That's the technical data. We also could provide some data about fallout but were pretty limited what we could do about fallout, as I recall.

Rosenberg: The problem I was sort of trying to get to, and I wasn't trying to be facile on this...

Bowie: I'm sorry, I didn't mean...

Rosenberg: ...the impression that was coming through that, you know, reading this over somebody might get an impression of what you are saying. The thing that I've been trying to look at myself has been the consequences of Eisenhower decisions on nuclear weapons for Europe as one goes on into the 1960's. And there are obvious problems to start with turning to administrations. Mac Bundy, only a couple of weeks ago admitted to me that there has never been a gap as wide as that which took place on January 20 1961. And he said he didn't bridge it with you. He made a comment that echoes one you made to me a number of years ago and it was, "One thing we always should have asked Andy about was we should have asked him about the Bay of Pigs." Andy you yourself said to me "I should have volunteered that information." And that was one side of it. But the fact is that you started something in motion on the long term, in particular the NATO atomic stockpile. That, in effect, became a force of its own. The negotiations went on, depending on which nation, in some cases into 1962, before you could get agreement to put warheads into specific nations. And what happens is a dynamic develops by the mid-60's, where McNamara is clearly fighting off pressures from someplace, its unclear where. Either its in the Pentagon or its over in SHAPE or its coming from Allied powers as well, for a nuclear stockpile in Europe of 20,000 weapons. And he's able to hold it to 7000, instead. Which for some people is not a major victory but for others it is. And so I guess what I'm, what concerns me is when you're doing the equivalent of long range political planning to head off the crisis of the alliance by using these weapons. To in effect tamp down possible bonfires that can rage and destroy the alliance. But what about the long term implications? Were you able to worry about those? And in particular, this is partially where we'd like some technical information, was there any way you could use military requirements to tamp those down, or were those always going to be driving things to the absurd?

[Question from unknown source.]

Rosenberg: Well it started off, when the NATO atomic stockpile was formulated, did anyone have a concept of how big it needed to get?

Goodpaster: I don't recall that there was. What I do recall was the argument that we had, and this involved the Air Force. On sizing the atomic stockpile, I recall the argument that was made to Eisenhower, we have these bombers, it doesn't make any sense to have the bombers and not to have the weapons for them. You know the argument that was made. Eisenhower didn't like the argument very much. But we did have an output of weapons material, and I don't think any decision was made about how many weapons. We made decisions from time to time about whether we needed another reactor or not. That was brought up and decided. On this one, when the determination was finally made to size the stockpile for the air weapons with the numbers of certain aircraft, I do recall Eisenhower saying, "I don't want anybody now coming in to me and arguing that we need more aircraft because of the number of weapons that we have." But I don't think any specific decisions were made concerning the numbers of army support weapons -- Honest John, Little John even that Davy Crockett. Those were regarded as determinations that would be set by the force structure. The idea was to provide the weapons that would be needed by the force structure. Where you began to get into the new set of issues was with respect to the IRBM's and the ICBM's. And here we were still in the Eisenhower period at such an early stage that there were no decisions as to levels made. As a matter of fact we were fighting off the pressures for crash programs in those areas, feeling that a steady program beginning as soon as we could begin it should be the aim -- to set up a steady program and that the determination where to cut them off would have to be made later. We had enough difficulty with the development of the ICBM's, both the Titan and the Atlas. So that I just don't recall any calculations of total numbers. I think that came during the Kennedy Administration.

Richardson: There weren't any numerical requirements that were submitted in the late 1950's. I can tell you that because we were fighting each other over the allocation of critical materials in the services at that time. Once we got the allocations we then decided in the Air Staff how they would be deployed and how they fitted into the force structure. So in those studies if there had been any input from the field commanders to influence the outcome none of us ever saw it, and we were writing the papers.

Wampler: Did you get that somewhat from the MC-70 requirements, that were laid out for the Honest John's, artillery, rockets...

Richardson: No, because the force structure governed weapons requirement in systems like Davy Crockett or mines. Each outfit was entitled to so many. You can't really say I'm going to fix so many weapons and then let the tail wag the dog by saying now give me the number of units or fighter aircraft required to deliver these weapons. You have to let the system building the force structure determine how many, in the very low yield categories. What's the weapons backup, for instance, for a fighter squadron or group? How many do I send over with them? Okay then when SACEUR gets one squadron atomic capable along with it comes its package of weaponry.

Goodpaster: Let me go to a question that you were getting at, which is how much of this was foreseen. There was a tendency which became acute after the Skybolt affair, to solve the present problem by creating a bigger one a little further down the road. Part of statesmanship is to avoid that kind of thing whenever you can. But on much of this the full consequences simply could not be foreseen. You had the realization that you'd better get on with it and be prepared to make some decisions at a later time when you knew more about it and were able to make a fuller assessment. So, there was that inherent risk. And that was, I just have to say, undoubtedly not thought through at this time.

Bowie: And wouldn't it be true, Andy, as a practical matter, the total numbers were merely a function of the availability of nuclear material...?

Goodpaster: ...of the critical material...

Bowie: ...and then their argument was who got it, whether it was...

Goodpaster: ...and then periodically Lewis Strauss and Dodd Starbird would come over and argue the case for another reactor, an increase in the output...

Bowie: I think we shouldn't go finish here without mentioning Strauss, because Strauss was as much a proponent of nuclear weapons as Radford. And he was also eager to keep this part of the apparatus going full tilt. And in fact I think when Eisenhower appointed him, he drew him aside and told him he wanted him to treat as high priority efforts to work out some form of arms control, to see whether you couldn't bring these weapons under control. And I think nothing was more distasteful to Strauss than this assignment. And I don't believe Strauss ever did much to pursue it. Andy could comment if he thinks otherwise.

Goodpaster: He was always an opposing force with respect to Eisenhower's interests and efforts in that direction. Now, he could be brought along and brought around. It took Eisenhower to do it. As you know his relations with the Congress were about as bad as they could be. The Joint Committee on Atomic Energy and...

Richardson: Well, they didn't trust him...

Goodpaster: Well, that's the way they put it...

Richardson: I don't think that was true...

Goodpaster: Well yes...

Richardson: He was a slippery operator...

Goodpaster: Well yes, that's right. But what they objected to was the fact that he wore two hats, one as an advisor to the President in which he would not tell them what advice he had given the President. But the law said that they were entitled to be fully and currently informed, and at the moment you had finished writing a sentence on a paper, they were entitled to have it. At least that was their view. This was a built in conflict and he was not the man to ease that conflict.

Richardson: My bias about him goes back to the war itself, World War II.

Wampler: You mentioned the IRBM's and it seems that increasingly that decision was initially made for political reasons, more than military. The Thor/Jupiter offer, both the one to the whole alliance and then the special one that was worked out with the British. There seems to be a lot of factors pushing this, and perhaps military requirements are not number one on the list. You've got RAF Plan K funds to be spent, SAC wants to rotate some bombers back from the UK and they've got a missile coming on-line that they would like to use. They've got an orphan air defense missile that they would like to put over in Britain, and want to sell this to the British. And it seems that, on the basis of the British documents, this thing was rammed down their throat. They didn't like getting this missile, they didn't like the command and control setup.

Goodpaster: There's a little story in this that I'll tell you because I think it tells a good deal about how our government operates or doesn't. The one thing, and you'll remember this, Bob, the one thing that Eisenhower laid down was that we were not going to ask anybody to take these missiles. They would have to ask us for them. Well it didn't work that way. The first thing you know each service is pushing to get its missile placed. They were in intense rivalry over this, the Army had the Jupiter and the Air Force had the Thor. Each one was trying to get it deployed so as to stake out its position in this area. They in fact were pushing it hard. And I have to say your department got bound up in this just a little bit. Because when we made a trip to Italy, our ambassador, a man named Zellerbach, in our preparatory meeting when we met with the President, Zellerbach said, "Now Mr. President there is one thing very important that you should realize in talking with the Italians. They feel that they are entitled to some compensation because they agreed to the risk of having the IRBM on their soil." And Eisenhower -- I thought was going to kill himself an ambassador right then -- demanded, "What did you say?" We went through all of this and Bob Murphy, bless his soul, was there and he said, "Mr. President I think there has been some misunderstanding. I wonder if we could have the opportunity to discuss this a little bit among ourselves before we pursue it." Eisenhower said something to the effect that by God you'd better. But in fact it came out very clearly, that not only were we pushing but we were prepared to give quid pro quo to people for taking this. I had to kind of ease Eisenhower's view in this. And I recalled a comment that had been made by Bob Lovett, when he was the Secretary of Defense. Bob said on one occasion -- this was in dealing with some of our NATO allies -- when I have to, I don't mind giving a quid pro quo, but by God I hate to have to give a quid pro quid. Eisenhower found enough humor in that to at least defang the situation for that moment. But yes, the handling of this was not very....

Wampler: There's a sense that he realized that missiles really didn't have much military value. They were going over there almost obsolescent by the time they arrived...

Goodpaster: Yes, but we're now entering the ballistic missile era. And that has a significance beyond the purely military.

Wampler: And this creates another one of these long range problems that Dave brings up. Once you get them over there, are you committed to modernizing them?

Rosenberg: Let me just read your own words, The president had asked Secretary McElroy and Mr. Dillon to come in and talk to him, talk to them a little bit about the subject of bases in foreign countries, with specific reference to discussions regarding IRBM bases in Greece. He said he could see a reason for putting IRBM's in such areas as Britain, Germany and France. However when it comes to the flank or advanced areas such as Greece, the matter seems very questionable. He reverted to his analogy, if Cuba or Mexico were to become communist new clients and the Soviets were to send arms and equipment, what would we feel we had to do then? He thought we would feel we would have to intervene militarily if necessary.

Bowie: What's the date of that?

Rosenberg: June 17, 1959 memo #109.

Bowie: But I think Andy has made a good point about the way the government works. I'm perfectly sure that there must have been arguments that with the Sputnik and with them entering into the missile age and all that, it was necessary to reassure the allies that we were not helpless and so on. And that this probably was seen as one way of doing that. And then you get into inter-service competition, which then starts selling it as something, as if they were doing us a favor, because the services are so eager to get their particular model in place. And so you know, it does certainly show how the president can have a pretty clear conception of what he wants to accomplish and its not that easy to accomplish it because it gets mixed up with the service motivations. Now I'm not one of those who has a strong view about you know organizational politics being everything, it isn't. But it certainly is a factor.

Goodpaster: You wouldn't go as far as Graham Allison.

Bowie: No, but it is a factor, it is worth looking at...

Goodpaster: But it is something that certainly exists and you had better be very watchful of it all along. Even so it'll get away from you from time to time. I see a state of exhaustion.

Rosenberg: No, there's a lot that we still wanted to try to cover but on the other hand you get so deeply down into the nitty gritty that it's very hard to actually pull the actual facts out of it because it's very hard to get down to. The thing that I was going to throw out is a question for you Bob, as to whether or not the MLF was perhaps the kind of answer to this, that actually looked to the long range. You're talking about a sea-based nuclear force.

Bowie: Well, I'll tell you my conception of what the MLF was all about. We had this situation once more in which, partly as a result of the Gallois-type argument, British nuclear capability, the French nuclear capability, it began to look as if the members of the Alliance were losing confidence and wanted some greater feeling of control and so on. There was a strong conviction, at least on my part and I think in the government, that the proliferation of national capabilities was a bad thing for the Alliance. That it was bound to highlight the idea that nobody could depend on anybody else. Because even the British, when they were selling their nuclear force in Parliament were using arguments which essentially took the position, you can't really count on anybody else, you have to depend on yourself. And it was perfectly clear that the Germans were under constraints, very serious constraints as to having nuclear weapons, and were going to be in a position of feeling they were naked if the others felt it necessary and therefore were second class, so to speak, were not covered or were exposed. Or there would be rumblings in the political process that Germany had to have such weapons and that would be divisive. So, one purpose was to try to figure out could you find a way by which the Europeans could have some form of real participation in the nuclear strategic capability, which headed off and if possible even undercut the national forces. At that time the British were having a hard time, both for money reasons and other reasons in actually having an independent capability. The French had decided to go ahead but were not all that far along. And finally the European community come, was in existence and had begun to look as if it might be going somewhere. And the British were pretty clearly at that time moving towards efforts to enter. So I was trying to devise something which would hold out the prospect, that as Europe became a political entity there would be this force in being, [the] Multi-Lateral Force which could be taken over by the Europeans as a genuine European force and NATO could move toward a situation in which, Europe really could play a very considerable part in it's own security. Now, I was anxious, in other words, to give some additional impetus to the European community with something that could be essentially the strategic arm of that community. Second to create a situation in which there might be political pressures in Britain which would force the British to join and get out of the national capability. I didn't assume that at the beginning the French would do that, but that they might over time. And that it would certainly take the heat off with respect to any worries by the Germans and the Italians and others who didn't have any such capability. And therefore I suggested, that the MLF have the sexiest weapon, which was the Polaris. It was also secure, and even a hundred or several hundred at most could be a major kind of a deterrent with the certainty that they could be launched and the certainty that they could be damaging to the Soviet Union. So the purpose here was essentially political in the sense of reassurance to the Europeans. Now there was no way I could see at the beginning to do something without the involvement of the Americans in some sense. Because there wasn't any European entity yet that was able politically to take over. At the same time it seemed to me that given the NATO strategy you could work out a solution of the use problem. That you could have an advance agreement that in case of a nuclear attack on Europe, this could be used by SACEUR. That would authorize the release. And any other need for release would involve a period of time in any event and that therefore that could be decided by the participants in this force. And that in the some future time the Americans would be prepared to turn over the force to a European political community. I didn't develop all of this in the proposal, but anyway this was in my mind and set out later in a series of articles. The future possibility was that when the Europeans were ready to take over and make this really into a joint European force, the US could agree to withdraw, leave it to the Europeans as their force.

The proposal really was one of these devices which was intended to reassure, which was intended to deal with certain divisive political problems, which was at the same time intended to lay a foundation for moving toward a Europe which was more self reliant. And in that sense it was a long term effort. I didn't visualize that it was going to happen within, you know, ten years or so. But nevertheless, in the meantime this was something which could be bait and also would serve this function of giving a participation by the Europeans. My feeling was that if the Europeans had to involve themselves in the targeting of these weapons, even though the American veto was the reality still, they would still have a very direct feeling that they somehow understood what the strategy was and what it could and couldn't accomplish and so on. It was no real cost to the Americans because the Americans would still have the right, unilaterally, to use SAC. And so this was merely a supplement, there wasn't a prayer of this being used irresponsibly. And therefore, while it cost something, it nevertheless looked to me as if it was worth what it cost particularly because we were going hopefully get the Europeans to buy it or pay for it themselves when they actually created the second stage, which was the one I've described.

Sims: Can I ask a quick...

Bowie: What?

Rosenberg: Just a follow on. When you put this together did you see any real military requirements for this or did you see it, much of what works out in terms of a force like that would relate to such issues as you've seen debated recently over the Pershing. That you provide the allies with forces capable of reaching the Soviet Union. And as a result you can, the issue is how this force then gets integrated into force playout [???] and operational planning and targeting and so on. Did you see or did you sense any kind of operational need to supplement what was already coming along, or was it primarily a political...?

Bowie: This was primarily if you wish, political. This was primarily to solve the problem of how do the Europeans have a share or a role within the alliance which will keep them satisfied. And second if and to the extent that it could evolve into an effective force capable of really helping the Europeans to defend themselves, that it would be a plus. But it wasn't the idea that there was some immediate need that wasn't being met in the military sense, no...

Goodpaster: It was part of the military arsenal. If you can count them, you know, as your weapons, now you have put them in a particular political format, that had very considerable importance.

Richardson: Let me comment on that one from the worm's eye point of view. I'm going to make this observation in retrospect Bob? If what you just explained, had been explained at the time it was presented, it might have gone over. You know, there was a lack of communication. I was sitting with the NATO council all during that period when this proposal came in. The first reaction particularly from Gallois' of the world and their compatriots, was Oh boy, this is a gimmick to pull the American weapons offshore and put them at sea where we can't use them right away and they won't be forced to commit themselves to use them. So they started out right away with the interpretation that the whole thing was an anti-nuclear political maneuver. Then what really killed it in my opinion was a joke.

Bowie: Was what?

Richardson: A joke. We got a story out of Washington about that time when I was sitting in NATO council. We got a story was circulating at the bar in the dining room at that time, straight out of Washington, that said, "Did you hear about the latest on the MLF? Well, it seems that admiral (what was his name, the guy that was working on the MLF military side in the Defense Department?)

Rosenberg: Lee was working at...

Richardson: Lee, Lee supposedly went in to brief Mr. McNamara on this and he really sold him on the idea, whereupon McNamara called in George Anderson, then CNO and said "Admiral this is a good cheap system. Since it's such a wonderful idea to give these things to our allies why don't we cut the 42 Polaris program back and put about 10 of these merchant men in the program for you.

Bowie: Now this shifting to the surface ships was forced by Rickover.

Richardson: No, wait a moment, so then allegedly, Anderson took off for an hour or two to explain to McNamara MLF was not militarily worth a dam. Whereupon McNamara said "well why do we try to sell our allies something that we ourselves wouldn't buy." While this conversation was supposedly going on at the circus in ring one there was another act going on in ring two, in the White house. In ring two Rickover was reported as talking to Kennedy and said, "Jack, I know you're a Navy man but you forgot something." "What did I forget?" "You forgot there's three parts to a submarine." By then they'd decided the merchantmen idea wouldn't sell so this was about giving NATO Polaris, with mixed crews. "There's three parts to a submarine: there's the motors, there's the nuclear missiles, and there's all of the cryptology, codes, and communication package. Now Mr. President if you want to give the funnies, the motors and the missiles, that's okay by me, but are you damn sure you want to give them all of our communications and everything that goes with these systems?" Then Kennedy, as the story went said, "Hell no don't give them anything." The point is that this kind of story was circulating in the Council while people from Washington were seriously trying to present and sell the MLF program. You can obviously see that in no time at all nobody would buy any part of it. They were laughing at the McNamara/State/MLF plan all the way to the bar.

Bowie: Well, Rickover, did as I understood, block using subs. Bear in mind I was out of government. I was a consultant, but you don't have much role from that. I wrote the report, turned it in, and I was still back at Harvard. So, I had really no much influence on what happened. But Rickover quickly went in to Kennedy and essentially told him you're going to have to fight me if you want to use subs. Well, of course that took a lot of the sex appeal out.

Richardson: I said, that was it basically of Rickover and the subs.

Bowie: But you know some people made fun of the mixed crew idea. Well, I cleared that with Anderson. I went and talked to Anderson, I said, suppose I suggest a system under which we had mixed crews and they were different nationalities. The only thing I could assure you would be that they would all speak English. Could you run a submarine with those? He says I can make a better damn crew with them than any of those British crews without any question.

JS: Could I throw in a question here? Going back to the '56, '57, '58 period, there were some negotiations going on between the French, the Germans and the Italians on nuclear cooperation. And I was wondering to what extent that had an impact on planning in the later period, in the later 50's. Do you recall any cable traffic, either intra-governmental or inter-allied on just that?

Bowie: That would have to be Andy, because I left the government in about August of '57 and I came back to do the study and I was not aware, and it certainly was not a factor in my own thinking.

Goodpaster: Yes, I can't remember anything. I don't think it became serious.

Wampler: The question that seems to come up... you said that MLF was not really addressing a military requirement.

Bowie: In the sense it was not primarily trying to fill a military void. It presumably would have served a military function.

Wampler: Yes, it would have to serve a military function and it can not go against a military interest. And what I'm wondering is, if we move back again to this '56-'57, we've got all of these things coming up. These ideas that go back to '53 or to '55. Is there any coherence to them? In the Eisenhower administration, where you were or in Eisenhower's mind, did all of this stuff fit together or is there a certain amount of ad hoc?

Bowie: What do you mean all of this stuff?

Rosenberg: You have a number of different military solutions, nuclear solutions that you see happening in the '56-'60 period with respect to NATO. And they include the IRBM in Britain, the Jupiter's to Greece, Italy and to Turkey, the NATO atomic stockpile, Norstad's medium range ballistic missile, and then finally the MLF, and MC-70.

Wampler: Long range force requirements planning, I mean all of this supposedly is there in the soup?

Rosenberg: The issue is not ad hocism, but historians...

Bowie: What you have to realize is that what had been foreseen by the early '50's, namely the achievement by the Soviets of a strategic, nuclear capability and relative parity, was rapidly coming forward. This was the kind of concern highlighted by the Sputnik. The two things together created quite a furor in the public, including this country, and you mustn't forget the Gaither report, which essentially exaggerated the situation, but nevertheless was part of the public attitude. We were getting for the first time a serious debate about whether the Americans could be really counted on to sacrifice for Europe. I can still remember a discussion in Freiburg with an American, where this was the issue at great length. And then you had the self-interest of the French, led by Gallois most graphically, to assert that there was no other solution but to have your own nuclear capability. You had this same exact argumentation being made in a blander way by the British. And all of these things had a tendency to really raise severe questions about whether or not NATO over time was going to provide secruity. And among the people most important were the Germans, where Adenauer was beginning to get queazy about all of this talk by the French, and the British, and in your debate at home.

[Question from unknown source.]

Bowie: Yeah, and so you really began to have what appeared to be the risk of unravelling of the alliance because of these questions which were being raised about the reliability of the United States, the adequacy of the deterrent, the possibility of relying on somebody else for nuclear defense. One thing I have found in reading all of the documents and even some of your paper is that it tends to be disembodied. It's abstracts too much from the ongoing atmosphere, debate, concerns, which are really very important in terms of the maintenance of an adequate cohesion within the alliance if you believe the alliance remains important. And therefore you have people trying to think up ways in which to deal with what I have already described as insoluble problems, in ways which may mitigate them or reduce the impact of them or placate peoples concerns. So, I think the underlying ongoing strategic considerations were continuing and were long term and were strategic in the real sense. But as to the particular devices or steps that were taken, I think there was some element there of thinking up ideas which would have some degree of mitigating, or resolving or compromising these concerns. So as to keep, continue to have the cohesion of the alliance, to continue to have confidence on the part of the Europeans, and to continue to have effectiveness as seen by the Soviets of the deterrent. And, so I would plead guilty to the fact that the MLF was ad hoc, but it was an effort to contribute in a number of fashions to an ongoing problem. And I think the same was true of a lot of these others.

Goodpaster: I think you're going to have to ask the question -- let me suggest you set it up this way -- could there have been a master plan at that stage? There was not. Conceivably there could have been, but frankly I doubt it. There were too many new things that couldn't be fully evaluated. Changes were occurring. You didn't know what the slope of the curves would be and you didn't know what their implications would be. And this was kind of a rolling thing where you had to just keep reevaluating, and re-look when you had times of particular stress, which we had after Suez and particularly after the Sputnik went up. And here was Khrushchev blustering around and lots of little differing perceptions. You know at the time of Suez, Khrushchev made this threat that the rockets will fly, and Eisenhower just laughed at it. And then we got a message from Gruenther saying that opinion in Europe has been deeply shaken, something needs to be done. Well the timing was just about past, but we talked it over and Eisenhower's decision was to have Jim Hagerty go out and tell the press that he had seen this, and the president just said if anybody attacked our allies they would be attacked in return.

Bowie: And then Gruenther made some statement.

Goodpaster: And then Gruenther made a statement.

Wampler: Well, let me pose a really ridiculous counter-factual here. You get this argument that you're having to take some of your actions to reassure the allies. Dulles is using this argument in '53, about tactical nuclear weapons. He said we have evidence the Soviets are moving these weapons in, we have to match them, we have to meet them. Now with the rockets, our allies are going to lose their confidence, so we've got to move to the rockets. If miraculously there hadn't been these expressions of concern and fear, what could you have done? What do you think NATO would have done -- in terms of establishing its forces? Would you have had this move to put in the IRBM's, to configure your forces the way in which you did? Would this have been militarily required just in terms of the threat you faced as opposed to meeting the political threat you faced of undermining alliance conflicts?

Goodpaster: I'm inclined to think that at that stage we would have responded simply on the basis of what we were seeing militarily. It was a very dynamic period. And in such a period you know that you cannot let the other fellow get a long lead. You get behind the power curve and you may not catch up. We know that from experience, like the British did before World War II, when the German air force was being built and finally the German air force existed and there was a feeling that if we try to build up, that would be provocative and a possible casus belli in and of itself. So at a time of dynamic development, I think on military grounds alone there's going to be a lot of pressure to at least not get behind, and stay ahead if you can.

Bowie: Well, I would simply say that my judgment is that the general trend of the way in which these NATO forces developed, armament developed, probably would not have been significantly different. I think most of the things that we did for the purpose of reassurance were ways of doing or add ons to what was seen as militarily necessary.

Goodpaster: There was professional military advice coming into the governments throughout this whole period.

Wampler: I was just looking at the long term in terms of contemporary European concern about these weapons. Would it be beneficial to remind them why they went there in the first place? A lot of them went there in the first place due to European concerns about American reliability, and it's a part of the history I think that's...

Bowie: It would certainly give one satisfaction to make that point but it won't make any money for you.

Goodpaster: What I would counterpose to this would be the embryonic efforts toward arms control, and I think a more effective effort, if I may say so, signalled at Geneva to begin to take some of the intensity out of the military confrontation through the opening of discourse that you were beginning to get. It was only a beginning, and of course it was promptly exaggerated in the press. We now have the spirit of Geneva, so that you were yo-yoing. But there was an improvement that came out of that session at Geneva and you gradually began to move away, and get on to a policy -- I can't find a good term for it -- a policy of declining confrontation and declining militarization of the confrontation.

Bowie: I think almost that the 1955 summit, almost explicitly, not really explicitly was a kind of lets say tacit recognition on both sides, that they were going to go very far to avoid direct confrontation which involved the risk of nuclear war between them. And in fact that's the way they behaved. I think the Cuban Missile Crisis was an effort by Khrushchev to get political mileage out of the weapons, but I think the minute he thought that there was a possibility of direct confrontation he backed off. And that was consistent in my view with, what sort of was tacitly established, I don't mean by agreement, I think simply both sized up the situation quite realistically and saw that that was the way to go. Each of them sort of understood that the other understood that a nuclear war was going to be suicidal and that it was not to be had if you could possibly avoid it. And you weren't even going to do things which involved excessive risk of having a nuclear war. Don't you think that was true.

Nerhlich: Two questions [???]

Bowie: To put it brutally, there wasn't any Norstad plan. Norstad did not have any operational proposal for actually what he wanted to do. I went over to talk to Norstad three times, while I was preparing this report. And I admire him, he's just a wonderful person. But the truth was all he had was a picture of possibly running these missilesaround roads in Europe. Now that doesn't make any sense.

Nerhlich: [???]

Goodpaster: The other thing he wanted was to create some system, something which might have a magnetic effect on the national capabilities. In other words politically it might have the effect, because it was multinational and potentially European, it might have a magnetic effect on undercutting the national capabilities. And I think it could have done that in Britain for example, had not Kennedy at Nassau sold the game down the river.

Nerhlich: [???]

Goodpaster: Well you see we had no single operational plan, until the very end of the Eisenhower administration. It was Secretary Tom Gates, and I admire him for it, because it was a very difficult thing to do. But he saw and discussed it. He said we simply do not have a coordinated plan and he undertook to try bring one about. And I would say that he did a very skillful job in finally causing that to happen. He had to take into account the Navy, and the air force and SAC and all of that. And until then -- I think the term is transparency that is used nowadays -- there was damn little transparency of what they were doing out there at SAC. SAC liked it that way, Curt LeMay and then Tommy Power. They really, both of them I think very seriously felt that all they needed was a one sentence instruction from the President.

Nerhlich: [???] I'm talking about the technical capabilities [???]

Goodpaster: In Europe that came later.

Richardson: You mean the nuclear alert forces, Quick reaction?

Nerhlich: [???]

Richardson: Dual capable, nuclear and non-nuclear. Quite a few of those.

Goodpaster: The specific planning of that I was not involved in. So I can't just say when that occurred. I don't remember much of anything about that during Eisenhower administration.

Richardson: The first flexibility I remember was when they came up with the, what was it called? The Allied Mobile Force Plan. The beginning of that was under General Skyler back in about '61 or '62.

Bowie: That was extra, outside NATO, wasn't it?

Richardson: Well, no, but at least it had the flexibility notion.

Bowie: But the different notion of flexible, flexibility like flexible response was also urged in my 1960 report. That was the second half of the defense recommendations. And I had the meeting with the president in August on the report. And I can still remember his jumping on me on the idea that there would be any kind of a partial capability of the non-nuclear sort. I haven't looked at what the record shows, but my vague recollection is that Norstad developed his thoughts which were not at all at odds with the point about the necessity of a more adequate capability. The purpose was not to fight World War II but to provide a greater assurance against the minor kind of incursion. And I had the impression that the two of us made more of a dent on it than I had succeeded in making independently. But I wonder whether Andy remembers anything about this or not.

Goodpaster: Let me say just one thing. I think the plans of that kind, the regional priority plans and those things, I think they came on a little bit later.

Rosenberg: This is Eisenhower's comment after your meeting in a meeting with McElroy.

Goodpaster: Is that one of mine?

Bowie: But you were there, you must have been there for this meeting, because you arranged it.

Goodpaster: Yes, I expect so, yes, I think that's the famous time when as we went out, Larry Norstad said, Now the President isn't quite right on this and if you get a chance you tell him so. I said this meeting isn't over so far as I'm concerned. If you want him to be told that you've got to tell him. And I lost a friend, he wasn't a friend of mine I think for a year after that. He wanted me to go in and tell him, you know, let me just explain this to you Mr. President. I could see myself flying out the window. No, I think Larry didn't like that very much. Mostly because he knew I was right. And you know that's worse.

Bowie: I suggest that it's time for an adjournment.

Rosenberg: Take a little break and then I know you have to leave.

Bowie: I think I'm going to leave too.

Rosenberg: Okay, well.

Bowie: If you don't mind.

Rosenberg: There's, alright well, that'll mean, that should mean adjourning. I have one question that has occurred to me that could be easily thrown in. And that's a question that's a counter-factual question. And what it is in effect is something that I've occasionally thought to myself having been trying to study the Kennedy years. I've been wondering what life would have been like if Richard Nixon had won the election of 1960. And in effect what I'm asking is this: Much of what the Eisenhower administration was attempting to do with nuclear weapons in the NATO context was very seriously transformed after January 20, 1961. And in terms of long range results, in thinking, planning, do you think that there was any way to have preserved that, for example do you think if Nixon had won in 1960, which is not an absolutely ridiculous historical idea, would much of this have, arguably maybe, he did win in 1960. Would in fact what had been started here have continued because there is such a watershed in 1961, that it is very hard to get a real understanding of the long term implications of what might have been, and thus what you were really attempting to do. I don't know, it's not an easy question, it's just one of those things in which, it's sort of like a druthers question. How would you have hoped to see what you started in the 1950's continue in the '60's? Not necessarily have to point [???] it toward criticism of the succeeding administration, of what you would have liked to see happen rather then what did happen.

Bowie: I think that's too much for me at 5:42.

Goodpaster: Yes, I think that what I would say there -- I'll limit my remarks because I don't want to be drawn into judgement on the Kennedy Administration, as to which my association is of a different character. I was just an observer essentially, if that, where I was a participant before. I'll speak to what my expectation would have been regarding the course that Richard Nixon would have followed. I think he would have been guided in military affairs very very strongly by Eisenhower's view on the way Eisenhower was going about it. I think there was more flexibility in Richard Nixon, I know that because we heard it in the NSC from time to time. There would have been more flexibility and more response to the new issues. But essentially I think that in military matters he would have very much followed the Eisenhower course. He had that regard for Eisenhower. He knew what Eisenhower had been through particularly in the last few years of his presidency, and I think he probably heard Eisenhower on occasion make that statement about how concerned he was that there would at some time be a man sitting in this chair who does not have the military experience I have, and could not, as he put it, deal with these military issues and military people.

Bowie: I would just say my own impression would also be that Nixon didn't see himself as very qualified in the military field. I don't think he would necessarily have much impact. And then the question would have been whether he would have simply taken advice, so to speak from Ike informally, or whether the processes of government would have taken overin which case I don't know what would have happened.

Richardson: If you want to address the problem of the difference, I would be glad to talk to you at some length. Not from the NATO point of view but a high technology and overall defense point of view. I'll give you right now three references. If you dig out those references and read them you'll begin to see what I'm talking about. First, get out the Phoenix studies, next get out is the 1965 findings of the White House Conference on Arms Control and Disarmament chaired by Jerry Wiesner. And third go back to the 1960 conference at the Boston College of Arts and Sciences, on Arms Control and Disarmament. Look at all their conclusions, their findings and their recommendations. Then look back and see historically what was actually done. Now you put that package together and you've got a real story of discreet U.S. unilateral disarmament! In addition to that I might add that in addition to the findings in those papers, we had a viewgraph that we presented in '65-'66 that show 23 major "cutting edge," new high technology programs cancelled within the space of 3 years. All on the grounds that if we do it they'll see us and they'll do it and this'll force the arms race and we can never have equality. Had any one of those programs succeeded, we wouldn't even be talking about SDI today, or deterrence, or a gap. I'm talking even about programs like Defender, Orion, Bambi, Rover, Dynasoar, Skybolt and soforth.

Goodpaster: Bob and I will be at our 50th reunion at West Point.

(1)General Richardson later expanded upon these points, noting that, "...we kept service and party line bias out of the New Approach by breaking the task down into major building block studies (intelligence, tactics, forces used, etc.) and then made everyone agree or not to each study before they were assembled into the Capabilities Plan.! This way one could not see what the impact of each would have on the conclusions and findings, but having approved all the imputs piecemeal there was nothing left to manipulate in order to change the outcome.!" Letter, Richardson to Wampler, n.d. (ca. August, 1991).