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

Conducted by David A. Rosenberg and Robert A. Wampler and Participants: R. Gordon Arneson, Robert Bowie, Douglas MacArthur II, Edwin Martin, Ernest May, David A. Rosenberg, Jennifer Sims and Robert A. Wampler

March 16, 1990

(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

Robert Wampler: I'd like to thank all of you for coming here today. It took quite a while to get this oral history session arranged, even more than the last one. I despaired at times that we ever would. This is a follow up to another meeting that Dr. Bowie took part in, so he knows what we're about here. You were sent all of the materials and questions, which if you read through all of it, you're very good men. We have a very heavy agenda of questions to get through, and we will likely not get through all of them. But we are going to try and focus on specifics, and this time we're very interested in looking more at the political-diplomatic aspects of the problems facing the US and NATO in the 1950's, through the Truman and Eisenhower Administrations, particularly as it pertained to the issues that arose out of integrating nuclear weapons into NATO planning and strategy.

First of all, as an administrative note, did everyone get a copy of the draft NATO political directive that I brought today? There should have been one at every seat at the table. It's just something I turned up since the packet went out, to add to all those documents we already have.

This session was set up mainly to help me selfishly work on my thesis, but beyond that it fits in with the much larger interests of the Nuclear History Program. Besides myself and David Rosenberg of the Naval War College who will be taking part in the questions, Ernest May, once he shows up, will be taking part in the questioning as well. In the first session, as I indicated in the agenda, we're trying to cover the period from the Truman Administration -- primarily the last two years with the establishment of SHAPE , moving into the PCC and Lisbon force goals -- up to the first two years of the Eisenhower Administration, ending in the adoption of MC 48, and the implications that had for NATO planning and the role nuclear weapons had in that planning. I have a very particular interest in the US-British connection in all of this, and the degree to which the British are trying to direct NATO strategy and planning in certain directions that the US is not always confortable with. It always relates to the British thinking about the impact that nuclear weapons are having on the overall strategic situation and planning, and requirement for defending Europe.

What I would like to start with is a very specific question, and build up to larger issues. It seems to me that in the US-British atomic relationship you faced problems that later faced the Alliance -- in terms of trying to cooperate, in terms of atomic weapons, atomic weapons planning, command and control, decision-making -- which later had to be addressed by the Alliance. The three new people that are here all had some connection with either NATO, the US-British connection, or atomic weapons policy in the State Department. I would like to start first of all by looking at how the Truman Administration saw the problems of NATO defense, the diplomatic-economic constraints working against the military requirements, and the British role in all of this as they tried to press nuclear weapons as a possible solution to try and square these circles. The people that come to mind, first of all, are Mr. Arneson, who was very closely involved in advising Truman and then Dulles on atomic energy policy, atomic weapons policy, and had some connection and experience in the talks with the British in 1951-52 on this whole range of problems, dealing from cooperation on atomic energy programs, weapons programs, the stop line talks, and also in terms of when the US would go to war, what sort of consultation would be had between the US and British if they did go to war, and then later on Churchill's visit in January of 1952, where he received a briefing [on SAC's strategic plans]...

David Rosenberg: Let them start up, and then you can bring it up.

R. Gordon Arneson: Well let's go back to some of the basics of our relations with the British. We were partners during the war. We gave them the right to veto our use of the weapons if they chose. That turned out to be no problem, because the British were as anxious as we to beat the be-Jesus out of the Japanese. In fact they gave their consent two weeks before the first test at Alamogordo, and a month before Nagasaki and Hiroshima. But at the end of the war things were in considerable chaos. The commission was trying to get organized to take over from the Manhattan District; they had endless security problems they had to deal with before they could do any work; they discovered we had no weapons at all; our relations just sort of drifted for a while. It got to the point where we needed more ore than we were getting out of the Congo -- it had been split 50-50, and the British had no need for anything like that, because there had been stockpiling in the British isles. So we got this Modus Vivendi through where not only did we get all the ore in the Congo for the next two years, but the right to draw down stocks from Britain. We also abrogated the Quebec Agreement, which had given the British the right of veto. That's the way it stood until 1950, as far as the use policy and their having a word in it.

In 1950, I think it was the first of December, Truman stuck his foot in his mouth, and said, "Oh my, we're going to use any weapons we want in Korea", and a newsman said, does that include atomic weapons? He [Truman] said, that includes all weapons, and besides, the decision of what is to be used will be determined by the commander in the field. The commander in the field happened to be MacArthur, and that gave Atlee conniption fits, because he thought maybe Truman couldn't handle the general, and he was probably right, for a while. So Atlee came over, and Truman didn't particularly want to see him as a matter of fact. He had other things to do. But they spent six days in a conference discussing all aspects of the Korean situation. The atom business came at the very end. They talked about whether to recognize China or not, what was the Soviet role in all this. And on the sixth day (it sounds like Genesis doesn't it), Truman and Atlee met privately -- Phil Jessup took notes for us, I don't know who took notes for the British -- and in that meeting Truman said, you know Clem, we're such good friends, and we have been all these years, and we'll continue that friendship. Of course I'll consult with you should I decide it's necessary to use atomic weapons. Atlee, who has been called a sheep in sheep's clothing, was actually a very bright guy and he was a good lawyer -- he would have liked to have this in writing. But Truman, being the frontiersman, I guess, said oh no, a handshake is as good as anything in writing -- it won't be any better if we put it down. And that was the end of the meeting. Phil Jessup made notes in one copy, which was sent to the State Department.

But when Acheson and I showed up for the meeting the next day, we were greeted at the door by Bob Lovett, who was acting Secretary of Defense. He said, Dean, the President's given away the store. We're in deep trouble, you've got to get us out of it. So Acheson went to the President, and got him to get a recess, and the President went to his private office. Acheson was trailing behind and motioned to Lovett and me to join him. Now the comedy of this is that Averill Harriman happened to be sitting right next to us, as did John Snyder, the Secretary of the Treasury, and they invited themselves. So the four of us went in. Contrary to Acheson's report, contrary to biographical data on Sir Oliver Franks, Sir Oliver Franks was not in that meeting, and neither was Atlee. How Acheson got it all screwed up, I do not know. Anyway, there was seven of us, and Acheson was telling the President he should know better. After all he was the first man to insist he was the only one who could make that decision, and here he had given it away. Acheson was berating the President, reminding him what he already believed, and told him that some 24 Republican congressman on the Hill, Senators, had come out against any commitment whatsoever. And while Acheson impressed on the President that he was in real hot water, Lovett motioned to me to write some words that would go into the final communique, and I did that. And then there was Lovett's turn, and he talked about the Quebec agreement and how he didn't have a [copy-?] and so on. John Snyder was way over in the far end of the room, and you got the impression he had come into the wrong church, in the wrong pew. He didn't contribute anything to this. I remember Harriman, particularly, because I made my two sentences, and I was kneeling (not Sir Oliver Frank), and I showed him the draft. He said let's make that "any change" to "a change" in the situation, which was a diplomatic nicety. Anyway, I did it, and it was passed on to Lovett, and Acheson and the President, and that was the end of it.

Or so we thought. We learned later the British were using the notes their man had taken of the Truman-Atlee meeting as being definitive, until Martin from the embassy came to me a couple days later, and said, now which is it? What the President said or what the communication said? I said, well there is a certain elemental logic to this: what is last is final. And we don't care what your notes say. But they continue to hold that that is what happened. I had been one of the people who wanted greater cooperation with the British, against all kinds of opposition from France and the AEC. But this episode reminded me that Britain had been know in the past as "perfidious Albion".

Wampler: There is a follow-up to that, which is mentioned in one of the documents (I think it's document number 2), which is a meeting of you and Mr. Martin of the British embassy...

Arneson: Yes, I have it here.

Wampler:...where they talk about the stopline talks, which by my understanding are the talks which later culminated in the agreement that came out in January 1952, which was sort of an elaboration upon this consultation upon the use of bases in the UK. Within weeks of Atlee's visit to see Truman in December of 1950, you have Bevin calling in to the US ambassador saying, look, Attlee doesn't want to wake up some morning and get a phone calling saying, "Oh, by the way, our bombers are taking off. Do you mind?" So Attlee and Bevin get on the telegraph to Acheson and to Truman saying we have to iron this out in more detail. There's sort of a kabuki dance going on throughout most of 1951, where the British are trying to tie the US down on when will you go to war, when will you use the bomb, what will be a situation that will cause you to use the bomb, and will you consult with us? And the JCS is saying, we don't want to do this. We'll talk to you about situations which may lead to war, but we won't talk to you about situations where we'll use the bomb.

Arneson: Well I think you have to distinguish between using the bomb, period, and using British bases with the bomb. I know of no one in the Administration -- maybe [Bob Bowie] can contradict me on this one -- I know of no one from Acheson to Lovett to Bradlee and the JCS, who ever maintained we could use their bases without their consent. Now if the Soviet Union should launch a massive attack on Western Europe, I think the British would probably be the first ones to ask us to use their bases. But we had no right. We had no right to use the Canadian bases. Where we stand on Greece and Turkey and a few other places I don't know, but in those two instances we had no automatic right to use those bases.

Wampler: Do you feel the principles and approach that are laid down in these talks with the British carry over when these same problems arise in NATO? You've got the problem of consultation over use of the bomb in war, and more specifically the use of the British bases. Later, as NATO planning becomes more and more premised on the use of atomic weapons, there was this whole problem of getting permission from the various members of the Alliance where you might want to base atomic weapons. There seems like there is a continuation of policy from the Truman Administration through to the Eisen- hower Administration that creates a real tension between the demands of the Alliance and the demands of the military situation, and also US law and NSC 30.

Arneson: And I think there is another terrible dilemma here. If the attack is serious enough then everybody is all for you; but if you have an opinion that is not the same as the others, then you're in real trouble. The other difficulty I think, and I'm sure many of you know this better than I, is that today and for some time, it's very doubtful that the President would have a chance to decide. There are so many weapons around the world, and you've got military commanders that have access to them. I think there are instructions that tell them that if necessary they can let go of them by themselves.

Wampler: That is one of the tensions that develops during this period -- the pre-delegation of authority because of the demands of the quick-paced attack and response.

Arneson: As someone said, suppose the President was sailing around in his special plane, and the warrant officer and the football were there, and the warrant officer has a fatal heart attack and dies on the spot. How do you get to the football? He's the only guy that's got the key. The President isn't going to have much to say about it one way or another.

Rosenberg: I can't go into details, but it's not that bad. I know people who have carried it, and I know the situation on the NEACP [National Emergency Airborne Command Post] and the [?] can make that decision. It's not that bad anymore, they've changed it.

Arneson: I'm glad to hear that. I'm sure the President is too.

Rosenberg: Or let's put it this way: there are the options of what happens when he gets woken up in the middle of the night, and then there are the options of what happens after when you've actually been fighting a war for a while. They tend to be different situations, different timing, so on and so forth. From what I know of at least one American president, he's just focussed on the what happens when you wake me up and I've got ten minutes to make a decision, more than worrying about the longer term things that are possible.

One of the things we don't have in here, and maybe you can shed some light on this as to whether or not it was generated by the problems of the US-British relationship or whether there were actually some larger issues, is that there were a number of drafts of a paper that was put together that finally culminated I think in this paper on agreed concepts relating to the use of nuclear weapons in 1952. It discussed the circumstances under which the United States would use nuclear weapons. We didn't put it in here, and I regret we didn't think to do this -- it's not even in the Foreign Relations volume because they were just drafts -- but do you recall a couple of papers that were put out over a space of about a year? There was one paper in 1951 and another in 1952, that was completed in the fall of 1952, that discussed under what circumstances the President of the United States would use nuclear weapons. It was coordinated with the State Department. There were copies in the Truman Library, but there is no information about what the circumstances were about why that was written.

Arneson: I don't believe I know about that. That would have gone to the Policy Planning Staff.

Wampler: There were some things in the FRUS volume by Carlton Savage about why and when you would go to war.

Arneson: Yes, [that would be] Policy Planning Staff.

Edwin Martin: I don't recall anything like that either.

Rosenberg: This was left in the White House. It doesn't relate to the Savage study or even the war objectives study, but it's been always tantalizing me. It looks like the kind of thing someone wrote up and handed to Truman, and [he may have] said, thanks a lot, this is useful in one sense, for things for me to think about, but I'm making the decision, and that is where it lay.

Arneson: Where did the drafts originate?

Rosenberg: There's no marking on it. That's what makes it interesting.

Arneson: Was George Elsey still in the White House in those days?

Rosenberg: He was in the mutual security job by then.

Arneson: I see.

Rosenberg: It could have been Jimmy Lay, but there's no sign it was that either.

Arneson: Well I'd think he'd be a very likely candidate.

Wampler: The British interests in this overlap into the NATO aspect, the global strategy paper, which in turn overlaps with the Lisbon force goals and how are you going to defend NATO. Can you afford to defend NATO with what SAC says you need and the TCC says you should be able to raise? Mr. Martin, you get called into this, because I believe you told me you were back-stopping in the State Department on the Three Wise Men for a period, weren't you?

Martin: Not only that, Harriman was our representative, Link Gordon was his deputy, and I was the State Department member of the Harriman team. I went over with him on his first trip to Paris. I have no recollection of the nuclear question coming up in relation to the Three Wise Men exercise. I think Gordon may remember more than I do, he was full time there, I was the State Department back-stopper assigned there to help. I have no recollection of the nuclear question.

Wampler: There's an ambiguity [here, because] some of the documents, primarily the British stuff you see, says the question arose, what impact will SAC's operations have upon these? It's such an early formulation of the question that there's no answer that can be given. But still the work has been going on within SHAPE over bringing atomic weapons into this. What I'm wondering -- and perhaps Mr. MacArthur you know about this -- is to what degree did the force requirements that Eisenhower produced to go into the TCC in any way take nuclear weapons or SAC into account?

Douglas MacArthur: I don't recall. The situation at SHAPE when we set it up in January or February was that the conventional forces were totally inadequate, and that the reliance had to be on the nuclear deterrent. One of the reasons we were so anxious to move on the German problem was that it was quite clear that without a German contribution to NATO conventional forces, the absolute minimum and irreducible force goals could not be met for political and economic reasons. We didn't have authority at that early stage when we set up SHAPE first at that hotel on the Champs d'Elysses and then on [?], but basically it was there, and our Allies understood that conventional forces were inadequate. They were not in an economic position or an economic-political position, because of the political implications of the economics of increasing Air Force contributions. Although they wouldn't say it, they were dependent on the nuclear deterrent to prevent anything from happening. But I do not recall the specific question that you addressed to me.

Wampler: There seems to be an overall stress within the Truman Administration on the conventional build-up, and an opposition to what they start calling the "Slessor Thesis" -- named after Jack Slesser -- that you are moving towards a period where the thermonuclear weapons the US is developing and the atomic weapons that are being developed will create a situation wherein you will not have to use the large forces of the Lisbon force goals. That all happened within months after the Lisbon meeting. It's rather amazing to me the very sudden drop off you get after February 1952. You have this big celebration in Lisbon, the high water mark, and within months people are saying this just can't be done. The British are coming forth with atomic weapons as the answer, and the US is fighting that. I'm interested in the calculus of the Truman Administration in looking at this. What is the problem, what are the resources to solve that problem, and what is the solution? You [Mr. Martin] were very closely involved, and maybe you could give an answer to that, and tell us the work you were doing. You went on with the Annual Review team.

Martin: Yes, I was actually with the US annual reviews for three years, from the start. First under Phil Draper, who thought he ought to set it up first, and then we suggested we wanted a channel of appeal. He would come in after a dinner party in a black tie. We had evening meetings the first couple times because there was so much to be done. He would sit in the third row behind me to see if he could be of any help. This was Draper, a workaholic of the first order. But I don't recall the annual review getting into this question at all.

There was one issue -- one of the few things I still remember rather vividly from that period -- of an argument over whether or not, if the Soviets attacked and we defeated the attack counter-balancing their ground strength with our nuclear strength, tactical nuclear weapons, could we achieve a Soviet surrender without their using first strike strategic nuclear weapons? I remember about that time sitting in an airplane on a fairly short trip with Henry Kissinger, who was then at Harvard, and he was arguing that that could be done. I was arguing that absolutely never will the Soviets give up and quit, and allow us to make claims on East Berlin, et cetera, without using the other measures. He subsequently changed his views, but there was considerable argument at that time, in which he was a participant, on this question.

Arneson: What date was this?

Martin: I can't be sure. It was early 1950's, but I can't get more precise than that.

Rosenberg: That was the approach that was being taken in the Vista Report, in the draft that was put together by Oppenheimer and Zacharias and so forth, that later got killed by Norstad saying I don't have those weapons now. That was January, 1952?

Wampler: That draft was in December of 1951.

Martin: It was in that period.

Wampler: Some of this is overhung by the sense that Marc Trachtenberg has talked about: that the Truman Administration and also later the Eisenhower Administration, seeing nuclear weapons as a wasting asset, [believed] that what you have to do is build-up while this asset is still giving you some benefits, looking ahead to a time when you'll have nuclear plenty or parity, when it won't be so effective in deterring the Soviets, and you're going to have deter on other levels.

Martin: I don't recall anything like that...

Robert Bowie: But there was an overtone of that in NSC 68.

Wampler: Mr. Arneson, do you have any recollections of Acheson's gut sense about atomic weapons and the role they are playing in US policy and strategy? The reason I ask is that there is a record of a conversation he had in the fall of 1952 with Lester Pearson, where he is just tearing into the British approach saying that this makes no sense strategically. He talks about Buck Rodgers gadgets that they are working on and tactical weapons that are far in the future, but to his mind there is no way you can put all your eggs in the nuclear basket. You have to develop some sort of conventional weapons to supplement the nuclear deterrent, and it plays into a lot the doubts about how effective SAC is going to be, and when will it be effective. This is also tied into trying to give the Alliance some sense of security that it [a Soviet attack] can be held at least long enough for SAC to be effective. I am wondering what you remember about Acheson's attitudes on these issues.

Arneson: Well I think you've stated it very well.

Rosenberg: What did you say?!

Wampler: Are the tapes going?!

Arneson: On the other hand, his position on the thermonuclear development was pretty gung-ho, I must say. In the department at the time there were four of us who were really involved in that -- the Secretary, Paul Nitze, the legal advisor who happened to have been the general consul at the AEC, and myself. As I look back on it, we were in complete agreement. Nobody had to convince anybody. The only fellow who needed some convincing, only because he was a damn good lawyer, was Acheson. He talked to Lilienthal [AEC Chairman], who was opposed. He talked to Jim Conant, who was opposed. He talked to Oppenheimer who was opposed. And he said I still don't believe it, go ahead. He said to Oppenheimer, how do you persuade a paranoid adversary to disarm by example? Oppenheimer thought if we didn't do it the Russians would. It was sheer nonsense of course. So he was tough on that, but I agree with what you've already said.

Bowie: The first thing you're talking about is the hydrogen weapon?

Arneson: Yes.

Rosenberg: In 1949-1950, Truman's decision?

Arneson: Yes.

Wampler: Some of the issues I'm trying to get at here are brought up in two of the documents which, if you had a chance to look at them, relate to NSC 141, and Paul Nitze's little cautionary note that he sent to Acheson in the last days of the Administration, [in which he discusses] what this stress on atomic weapons is going to mean for the US as the Soviets build up their own nuclear capabilities, and the pernicious effects this could have upon the Alliance. It seems to me the Truman Administration was present at the creation of a lot of things Acheson never went into. It parallels with the work David has done. If you look at planning on the atomic level, setting a pattern the Eisenhower people followed through, issues arise under Truman that get carried through and get faced even more squarely because they become much more tangible under Eisenhower. It seems [these issues are] almost all there in embryo in the comments Nitze is making at the end of 1952 about the real problems this reliance upon atomic weapons is creating for the US and Alliance. His only answer is, we've got to try to build up other (i.e. conventional) forces, which Acheson has got to know at this point is a non-starter. So what do you do? I'm just wondering what you saw as the solution to this, as you were heading towards the transition? I want to get a baseline for comparing the Truman approach and the Eisenhower approach to these problems.

Rosenberg: Or let me put it in more historic terms: was Nitze the only one who was really worried about this to that degree?

Arneson: The trouble is, if we downsize the atomic thing, what assurance do we have that the Russians will? It takes two to tango.

Martin: All I can say, and I wasn't directly involved in much of the nuclear discussion, is that certainly the Annual Review process and the whole purpose of that was to build up the conventional forces. We were not only doing that through that procedure and our military assistance programs. We were attempting to build up a production capacity for military weapons in Europe, trying to get cooperation. There was an organization in London at one point just on this question (NATO was still in London). There was some further follow up in connection with the European group in Belgium.

But the obstacle we continued to face was that they didn't trust each other. What we were trying to do was to have materials for all the NATO forces in Europe built in one plant which would be the most cost efficient. The French said they would never agree to buy an Italian truck, because it would probably break down in the first three months. In other words they just didn't trust each others' capacity to produce the thins they needed. They also were reluctant to standardize across borders, worrying about part supplies and that sort of thing. So we made almost no progress. We did finally get some work on tanks in Germany, which helped a little bit, but it was an obstacle to the most cost efficient method. We tried our best to say we would use our money to buy their product, but they just never would trust each other and work together on it.

So that slowed up the build up of conventional forces. Hopefully they could hold long enough to allow the US to ship forces and equipment over in case of attack. But that was always a will it work or won't it question, and that's what led increasingly, I felt, in the mid-1950's, to the emphasis on the nuclear deterrent of tactical weapons. Then the question came, what kind of tactical weapons, and how do you locate tactical weapons?

One of the other things I remember clearly is the debate in the 1950's over whether to put them on barges in the French canal system, put them on railroad tracks and cars that would keep moving, or, looking to the future at that point, the possibility of submarines. At one ministerial meeting where we had a lot of military brass, General Le May tossed in in the mid-1950's his alternative, which was airplanes that could land on water -- that could just land any place and fly around, put the nuclear weapons on them. That didn't sail very far, but it had a certain logic about it. You can map out a canal and railroad system, but you can't map out where an airplane capable of landing on water will be.

Rosenberg: If the planning for that is 1955 or 1956, that could also be explained by Le May's real fear that the Navy was planning to build a jet-powered sea plane. He didn't want them coming into the nuclear bombing force.

Martin: Of course very quickly we agreed that submarines were the best answer.

Bowie: Coming back to your question you were raising, why did they go for the conventional arms before the Lisbon goals. I was not in Washington but I was in Germany in 1951, and my recollection is that the mentality or rationale was something like this: [you can] assume that the nuclear weapons would be used strategically, but people like Adenauer and others, and I'm sure the French, were concerned that that would have its effect only over a period of time. With the enormous postulated Soviet capabilities [it appeared] that these countries would be overrun, and then it would be a question of liberation. The last thing they wanted was liberation; they had such lively pictures of what World War I and World War II meant, and they were just determined that somehow that would not be subject to this again. I think they had not really got to the stage where parity was thought to keep the nuclear thing from having its effect. It was rather the interval between that having its effect on the Soviet capability to overrun Europe, that was the period I think they were particularly concerned. The reason for the Harriman group was to ask the question, what is the most we could possibly produce given the restraints that were obvious with respect to the economic and political situation? Again, I was only on the fringe, but my memory is that they really didn't consider it as a strategic question; it was assuming that yes, they are going to be using nuclear weapons, but we want some capability, as much as we can have on the conventional front. And then the question was, how much can we have? They really didn't get into the nuclear question as such. They sort of took it for granted, but they didn't ask the question how much it could accomplish; they were asking the question how much capability could we afford with respect to conventional [forces]. That's my picture of it.

Martin: I would agree.

MacArthur: I'd agree too, Bob.

Wampler: But that was geared against what you needed. That in a sense gave you the assessment of the risk you were taking by building up...

Bowie: Yes, but the trouble was the postulated Soviet capability of 175 divisions meant you needed everything you could possibly get.

MacArthur: And more.

Bowie: Yes, and more. So the question wasn't that kind of neat calculation; it was, how much can we possibly mobilize?

Martin: I'd like [to add] a slight modification to that. I think there was some feeling, and I remember hearing talks about this, that we might have an air capability to damage their supply lines. They had to provide support, from a supply standpoint, through Poland and East Germany. This was a long stretch, and we could quickly have in Europe an increased capability to bomb those supply lines. That was a chance to compensate, to some extent at least, for their material capacities.

Ernest May: With conventional or nuclear weapons?

Martin: Conventional bombing.

Wampler: You had a carry over from the planning that went on in 1948-51 -- emergency war planning for Europe -- which pretty much said about-face and head for the Pyrenees, and once you give the Soviets a nice long logistics tail, start bombing it. Eisenhower's talking about having strength on the flanks and then try to hold in the middle, and he has that talk he gives to Truman in early 1951 about his idea for a strategy for Europe. There's always built in this assumption that you can not draw a line. You have this political requirement for forward defense, and you have to pay lip service that we're not going to give up an inch of territory. But in realistic planning you have to assume you're going to give up some territory. But the Alliance puts some real limits on how honest you can be about that. Eisenhower says you're giving me these plans that call for a pull-back, and I can't put that in plans that I have to discuss with other Allied commanders.

Martin: Of course not.

Wampler: It's politically impossible, but the US is continuing to plan on the basis that you're going to have a strategic withdrawal. The question is, what's going to govern if the flag goes up? You get the sense it's going to be the US plans.

Bowie: I think this underscores the point I was trying to make, that it was politically unacceptable not to visualize that you were trying to keep Europe from being over run.

Martin: Yes, that's right.

MacArthur: That's right. And certainly both Eisenhower and General Gruenther understood that very very well. But you just couldn't talk to Allies and tell them that too bad, you guys will have to be occupied form a while. The whole thing would come apart at the seams. And then the effect would be one of neutralism; if we're going to be occupied, and you're going to abandon us, then what the hell are we in this thing for anyway? Politically and psychologically it just wasn't feasible to talk about it like that.

Wampler: Then the other side of that is that people start arguing that if the only way you can keep us from being occupied is to start bombing the hell out of Western Europe with tactical atomic weapons, well then that's sort of a Hobson's choice.

Bowie: No, no. In the first stage it wasn't seen that way. Tactical nuclear weapons were seen as if they were a compliment for or a reinforcement of the conventional force, it was part of the picture. It was not seen that this was a two way street -- really it wasn't. The result of the first exercise, when there were a few bombs used in Germany and it showed what it would do to Germany, that was a real eye-opener. It really created havoc in the sense of the way they had been thinking about it before. My recollection is, and you correct me if you think I'm wrong, is that certainly the political people thought that we'll add the tactical nuclear weapons, and that it was a compliment to the conventional to keep those guys at bay. It was not seen as a two way fight being over...

Martin: I remember hearing discussions about can we use tactical nuclear weapons against the Soviets if they are already in Germany. We got a lot of flame at that one.

Wampler: Well there was the question of whether the Soviets are going to be throwing them back at us. But I'm concerned about how much the political side knew about what the military side was thinking it would actually have to do, as opposed to what it was being forced politically to tell the Alliance it would try to do. You may have a debate over, well we can't say we're going to be using these weapons on targets within Western Europe, but militarily you almost have to plan for a contingency like that, which creates a real tension and ambiguity in declaratory and operational policy.

Martin: I think we kept very quiet about that.

Rosenberg: How much did you as State Department people know about the military planning? Both SAC planning for use of strategic weapons, as well as SACEUR planning for use of the nuclear weapons that were available to them, such as we put in in the planning notices to Eisenhower in this first [NHP document collection] volume. Did you know about those?

Martin: Only in general terms. At least I didn't know anything that specific.

MacArthur: That's right.

Wampler: Going back to where all this started, with the Annual Reviews and the problems of the Lisbon goals. It seems that you weren't aware of it but overhanging the first Annual Review, and it seemed to overhang all of them throughout, was this whole question that maybe atomic weapons will allow us to scale back the force requirements. Let's not sign on ahead of time to real high levels. And also, on the US side, after Lisbon they totalled up what this was going to cost in terms of material, and they came up with a figure. Then they totalled up what the Europeans could kick in, based on ECA figures, and you get this very large gap. Then they said, who's going to meet this gap? They're going to come to us, the JCS argued. The budget people said, we can't do this in terms of aid. Then you get a bootstrapping in Europe to ratchet up requirements as high as possible in order to ratchet up the aid requirements. The US is trying to say, we need conventional forces, but we can't be pulled in to give a commitment ahead of time to meet this gap. It seems like you're walking a very fine line here between over-commitment of the US to meet the forces that are needed, and trying to dampen down hopes that atomic weapons can bring down the requirements. There are a lot of restraints in terms of what you can and can't do.

Martin: My impression is what we were doing in the Annual Review process was basically trying to identify what the countries, under as much pressure as we could put on them, were prepared to do, and to use what they could do. Such as, for example, providing people to allocate among countries. And between different types of weapons systems, what would make US aid the most we were able to get the Congress to agree to, and how that would best increase the force capability, without looking too hard at long-term projections of requirements. But from here to next year, what can we do best to meet those? And of course, one of the other aspects besides the Annual Review, which was fairly important to this and I think had a relation to the atomic question, was the NATO infrastructure program. That provided air bases communications systems and so forth that could be important elements in supporting the forces and all their needs.

Another thing I do remember fairly distinctly, and this goes I suppose further ahead than we are getting, is the decision by NATO in the fall of 1956 on a new infrastructure program. It was a very substantial increase, with every country making an appropriate contribution, at a time when the press was telling everybody that NATO has collapsed over the Suez crisis and Dulles' comments on it. We did that, and we also in that fall did adopt a procedure to authorize SHAPE to use nuclear weapons. One of the amusing things that happened (for part of that time the ambassador was away and I was sitting for the US on the NATO council meeting), was when the Portuguese ambassador, who was a retired foreign minister and who was rather well along in age, said, for God's sake, SHAPE, do what you want to do, don't bother to ask us for permission! It took a month for his foreign office to read his cables and give him instructions on any issue, let alone this one.

Wampler: In a sense that seems to be an end point to something that started in the earlier period, and perhaps Mr. MacArthur knows something about it, and hopefully Mr. Arneson, because it ties in with the whole decision between the US and the British on consultation -- that is, how are you going to develop a NATO alert program? There was something called Operation Mothball. Does that ring any bells? It was the name given to the effort to develop an alert program over who could do what, what kind of authority SACEUR would have to act, and whether and what kind of warbook NATO would have if war broke out. It was a contentious problem all throughout the 1950's. You keep getting references that well, we're trying to get people to sign off on this, and there's a real big tension between the military people saying we have to have authority in advance to do this, this and this, and the political people saying no, we can't let you do that. We have to retain the authority to decide upon this. Since this is such a hazy issue, I'm hoping you might have some recollections.

Martin: I must say it does remind me of the final remark that the Portuguese ambassador said when he said, just go ahead and don't bother us. We may hang you afterwards, but don't worry about that!

MacArthur: In general terms, I don't think any of us at SHAPE in the early 1950's thought that it was conceivable that governments would say we delegate to the military the use of nuclear weapons. It wasn't in the cards. We were not that far down the trail. When I was there General Ridgway's report, which was in 1953 I think (I left in 1952), hadn't come out. Politically speaking, even if a government or an individual or Prime Minister might agree, they certainly would not want this point ever to be raised publicly. They would be obliged to disagree, because of the pressure of public opinion, that they were delegating the incineration of their country, perhaps, to their military. So at least in the early 1950's, insofar as SHAPE was concerned, we saw no way that you could get, politically, an agreement that governments would sign off on, which would become public, that the military had that authority. That was one of the reasons, in addition to our desire to see the threads of Germany woven into a European fabric in such a tight manner for economic and industrial and other things. That way, even in some future time if you had a German government that was going back to the nationalistic side -- undependable -- as a practical matter, it would be very difficult for them to unravel the German threads from the fabric of a united Europe that was integrated economically and industrially. With that, also, was the full acceptance that we could never meet the NATO force goals without a German contribution. I remember when General Speidel asked to see General Eisenhower -- they asked through me, actually -- it was not to talk about a German contribution. This was in perhaps late 1950 or the beginning of 1951. It was basically to have some contact with General Eisenhower as SACEUR on the military side and to reassure. I did not participate in the meeting that was set up. General Eisenhower told me it was in the nature of an introductory meeting where no details were discussed, but General Speidel wanted to assure him that Germany was behind and depended on what he was doing and the NATO Alliance and so forth and so on, to see that Germany was not overrun again. And I repeat, there was no way that any of us believed that a government could commitment itself to delegating the authority for the use of nuclear weapons to any military.

Arneson: At this period of history, yes.

Bowie: Would you be able to elaborate at all on Eisenhower's thinking during the period of the development of the Lisbon goals, and the whole effort to build up the conventional? How did he see it, and how do you think it affected how he approached the problems of the reliance on nuclear weapons later when he was President?

MacArthur: My recollection is not too sharp on any specific, pertinent comment, other than when you looked at the Lisbon goals, they didn't seem to be realistically achievable in the future of the next several years certainly, for economic and political reasons. As I mentioned, Eisenhower was the first military person who really understood the problems of an Alliance. He had commanded alliance forces of war and peace, and he learned under the three most difficult and temperamental teachers that it's possible to have: Franklin Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt[?], and Charles de Gaulle. And he knew the ramifications of alliances, and how always there was someone in an alliance that would have some objection to some aspect of the thing, or wanted a greater voice, or was disappointed in what was happening. So he was quite realistic. He was the first president that we had from the days of the Founding Fathers virtually, that went into the White House with any real knowledge and understanding not just of military things, but international relationships and how they worked both among friends and allies, and with adversaries. So he was really unique in this thing. And I think he thought sometimes some of the military planning that was based on pure military information and assumptions that neglected to a considerable part the economic-political realties of the world in which we live were unrealistic. I remember sitting with the joint staff -- and Ed will remember this too --when on an US eyes only basis, the Pentagon and the joint staff started developing force goals for NATO back when Ed was head of URRA, and I was his deputy and on the NATO side. The first absolutely indispensable minimal force goals for NATO that this working group came up with (it never went upstairs because it was too vulnerable), was 159 divisions I think. It was quite unrealistic. It was scaled down, and it was made clear -- and Ed probably remembers -- that politically and economically there was no way this could possibly be quoted without really having an explosive effect on our European friends.

Arneson: One point you want to remember here is that until the 10th of September, 1952, the military did not have any custody of atomic weapons. The decision was made on that day by the special committee and was approved by the President, but up until then all this was hypothetical. There was no danger of dropping any bombs because they didn't have any. I think that had a very strong bearing on everything that followed.

Rosenberg: Well there is the transfer in April 1951 of 9 complete bombs to SAC out in the Pacific -- that's declassified now -- but that doesn't count in terms of the European theater.

Arneson: That's right. And of course non-nuclear components could be sent out too.

Rosenberg: Non-nuclear components went to England in the summer of 1950.

Arneson: And Goose Bay also, I was involved in that one. That was a big hassle. So I think we need to be aware what history is here, apart from what else happened.

Wampler: It seems like the whole tension is bound up in that document I mentioned earlier, NSC 30, which interestingly enough didn't get approved until you got rid of the British veto. You get rid of the British veto in January, and six months later you are able to at least work out NSC 30, which [states that] the President retains authority. The JCS can plan, but the final decision is left to the President. That is almost the approach that is taken later in MC 48; SACEUR can plan, but the political people will retain the authority. Given that tension over whether or not you will actually ever be given the authority to carry out your plans, given the way in which integrating nuclear weapons into your forces creates certain balances that makes it difficult to do things with and without those weapons, given the economic and political constraints on building up the conventional forces that SACEUR later says he is going to need with or without those weapons, are you getting any kind of strategy that is ever going to work in NATO?

Arneson: Well interesting enough I ran across a figure the other day, it's apparently unclassified, that as of 1956 Eisenhower called on the AEC to send one-third of our thermonuclear forces overseas, and one-half of our atomic weapons.

Rosenberg: Yes, that's the dispersal plan.

Arneson: You have that then. Good, the author isn't wrong.

Rosenberg: But I'm not sure the numbers are that high though. I think there's some misinterpretation...

Arneson: Yes, but it's still some big stuff.

Wampler: Mr. Arneson, I'm wondering if you could shed any light on how big of a jump it was between the Truman Administration and the Eisenhower Administration, in as much as you were in a position to advise Acheson and then Dulles on atomic energy matters. Do you think there is more continuity than a break here?

Arneson: Well I'm fairly sorry you asked the question, because I had very little to do with the new Administration. I met John Foster Dulles once, when Sir Anthony Eden showed up again wanting to deal with this whole question of consultation. It was amusing because I hadn't seen the Secretary, I hadn't had a chance to brief him, and I got a call at about 6:30 one evening -- my foot was out the door. [I was told to] come up to the Secretary's office right away. I had no idea what he wanted to know, but here was Sir Anthony. And Dulles said to me, Mr. Arneson, what is our position on granting any favors to the British? I didn't know what our position was; I knew what mine was. So I let go with both barrels, and he seemed highly satisfied. That was the only time I was involved with the new Secretary of State.

Wampler: There's one reference later, where you at least sent him a memorandum saying we have to do something about opening up cooperation, in December of 1953.

Arneson: Yes, that led to the amendment of 1954 of the Atomic Energy Act. That had two purposes: one was to open up power to private industry, they wanted to get in on it and hadn't done very well; and the other was to have greater flexibility in dealing with weapons effects and that sort of thing in NATO and with the British. That legislation did go through in 1954. It was the second amendment to the Atomic Energy Act. That had been gestating for some time. It wasn't new with the new administration.

Rosenberg: If you didn't see Dulles, what were you doing in effect as Special Assistant for Atomic Energy? Where were your papers going?

Arneson: I was seeing Bedell Smith. I remember that too. I went in to see him -- he had been head of CIA you know -- and he looked at me and said, Arneson, what the hell do you know about atomic energy that I don't know?

Bowie: That was Smith's way of making first contact with you. He called me down to talk about whether to join the SP. He was the fellow who asked me to come down, and I don't remember what he said, but the technique was precisely the same.

Arneson: Fortunately I had an answer. I said, well maybe you've missed this one, general. I understand we have nuclear fully armed [aircraft?] on board aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean. He said, Goddamn, I didn't know that!

Martin: I have another Bedell story, which got me to Paris. I was reporting to Bedell too, as coordinator of foreign assistance programs for the secretary. It was always to be the undersecretary, but when they put the initials down they decided they couldn't do that, because it was UCFA -- [pronounced] uhkfah. After the first man was replaced, they put SCFA, but still I reported to Bedell. I remember going to a meeting early in the game and we were talking about staffing for Dulles. Paul Nitze was there then as I think head of the Policy Planning Staff, and he made a suggestion. Bedell turned to him and said, Nitze, I know more about staffing in my little finger than you will ever learn! That day I went to Doc Mathews to see if I could go abroad. And I got the job as deputy chief of USRO, under a textile broker from New York as the ambassador and administrator to NATO. The only instruction from Dulles was to cut Draper's staff from 800 to 400 in six months. We made it.

Bowie: I just want to keep the historical record straight on Bedell. This was Bedell's way of testing you. If you just stood up to him -- not aggressively but just made him feel you weren't being cowed -- he immediately took you in. From then on he couldn't be more easy going and informal, in my opinion.

Martin: Really?

MacArthur: I agree with that completely. I had what the French call a frieze de bec(?) with him. I finally said, General Smith if you don't like what I'm doing, tell the President. I don't think we have any more to talk about. I got up and started to walk out, he was giving me hell about something, and I got half way across, and he said, Doug, Doug come back here for a minute. I sat down, and everything was fine and we cleared everything up. He liked to stick that shiv in the beginning, and make sure you knew he was a force and you were going to play ball. It was a technique.

Wampler: Well, you were briefing Bedell Smith, and he later on in the fall of 1953 became involved in trying to clarify a point in NSC 162, the first statement of the New Look, relating to the US commitment to use atomic weapons. There was a paragraph, 39-b, about are we committed to using these weapons in the event of war? There was a lot of ambiguity about that, and Bedell Smith had to try to issue a clarification to get Presidential approval. I'm wondering if you were pulled in in anyway as an advisor on atomic energy matters, into that whole debate on what these weapons were going to be used for?

Arneson: I think that would more likely be a Policy Planning Staff matter. I was not involved.

Bowie: That was all part of the horse trading and negotiations that went on in the production of NSC 162/2. The military were trying hard to get what they saw as a commitment to use, and Eisenhower was quite clear in his mind -- you have an authority to plan.

Rosenberg: I hate to say this, but this is from FRUS. It's a memorandum by undersecretary of State Smith to the President, and the footnote notes that it was "drafted by Bowie and Arneson." Take a look at this, it's on the bottom of the page.

Arneson: Mostly Bob Bowie, I'm sure!

Bowie: I'm not surprised. Because I was on the planning board, I was most surely called in by Dulles to say what can we do by this, or by Bedell. And I'm sure I wouldn't have done anything without checking with Arneson. I don't know who actually wrote the piece, but I am sure it was a joint view.

Arneson: I'm sure you wrote it Bob! I had really forget all about that.

Wampler: Mr. Arneson, you said you were more or less an advocate for increased cooperation with the British. Did you have any encounters when Eisenhower came in with Lewis Strauss? He seems to be sort of a bette noire for the British in this regard. The reason I ask is that I seem to remember a British document that indicated that you ran a foul of Strauss because he saw you as a devoted Anglophile.

Arneson: Well, as a matter of fact Strauss got me fired. Which is about as drastic as you can get. On this 1954 amendment, I was the chairman of a working group that was drawing up the recommendations, and all of us except the AEC representative wanted to keep the domestic power and the foreign aspects together, on the theory that if (inaudible)...a legislative strategy. The AEC held out, and said they wanted it to be kept separate. I said, well I'll redo this paper, and I'll simply note that the AEC disagrees, since we can't get them to agree. It went on to Bobby Cutler and the working group there, and I was quite astounded -- Bobby turned to the AEC fellow, I forget his name, and said you go back and you tell Admiral Strauss that we're going to keep these two together Goddamn it and he better get in line. I almost fainted. But Strauss was opposed to doing them together. He was against the foreign aspect, the greater exchange of information. That was mostly anti-British, actually. He tended to be rather negative about the British.

Wampler: We've sort of segued here into the Eisenhower Administration. My particular interest is how they begin to consider the problem of applying the New Look to NATO, and the political and Alliance constraints upon what is a doable strategy and policy, and the tensions that come out of nuclear weapons added on to tensions emerging from the problems of the annual review process. I'd like to get a baseline on how you felt Eisenhower, Dulles, Radford (if you had any contact with him) approached this problem of Alliance strategy when they came into office? What sort of educational process may have taken place? And to what degree you were either egged on or constrained by the British or other allies towards a certain direction in NATO that might not have been the one the Administration would have taken if it followed its own head?

Martin: I don't remember any particular problems with the British. In my experience, Dulles was much more unhappy with the French for vetoing the European Defense Force. I remember being brought back to help him write his speech for the ministerial meeting that just followed the French decision to withdraw. Since back in the 1940's he had been a European integration advocate, and he thought the Defense Force was an exceedingly important aspect of that. We spent a Saturday afternoon in his office and a Sunday morning in his home working on the speech. Each time he went to his shelf and pulled out a copy of The Federalist to get a quote, on the assumption that I thought was a little bit far fetched, that the colonies going together to form a new country would be a little like the European countries forming a new country. I can think of nothing more out of line. That seems to be the thing strongest in his mind. Part of this was a long-term feeling that getting them together in the community as well as the Defense Force would make it more efficient, and partly to bring Germany into the fold and give them assurances and participation in a European Defense Force. But I don't recall any other new initiatives or special activities.

Wampler: The British seemed to act as a catalyst in forcing the Eisenhower Administration to decide what our policy was going to be on NATO strategy in light of the New Look. They are pressing their own ideas and trying to change the strategy. That get's worked out in the fall of 1953, with the initiation of the New Approach studies. But also, the Eisenhower Administration comes in with carry over JCS who are committed to the force build-ups under Bradley that the Truman Administration signed on to. [There was] also the commitment to the economy, and retrenchment and reconfiguration of the US defense approach. All these are going into the pot of policy in the summer and the fall of 1953. There is also a sense that the Alliance -- at least you get from reading documents where Dulles is talking to you in August of 1953 -- is facing some sort of crisis in direction, in cohesion. The death of Stalin and the Soviet peace moves are removing the impetus that was found in 1951-52 to build up a strong defensive force. Where is the need any- more? The feeling that thermonuclear weapons are going to have a massive effect, and then the Soviet test of their device that summer has a strong impact on him; this feeling that there has got to be some sort of a change not only in military planning, but policy and the political approach to the Alliance, in order to keep it alive, or else you going to see it all fall apart. Do you recall any sense of that?

MacArthur: No, I'll go back to what Ed said. The Secretary and the President's concern about the European Defense Community and bringing Germany in was really very, very much in the forefront of their minds. I was sitting having lunch in the little executive dining room on the seventh floor, and I got word that the President wanted to see me at lunch, and I'd meet Secretary Dulles in the President's office. I went over -- I didn't have a clue what it was about -- and he said, we want you to go over and see your friend Chaban-Delmas and explain to him the gravity with which we view French obstructionism. (I had known Chaban-Delmas, who was at that time President of the Assemble Nationale and later Prime Minister and one of de Gaulle's principal people.) He said, I called your wife, she'll meet you at the airport in a half hour with clothes, and your booked on this thing and you are to go over and see Chaban-Delmas. She accidentally packed one jacket and an odd pair of pants, so I didn't have any fall back diplomatic attire to wear. But I got to Paris, and got wind that Chaban would see me at a little [?] he had on the [?] in the evening. He was presiding over the Assemble. I spent about three hours with him, and he was absolutely adamant that there was no way it would be possible to change the French position on this.

I mention this only to reinforce what Ed said about this being a very important element that preoccupied both the Secretary and the President. Without bringing Germany into the fold, the whole [?] of a meaningful military position in Western Europe came into doubt. I think this was among the things that concerned the President and the Secretary very, very much indeed. The whole idea of a European Defense Community had been initiated by a French suggestion, which the French told me later was so outrageous that they were sure nobody would accept it. When it was accepted, then they weren't going to have any part of it, at that particular time.

Martin: May I just mention one other thing on this, about Eisenhower? Five years ago I had the occasion to have an informal chit-chat with Milton Eisenhower when he was President of Hopkins, on the way to a luncheon. I asked him why his brother decided to run for the presidency and give up what he thought was an interesting job at Columbia. And he said only one reason: Taft was against NATO.

Rosenberg: Let me ask you this, since you were over at SHAPE when the EDC was begun in the Truman Administration, and then you were back at State: how would you characterize the support from the State Department for the EDC between the Truman Administration and the Eisenhower Administration? Is it consistent? Is it rising in fact under Eisenhower and Dulles, or is it declining? Just some general sense...

MacArthur: Bob and Ed are probably better equipped to speak to that than I am, but my own feeling is -- and perhaps its subjective -- the support of Eisenhower and Dulles for European integration and the weaving, as I said, of the threads Germany into a European fabric where you couldn't just unravel and pull them out very easily without creating a problem, was very strong. We didn't think the EDC was the ideal solution, but it was the only solution that had surfaced, and at least it did achieve the objective of bringing Germany in, so we embraced it. I don't think, as I recall, that it was embraced with great enthusiasm. And certainly it wasn't a situation that our military thought was the ideal situation. But it was a solution that would be the start of bringing Germany in, and once you got that started, that process could become irreversible. So it was what the French say faut de mieux, and we went down that line for the EDC. When the French made quite clear -- as Chaban-Delmas did to me and they did to Doug Dillon who was our ambassador then -- [there was] no way and so on, other elements entered the picture, and the thing moved forward.

Martin: On the previous Administration, there was a man named Dick Bissell, who was deputy to Paul Hoffman of the Marshall Plan operation, and he was 150% for European economic integration. I had arguments with him when he wanted to withhold any Marshall Plan aid to any country that didn't support this concept. Linc Gordon and I -- he was also with Harriman on the Marshall Plan in Paris and then back here -- had considerable reservations on the grounds that you can not have an effective economic integration without a political integration. In other words, the decisions that have to be made on the use of resources, about policy on borrowing, and trade policy and so forth, are political decisions, not just economic ones. To threaten the Marshall Plan's success by asking these European countries -- of which at least five were having very difficult political systems in their own territory -- with very different cultural back grounds to go together, and be able to make a political decision -- they haven't done so yet. They now may do it by 1992, but this was quite a few years ago that we were insisting on it. I think the State Department tended to put a few brakes on Bissell. He never did get to withhold aid from anybody because of a failure to support it. Now at that time the question of integrating Germany was a more minor issue than was the issue of the economic benefits of working together at a time when the economic crisis in Europe was the number one problem. We were not facing the military to the same degree at all until the NATO thing came along.

Bowie: I can shed a little light on this EDC issue, because I saw it from two perspectives. I was deployed in Germany at the time it was launched and in the first year of negotiation, and then I was in the Department during the period Doug was talking about. In the beginning, the question of bringing Germany into the defense of Europe arose explicitly in 1950 in the September meeting of NATO in New York. Prior to that, the issue of some participation of Germany had been raised partly by American talk, discussion, and also by Adenauer himself. And in the summer, I think it was Churchill who made the speech about the possibility of a European defense -- he didn't call it a "community" -- but defense commonality or something. And McCloy,trying to respond to the pressures (particularly from Adenauer), sent a cable urging that consideration be given to making something like an EDC as the solution to bringing the Germans in without answering the questions that were on everybody's mind (except the Pentagon) of the political consequences of having a separate Germany army. In the lead up to the September meeting, McCloy sent back me and Gerhardt. He was a Colonel who had much more the military view. The military view, the Pentagon view was that if you told the Germans they could have a national army, within six months they would rise up like dragons teeth and you would have it in being. They didn't understand the politics of it at all. Nevertheless, at the September meeting they pretty much prevailed over the objections of the Department. The Department wanted to at least consider the possibility of an integrated solution. The Pentagon said no, they would only agree to name the commander and send the additional forces if the Germans were to be asked to form an army.

So the first US backing was for this, but because of the French objection it had to be postponed until December. The Spofford Committee was created in order to work out some possible way of having a German contribution. They developed a plan for limited size of German forces, limited weapons and so on. While that was going on, Plevin launched the French proposal. That was in October. The French got a conference going, but no real support from the other NATO members. They all insisted on pursuing this other Spofford Plan. That was negotiated for six months at the Petersburg. I think it was General Hayes representing us. At the end of this period they worked out a deal where the Germans would have a limited size forces, limited weapons and so on. Adenauer's answer was, I'm not going to ask German troops to fight as second class soldiers, so that quashed that. The only thing left, then, was the possibility of the EDC. Eisenhower became interested at that, and really gave his full backing. (We talked about this last time I think.) Richardson was named as his designee to be the liaison. They did then work out a draft, with Ike's suggestions on the military side of it. I think he wasn't all together satisfied with it, but it was the best that could be done. From that point on, the EDC was the only vehicle. But I think in considering the way in which the subsequent endorsement, and the sticking with the EDC particularly by Dulles and Eisenhower, was partly because, as Doug says, they felt very strongly not merely that this was the best way to get the German contribution that was on the table, but also that it had the benefits of bringing Germany in and tying it in and all the political benefits. Also you must keep in the background that they had tried this route of having a separate German contribution and it had gone into the ground. And therefore, in a way, it seemed like it was the only horse that was in the race.

Finally, in considering whether or not the French were serious, McCloy did go down after the Bevin [Plevin?] Plan was put out from Germany to see whether or not they were serious. He came back convinced that they were. But politically in France, de Gaulle over time began to have more and more influence in the Assembly. They were not so much opposed to German rearming as was a large part of the Assembly, but they were opposed to giving up the French army. Therefore you had a coalition between those who were opposed to any rearming of Germany, and the Gaullists who were opposed to giving up the French army. Finally they got together and Mendes Roth actually killed it by maneuver.

Wampler: That whole episode was being driven by assessments and judgments being made not only about the need economically and politically to have Germany within the Alliance, but militarily. Why do you need German divisions? That is tied to the assessment of the threat, which is tied to an assessment of Soviet intentions, which is shifting. That might be the major difference between the Truman approach and the Eisenhower approach.

Now you have a debate that goes on between Bohlen and Nitze over, if the Soviets do not have a master "Mein Kampf" type of plan, why do we need conventional forces? Why do we need a strong force build up? This starts getting built in to the need to try to remove degrees of miscalculation or misassessment on the Soviet part. To be able to deal with accidents. It's almost as if your scenario moves from a World War II to a World War I type of concern, which seems to go through the 1950's. You've got to protect against not some pre-planned Soviet program coming up in 1954 or 1956-57 at which point they will attack, but you have to deal with a very dynamic, shifting strategic balance, where you have to try to remove any possibility the Soviets would ever see any advantage to doing anything or taking some action which could get out of hand and escalate. I wonder how within this larger overall shifting assessment of what the threat is, what Soviet intentions are, how Eisenhower saw the mission or the use of NATO? What purpose did NATO serve, and what purposes did NATO forces serve? In particular, why did you have MC 48?

Martin: A friend of mine who is a declassifier now, who has heard of the Nuclear History Program, talked to me yesterday about a telegram he had been involved in declassifying, signed by Dillon. It's May 1954, and it's on the consultations between the US, the British, the French and other interested governments on aspects of European security which were fully discussed by the four foreign ministers in Berlin, and to which the Soviet government again drew attention to, this note of March 31st. This is one in which in effect the Soviets proposed there be an organization within the UN framework, including the Soviets, which would move towards disarmment, particularly, all European countries. It's a rather interesting document. [Quoting from the telegram] "A collective security pact...it should be accompanied by an extension of the Atlantic Pact through the adherence of the Soviet Union to the North Atlantic Treaty..." Now that's something I never remembered! That's May 6, 1954, before the French pulled out.

Wampler: The Soviets made a proposal for a meeting in the summer, before the final vote to get together and discuss a European security pact.

Bowie: This was part of their maneuvering to try and head off the adoption of the pact. We always called this the application by the Soviets to join NATO, which indicates the degree to which we took it seriously.

Well, that's such a big question, Bob...

Martin: [The memo] ends up, "the US government agrees that there is urgent need to improve relations and mutual security, and...the best means would be if the Soviet government would give concrete evidence of its good intentions by joining with the governments of France, the United Kingdom and the United States in finding a speedy settlement of the Austrian question, which will restore Austria's full sovereignty and independence...seeking a lasting and acceptable solution to the German problem, agreement on general progressive balanced and supervised disarmament, including the prohibition of atomic and other weapons of mass destruction, working for solutions of the most pressing problems in the Far East at the Geneva Conference and adhering to the charter of the United Nations and their activities there..." I hadn't seen it in any of your documents, and I thought you might...

Rosenberg: We'd be delighted.

Martin: (Hands the document to DR) It's yours.

Wampler: Maybe I can whittle that question down to the last part: why did the US sign MC 48, and how did...

Bowie: I'd rather not try to deal with that particularly, because I don't remember dealing with MC 48. I can tell you a little bit about a more general answer to your question. I think you have to bear in mind that particularly Dulles and Eisenhower, as Doug said, were keenly conscious of the problem of keeping the Alliance cohesive, together. I think as far as they were concerned, every one of these military decisions or strategic decisions, were seen in particular in terms of its political effect on the cohesiveness of or the strength and unity of the Alliance. They both, I think, felt very strongly that what we were engaged in was a long term effort that was probably not going to end up being military at all, and that the likelihood of a major war was very, very tiny. I think Eisenhower in particular felt this -- that this was not the primary problem. The primary problem was to keep the West together, keep enough capability so that you'd have a deterrent so that you didn't have a war. That was very important. But nevertheless, the political side of the thing was central. The contribution of the military to that purpose was to keep the West Europeans reassured.

The reassurance of the West Europeans was at least as important as the deterrence of the Soviets. What you had to try and do was to try and keep an adequate deterrent which, I think Ike felt, wasn't a delicate balance of terror at all; it was a very kind of gross thing. As long as you kept the Soviets conscious that you were going to have a terrible clobbering on them, he thought that was going to keep the peace. But you had to do this in such a way that the Europeans, your allies, were comfortable enough and reassured enough that they were not fearful of what the Soviets might do, particularly with what were over-estimated capabilities on the conventional side -- but not merely that.

The decisions in NATO it seems to me were colored by two things: the military constantly were doing what they were charged to do; namely, try to figure out some practical, feasible way to use the weapons and the other capabilities that we had, to create something that could be thought of as at least some what of a viable strategy. And they kept wrestling with that. Obviously it was important politically that the other allies should feel that if this was going on it was probably viable or made sense or could work. But the other component was that it had be something that was not going to tear up the Alliance, not going to put strains on the Alliance, and was going to keep it together. It seems to me that the conventional capability -- which logically didn't have much role if you took the New Look theory utterly seriously, and didn't have much of a role in Europe -- was nevertheless important for the residual reasons that we mentioned. The Europeans had a historical picture, and were not comfortable if there was a lot of force [on the Soviet side] and not much [on the Western side]. So you had to have enough so that they felt comfortable, and you had to have agreement by them that was sufficient to keep the nuclear capability -- which was basically the strategic capability, I think as Ike saw it -- viable and a real threat to the Soviets if they did anything. I don't think there was that much change in the view of the Soviet threat. I think at the end of the decade there was beginning to be the feeling that we don't want a chink in our armor. We don't want a situation were they could do some small grab that would have politically profound effects on the assurance of the West [Europeans]. So then we must build up somewhat more of the conventional capabilities. That was certainly the thesis I put forward in that paper I wrote in 1960. I never knew how much Eisenhower bought it, but I think Dulles did before he died. He began to have something more like this worry about this aspect of things.

MacArthur: I agree completely with what Bob has said. I think there is another aspect that related but was apart. I remember when I used to brief General Eisenhower at SHAPE every morning, his concept of America's strategic security and defense, as he annunciated it to me on several occasions, was the tripod concept -- the tripod consisting of North America as Canada and the US, NATO Europe and Japan, because we are both an Atlantic and a Pacific power. For deterrence, if you cannot project your power beyond the American shores of the Atlantic and Pacific, you are left with one deterrent, and that's a strategic holocaust. When I was briefing him one morning on the Middle East, he said to me, Doug, when was the last time an American Secretary of State visited the Middle East to talk with the leadership there? I said General, no American Secretary of State has ever visited the Middle East. He said, my God! Two legs of the tripod, Western Europe and Japan, are heavily dependent, for their energy, their economy and their life, on the Middle East. The interesting thing was that when he was elected president, I was asked to visit him at the Hotel Commodore in New York to meet with him and Mr. Dulles, and he said to Mr. Dulles, the first trip I want you to make as Secretary of State -- and I want you to do it by the end of January after my inauguration on the 20th -- is a quick tour through the NATO countries. The second trip I want you to make is a trip to the Middle East. So when he was thinking about NATO and all the things Bob said, with which I agree completely, he was also thinking about the deterrent business. In those days the only way we could project were intercontinental ballistic missiles. We couldn't project air power, we couldn't project land power without bases on opposite sides of the Atlantic and Pacific. The overall deterrence which we could exercise, then, would be much, much less than if we had a physical presence from which our Air Force, our air power, our Navy could operate, our military forces through bases and the like.

Rosenberg: Ballistic missiles weren't in existence certainly in that period, and the only capability the US had to project power into Europe was in fact through medium bombers that were in bases around the Soviet periphery. That could have also been...

MacArthur: Yes. My time frame, when you reach the double forty's, sometimes it collapses...

Bowie: Amen!

Martin: If I could just say something on this Middle East question. The last memo I wrote before going to Paris in July of 1953, at the request of Doc Mathews, was on the idea of a Middle east repetition of NATO, which he did put through. I had about six points on why it was a silly idea. I don't say they were necessarily the reasons that made it not work, but some of them were.

Wampler: I'd like to just get sort of a base line before we break here. We're calling this first session off in 1954, and [with] the approval of MC 48, which is one of the watersheds in the development of NATO strategy. At the last session we went into a lot of detail on the military thinking behind that. What we'd like to try and get at now is to what degree Dulles and Eisenhower had time to be briefed on what this meant, and how they understood it. There are signs that Dulles at least was very concerned about the long-term implications of creating this reliance on nuclear weapons for the Alliance, and that you are sort of being pressed towards this rather than desiring it. I'm wondering how did you understand what this decision meant for the Alliance, and did you have any forecasts? I believe you, Mr. MacArthur, were briefing Dulles throughout 1953-54 over these emerging questions, so your're in between the lower, really detailed staff...

MacArthur: I was not as close to this as Bob and other people were. I had an overall brief as a coordinator of plans and policies for our meetings as counselor, with our meetings with the Russians and NATO meetings, but particularly bilaterals or trilaterals, big threes. But Bob could you speak to that first?

Bowie: I can't recall specifically the problem of adopting or not adopting MC 48. I can only remember a general trend of the way things were going. I think you have to keep two things in mind. I think Dulles had particular caution or prudence about him seeming to assert an independent judgement on military matters. I think he felt his great strength was political diplomacy and that sort of thing, and that Eisenhower knew so much more about military things than he would ever know that he did not want to get into the position in which he seemed to be advising Eisenhower on military mat- ters. I found that he was often reticent to do things. For instance, later on when we were trying to get him to push harder for some more conventional capability, Dulles was just not quite prepared to get out there because he might undermine his standing with Ike on the things he felt he was strong on if he seemed to be offering to much push on things where he felt Ike had the strength. I'm just trying to say that I think he made a point of understanding what the issues were, but he came at them very heavily from a political perspective of what the implications for this were for the Alliance, rather than having any particular view as to the [?] of the military, which was implicit. I think everybody looked back on the experience of the Lisbon goals and the inability to meet them, and they saw that as kind of a watershed in which it was clear that the Alliance was just not politically capable of doing more than a certain amount in the conventional field. That was coupled with the slowness of the rearming of Germany, which after all didn't start until 1955. By the time these decisions came up, there was no German contribution and it wasn't at all certain when there was going to be a German contribution. The image in the Pentagon that they were going to spring up like dragons, it had even come through to the Pentagon that it was nonsense. It was going to take a heck of a time to deal with the political problems, the organizational problems, and all the rest. And it was probably going to be five years after you started before you had any capability. That is a great big hole. There were going to be 12 divisions. All I'm saying is that everything was forcing people to say nothing really but nukes.

Rosenberg: I may be giving the answer when I give you the scope of this question. The impression I'm getting is that with the French voting down the EDC in the summer, the New Approach studies going on by a military group (providing what appears to be a reasonable answer to the problem), it is natural that you coalesce in the direction of the New Approach studies, and move in the direction of MC 48. Would it be correct, though, in saying that the reason why you end up getting MC 48 when you do is simply the fact that you have a NATO ministerial meeting coming up, and the timing is right? What I am essentially arguing here is that all that was left were nuclear weapons, to a great extent. There was a plausible military approach at work now, and as a result you move to adopt that because the meeting was coming up. And while no one was worried the Soviets were going to invade, it made sense to do it at that time. Does that strike you as being a reasonable...?

Bowie: Without claiming to remember all of this, yes. My answer is yes. That is my sense of what was going on. It was important in terms, again, of the politics of it, that the Alliance be seen as able to settle on something, to decide, to have a strategy so to speak. And that, as you say, there didn't seem to be anything else around.

Rosenberg: And the Europeans don't have any second thoughts about this?

Bowie: Well, I can't answer that. I can only say that your other instinct -- that namely the emergence or the coming up of a meeting was a powerful factor in forcing what were often considerable differences of emphasis between the Pentagon and the Department...

Martin: That's what meeting are for!

MacArthur: That's right.

Bowie: And over and over again, those would force some kind of either compromise or solution or decision certainly before bureaucratically whatever otherwise would have occurred. And probably before people wanted to do it.

MacArthur: Eisenhower's character...I remember at the very beginning, when I started working in 1953, and I was supposed to coordinate the first meeting that I coordinated at the consulate, he said, I don't want any of these bureaucratic papers that you and Defense and Treasury work out that are filled with these generalities that mean that each department will march in its own direction. I want none of that. I want differences sharpened, and if they can't reach agreement at the secretary level, at the top of the departments, I want them brought to me for a decision. So here again, he wanted the things sharpened, and I think this helped us, Bob, in reaching something.

Bowie: Yes.

MacArthur: I agree completely with what you said about the thrust of the whole thing.

May: I want to ask a general question. Something I never understood, completely anyway, is why given the perception that the Lisbon force goals were unattainable -- the early perception of that and probably the perception beforehand that this was out of sight -- I've never seen any evidence that there was any work, so to speak, on the demand side. That is, on the 175 divisions on the Soviet side -- the threat estimate. Was there? Were people rais- ing questions that the threat was being overestimated? And if not, why not?

Bowie: I can't answer, again, really from memory. But certainly my sense of it was that the 175 divisions was written in stone practi- cally in the Truman Administration. The actual amount of data, information, available to the Agency was pretty skimpy. I can still remember things like, when a particular weapon was seen in a May Day parade, the effort was [to determine] how much they would produce of that. There was almost an extrapolation of whatever they could produce, they would, and then what they could produce was based on an awful flimsy analysis. The Air Force was always insisting, for example, that they could produce far more bombers than they ever conceivably could. But nobody had much data. And the truth was that it was pretty skimpy, a lot of these estimates. So when it was asserted that they seemed to have so many forces around, people really didn't have any particular basis for the kind of more fine-grained analysis that later under-cut the numbers. Such information as they had, I think, did establish that they had 175 divisions. I think there probably were. But some of them were absolutely just paper divisions, some of them were just tiny manning, and others...and that part of the analysis, I don't know whether people didn't think to make it (I can't believe that's it), I think they really didn't have the basis, the means for doing it. I would guess that [?] was very primitive, and the ability to distinguish where you had cadre divisions and where you had real divisions probably didn't exist. In Germany and elsewhere they had real divisions, I'm sure, and so that's what people extrapolated from. And they could make a case that they had x number. The fact that this didn't really represent 175 ready divisions was probably just not able to be analyzed or combatted.

MacArthur: As a result of what happened in World War II with respect to the German armed forces, I don't think any of our military people wanted to be put in the position to have underestimated the nature of the threat, as the nature of the German military had been grossly underestimated before the outbreak of World War II. So I don't fault the people. I agree with Bob, I don't think the information was there. And certainly if it isn't there but you've got a certain amount, the one thing you do not want to do if you're in a position where you have to recommend what forces are adequate for the threat, is to underestimate it. That had led to a disaster only a few short years before.

Martin: On the other hand, I think that some of the people that were involved in this outside the military had a feeling that, sure, they have 175, but how many divisions will they be able to support on the firing line, in say West Germany?

Bowie: I think there is another factor here. Suppose you cut it in half. You're still faced with an absolutely staggering opponent. It probably didn't seem worth while tinkering with the number, getting down to 143 or 116 or something -- it was still so far beyond the what, 15 or so divisions we had then. The disparity was so great that I don't think the notion that you bring this threat down to something that was manageable was in any...

Martin: Are you talking about 15 NATO divisions?

Bowie: Yes, at most. There weren't that many, were there?

MacArthur: Active, yes.

Bowie: You didn't have the 12 German, and the others were just building up. You had these 6 Americans and a few others.

Rosenberg: This goes back to General Goodpaster's comments about having gone to the intelligence chief, and said, how dangerous is the threat in terms of a standing start war? And the intelligence chief essentially let Goodpaster go through the materials, as he noted last year, and what Goodpaster discovered was that the Soviets were not mobilized for an imminent attack, which gave NATO more time. The key point about this is you're not adopting MC 48 on the equivalent of an emergency basis. You are adopting it as part of a flow, but the timing doesn't relate to the enemy, or even an analysis of whether the Soviet threat has changed. It sounds like that just stands. The only thing you have is that you don't need to adopt it fast and then get everything into shape, because the Russians are not planning to attack.

Bowie: I don't have any memory of any sense of crisis, or anything like that. It was seen as part of a process of trying to get NATO's house in order.

Martin: Yes.

MacArthur: That's right.

(R. Bowie departs)

Wampler: On the intelligence side, it seems that NATO intelligence was pretty much a boiler plate for what the US and the British had decided. You don't seem to have many people with a standing over there, or an interest, in scaling those down. Especially the British Chiefs of Staff and the JCS, facing efforts to cut down their budgets anyway, are not going to turn around and say we're facing less of a threat than we thought we were. And on the other side, you start talking about the Lisbon force goals, and you find all of these figures thrown about which range 95 up to 102, and you have to work in the time phasing. What did he say he needed on D Day, or M Day, and that gets shifted around some too. And what you needed 30 days, 60 days and 90 days [into the war], and that effects how much you have to spend.

Martin: True.

Rosenberg: I think we'll agree that these are timeless questions. The issue of who buys what is exactly parallel.

Wampler: Eisenhower's first cut in 1951 was 16 divisions.

MacArthur: I don't remember.

Wampler: When he came back from his first tour, he told Truman, give me 16 divisions and I can hold.

May: That's right.

Wampler: Later on you get back to 30 in the central front, and a lot of the larger figures are for Turkey and Greece which are forces that are going to be used in Turkey and Greece. They are not going to be used on the central front.

MacArthur: The first 16 divisions that you mentioned, you can't hold the Alliance together by saying that, Jesus, this won't do anything, or the whole thing starts coming apart and unraveling at the seams. So you say yes, we can do this thing, under certain assumptions, and so forth.

Wampler: These things get inflated to a certain degree in that you have Denmark saying, we want forces to hold the Danish border. You have other people on the flank saying we want to hold our border, while Gruenther and Eisenhower and others are saying, we need the forces where we need them. So that inflates what each nation says it need to take care of its particular interests as opposed to what SACEUR says he needs to hold the theater. They fight throughout the 1950's this nationalistic inclination to say we need this for our own interest, as opposed to what NATO needs to carry out its idea of an integrated campaign in Europe.

MacArthur: They were under the heavy political pressures from their own people. Word gets out that its this and not that and, I mean, [people would complain] where the hell are you guys! You're agreeing to this which leaves us naked.

Martin: And even the US has Asia to consider, too.

Wampler: And that brings me to the thing that I'd like to start out with next time. MC 48 is sort of geared to an idea of deterrence through retaliation linked to deterrence through denial -- the root-and-branch approach to the Soviets. That starts getting undermined, and a lot of your papers deal with that between 1955-1957. I want to see how we get from there to MC 14/2, and how that addressed this whole problem of how denying an invasion doesn't protect the Europeans any more. They are still going to get devastated even if the Soviets don't go beyond the Rhine. That's where we will pick up after a break.

[BREAK]

Wampler: Where we pick up now -- and the ultimate goal is to go from 1955 through 1961, but I doubt we'll get there -- is the way MC 48 may have been a solution to certain problems, but created a number of others that had to be worked out in the course of the next few years. In this regard, a number of the supplemental documents I sent out, a number of which were written Mr. Martin, Mr. MacArthur -- sometimes from Martin to MacArthur and back and forth -- try to deal with the political aspects of the military problems facing the Alliance. It comes down in part to economics -- you just can't pay for what the military says they need -- but there are these larger issues: what does nuclear parity mean for NATO, NATO's mission and deterrence? And the sense that the mission of trying to deter and defend is becoming more problematical, and the effects that has on Alliance cohesion, the impetus towards neutralism, and things of that nature. Perhaps I should let Mr. Martin lead off. If you've had a chance to read through a number of memorandum there, you were very closely involved in certain of these issues as they emerged in 1955-56.

Martin: I didn't remember any of those memos. I have nothing to add.

Rosenberg: 1961 may come faster than we thought!

Martin: I have said practically everything that I was able to remember since I started thinking about it and reading the documents (I couldn't read all of them). I did read those memos, and they reminded me of nothing that isn't already in them, I'm sorry to say.

MacArthur: I'm in Ed's same position.

Wampler: It's curious to me in reading through the documents that these were very pressing issues. There was a good deal of concern with how these were going to work out, but in retrospect you get the sense that this wasn't such a terrible time.

Martin: I don't have a recollection that we saw it as a situation of real crisis in any way.

Wampler: Did you have any sense that the decisions you were making had these longer term implications of real problems for the Alliance? Historians look back and see something like MC 14/2, still shrouded in classification and a certain amount of mystery, as being a very important milestone in the Alliance. But you get the sense that its just another change, another document, another decision. What sort of time were you able to give to looking at these longer term issues? In the long memos that you wrote, Mr. Martin, you were at least giving a good deal of thought to it and were very concerned about it.

Martin: Yes, I see that. The only one I remember at this time was the question of additional members. I was on the whole opposed to the addition of Greece, Turkey and so forth, on the grounds that the difficulty of reaching decisions was squared with each additional member you take into the organization. I didn't think they offered enough advantages in location and military power to be worth the trouble it would cause. They had to be unanimous decisions -- you just can't make majority decisions on the things that NATO has to consider. But other than that, I'm on the blank on this one.

MacArthur: I'd just like to say one word about classification. One of our concerns in dealing with these kind of questions that are political, political-economic, is that if it gets out and is printed in the Washington Post (I guess it was the Star in those days), you immediately have a fire storm with your relationship with the country involved, and that's the last thing you wanted to do. Perhaps they were classified pretty high, but they were classified pretty high because we really didn't want all this stuff to get out when we were in the midst of a debate in our own house, to be aired and create the reactions that would inevitably occur in a friendly NATO allied country.

Martin: I assume you've gone into Linc Gordon's study on 1955, on whether NATO should consider global issues and not just US-European?

Wampler: No. I haven't seen it.

Martin: He was commissioned by NATO to make that study. He stayed with us for a couple of weeks in Paris while he was doing it. I think he concluded negatively, but he was commissioned to do a real study on that subject.

Wampler: I know he was doing work. He was in the British embassy at the time as an economic advisor, at least that's the document I have.

Martin: He was the economic minister on the Marshall Plan in the embassy in London. Then Wynton(?) Brown and then I had that job.

Wampler: There's a document that he wrote towards the end of 1956 where he took to task what he sees as sloppy rationales that are going on, where people are saying, well, the forces we need to deter the Soviets just luckily happen to equal the forces we are able to raise.

Martin: I think by then he was back at Harvard. He left the embassy in London in 1955. Brown succeeded him.

Wampler: There's one thing that you mentioned when we spoke earlier, and that was, when you went to the British embassy, you said you were involved in the negotiations on the IRBMs. Anything you can remember about that would be of great interest to us. I have questions, and I'm sure David has questions, about how those arrangements were worked out. It raised a host of questions with the British over command and control, paying for them, and things of that nature.

Rosenberg: Before we get into that, there's a question that I've got that is more a sense of feel than of substance. We have this collection of papers, particular your memos in the other volume on 1955-57. The question for historians, of course, is what good is this piece of paper? How important is it? Between MC 48 and MC 14/2, you can read over, in particular, some of the NATO military documents and get this sense of a military crisis in NATO -- the military crisis meaning that you can not in fact implement the strategic plans that you have come up with. You have to push forward to create what you get out of MC 14/2. For the non-military reader looking at this, you say, well given what you've accomplished in MC 48, and then what you're saying in MC 14/2 and in American plans, there really is not that much difference. So the question I have is, are we whipping ourselves into a tizzy over documents that there are a lot of, and they are declassified, but that once you get MC 48, the Alliance is set on a path and that MC 14/2, while an adjustment, is less significant than we are trying to make it?

Martin: I don't recall any major significance for it. I think things went relatively smoothly through that period, with problems, sure. This is probably totally irrelevant, but I asked Gruenther, who I knew very well (I was in his Sunday morning tennis group, among other connections), what transition guidance he had given to Norstad when he came in. He said, well I said under no circumstances can you use the tennis court to practice chip shots!

Rosenberg: I think that says a lot!

Martin: In other words, he didn't see any significant change. Now I think there were some significant changes in that Norstad was a much less cooperative person than Gruenther was. We overlapped for a year, we got along fine, and still have kept in touch in recent years. He was an extremely able and intelligent man, but was not a cooperative, working together sort of person. There have been a good number of complaints about that that I have heard of. Of course Gruenther had a very able (what was called) "Chicken Colonel" special assistant who was later a SHAPE commander too, who I think you've interviewed. So that was a very effective [?]. But I can't think of any real uproar of any kind that was developed during that period that was significant, in the whole NATO approach and strategy, in the military-NATO relationship.

Wampler: It seems to me there was a big uproar over what the British were doing. They are saying, OK, we've got thermonuclear weapons, we're moving towards a situation of mutual deterrence...

Martin: When you say "we", you mean they are going to have them?

Wampler: I mean the Soviets and NATO are going to have them, both sides.

Martin: O.K.

Wampler: The Soviets know what will happen if we start setting these things off. Therefore there is no chance they are going to go to war, and therefore we don't need much in the way of ground forces in Europe. All we need to [do is to] handle infiltrations, incursions, and to gauge the intent of any hostile moves. If it looks like there's going to be a major move, we set off the big guns. It's a plate glass window, a trip wire strategy, that the US is constantly fighting against because it feels you do need more forces than that for political and military reasons. Plus they have the feeling that if you go over to nuclear weapons as the main reliance, as Dulles tells Eisenhower, that leaves us holding the bag for European defense. They get a free ride, while we have to put in all the money and the delivery systems.

Martin: I just have no recollection of that to date. From these documents here I can add no more.

Rosenberg: You don't feel that perhaps, putting it another way, given your comments on Norstad, that you get Norstad pushing in a sense to create the equivalent of his own strategic concept that will relate to the sword and shield (particularly the emphasis on shield forces), that fits his own desires, but could be written off in effect to a commander that has his own command style, that wanted to have certain i's dotted and t's crossed, rather than any kind of problem in the Alliance?

Martin: I didn't see any problem in the Alliance arising out of his views. I don't remember it, I can say that. It was a long time ago.

Rosenberg: Since this is an international project, we've got some colleagues in Germany that have a number of questions. Let's try these out. The first one is to what extent was the Federal Government in Bonn, between 1953 and 1957, informed about US New Look policy and the nuclearization of Western defense strategy? Were there specific briefings given to the FRG?

MacArthur: Not that I'm aware of...

Martin: You should ask Bob Bowie about that. He would know if anybody would. Some of this nuclear stuff was not know at all levels, or channels shall we say.

Rosenberg: There were the SHAPE channels, and then of course the American military channels.

Martin: The American military channels in Germany were very important, top people.

May: What were the channels in the State Department where nuclear questions would be discussed? Can you remember that?

Martin: I don't know. I dealt with my successor for European regional affairs essentially. And Lane Timmons was there.

May: Earlier, a very small number of people.

Arneson: I would imagine the Policy Planning Staff

Martin: Yes.

Arneson: I think that's the answer.

Rosenberg: This gets back to some of your memos. You were providing a conduit of information back to Washington that could be seen as material for possibly working a change in policy, but you weren't necessarily advocating the need for that change.

Martin: That's correct. I was reporting. May I say, for the record, we had a quite different ambassador the second two years than the first two. The first two was a textile broker from New York, who was a very fine guy and who used the staff well to do what he had to do. He had spent a month in Paris every year since 1922. He had been in charge of social affairs on Pershing's staff in World War I. But he was succeeded by George Perkins, who was also a non-career person, but had been Assistant Secretary of State for Europe. A very able person. I had worked for him in that capacity, too. But when the Republicans came in he was required to resign, even though his first job out of college had been on the staff of the Republican Postmaster General. And he's a Morgan-family Perkins, and so forth. Anyway, they let him back in in 1955, and he was very able, and played an important role in the substantive matters, as you can see from the documents.

Rosenberg: Let me run down the rest of these questions, and see if there is anything here. They are very detailed and you are probably right, they probably should go to Bob Bowie instead. But let me just run through them. Did the Federal Government actively approach American officials (in the White House, State Department, Pentagon, or American embassies in Bonn or Paris, or even SACEUR), to get nuclear information? Do you recall any German government efforts?

Martin: Not that I'm aware of. This doesn't really tell you much.

MacArthur: In the years that I was there, 1951-52, there was an approach. Bonn didn't have embassy there, but they had what was called a mission -- two people. One was Franz Kraft [?], who was later ambassador here some years later. He approached me about meeting General Eisenhower, and about General Spiedel meeting with him. But these were, as I say, not substantive meetings in the first instance. It was to have a contact and a relationship, and to be known and recognized. As far as I know, and I was present when Franz Kraft met with Eisenhower, there were agreeable noises and so forth, but no real substance, certainly nothing on the nuclear issue.

Rosenberg: The third question is, did the American government approach the Federal German government concerning the nuclear issue, with respect to the problems of the nuclearization of Western defense strategy in Germany? And also, the special security dilemma of the Federal Republic as a potential nuclear battlefield?

Martin: Yes, that did come up frequently.

Rosenberg: Was it a case of the Americans doing anything special in terms of talking to the Germans?

Martin: I don't know about the Americans doing anything special, but I do know the Germans were concerned about that, naturally.

MacArthur: That was a bit later.

Martin: Yes, I would say in the 1960's, after they were in NATO.

May: If I could pick up on that question of the overtures and so on. It goes back to the question I was asking earlier about looking at Soviet forces. One of the sources we had on the 175 divisions are the files of John Gehlen, the photographic files and so on. What was the liaison on that?

MacArthur: I just don't know. I was not present. Actually not only Spiedel, but General Heusinger came out to SHAPE too. Spiedel was the first one, and then he came out. But I was not a party to those meetings, so I really can't comment. I'm sure Al Gruenther probably mentioned something to me, but I just don't recall anything.

Wampler: The IRBM issue is tied in to the entire atomic stockpile issue. I'm wondering if you recall the genesis of that, the different motivations and rationales for it. And especially from your view point, was it a political solution to certain problems that had arised, as opposed to being a military requirement of SACEUR?

Martin: I don't recall the common stockpile concept at all.

Wampler: But then you were involved in the IRBM discussions. In what capacity were you dealing with those?

Martin: I was the economic minister, but given my NATO background, and there was not a political-military officer there, I had known from NATO background the permanent civil servant in the Defense Ministry. I dealt with him in negotiating the arrangements. There was a brigadier general who was assigned there at the time who I worked with closely on this, but the details of the negotiations I have no great recollection of, and I don't think I have anything in my files on that subject. It's pretty highly classified, and handled carefully.

Wampler: Were you dealing with Richard Powell?

Martin: Yes, Dick Powell was the one I was talking about. I had known him at NATO. He'd been over there in some capacity in Paris for a while, and we had worked together. A very able fellow.

Wampler: Were you working out things such as the details for the base support, and things of that nature, or was it economic....?

Martin: No, just the general arrangements. Negotiating a general agreement.

Wampler: Part of that involved turning over the weapons at a certain point to the British, replacing and modernizing those weapons, warhead availability, British national use as opposed to Alliance use -- did you get involved in any of those issues in negotiating the agreement?

Martin: We were rather insistant on Alliance use as the only use. They are NATO weapons, in effect. That also came up later on with regards to Turkey and the Cuban missile crisis -- that they were NATO, and we couldn't commit anything with respect to them. They were NATO, not US, and not even strictly UK.

Wampler: But there were some revisions for future UK acquisition of missiles for national use, weren't there, to use their own warheads on them?

Martin: I don't know. See I left in late 1959, and came back to Washington.

Wampler: Were you involved in the joint decision-making aspects of it?

Martin: I don't think so. I don't remember. One thing you have to recognize about the UK [is that] there's quite a habit of direct contact between the UK minister and the US minister, and the embassy sometimes can't keep track of what's going on. If there's an economic problem, the Chancellor of the Exchequer calls the Secretary of the Treasury, and I'm lucky if I find out about it. So I don't know anything about that.

Wampler: So you left the UK in late 1959. Then you were there through the Berlin crisis.

Martin: I was strictly an economic man on that. I was not involved in political-military matters, except on the missile location issue.

Wampler: Mr. MacArthur, were you at the State Department throughout that period?

MacArthur: I left at the beginning of 1957 and then went to Japan. I stayed until 1961, until we signed the Treaty with the Japanese, which I negotiated, and we were established and they had elections, which proved to the demonstrators who had demonstrated against the treaty. (Actually the liberal democratic party came back with more seats than they went into the election with.) Then I was transferred and went to Belgium. I was US coordinator of "Dragon Rouge," the US-Belgian rescue operation in the Congo for those 2,000 hostages we pulled out. That shows an interesting aspect of Defense Department evaluation of forces needed.

We were not going to use combat forces under any circumstances. Finally Spaak and I came back and worked out with the president and secretaries of State and Defense that in principle we would be prepared to supply the aircraft that the Belgians didn't have if they supplied the paratroopers and the fighting forces. It would be a rescue operation, pure and simple. (We knew it would be exploited as colonialism and so on.) The first cut in the Pentagon was that the minimum that would be required of the Belgians would be 6 battalions. This would require a train of airplanes. Then they were told this was out, and that this was done on a US eyes only basis before we got into the nitty gritty. The second and absolutely irreducible one was four battalions. Then they sent a team over in civilian clothes to Brussels. At the end of the first morning, with some of our best planners, the head of the group came to me after they had met that morning when they met with the Belgians, and said to me, who the hell is that little bastard [?], the little Belgian colonel paratrooper? What the hell does he know about these things?! I said, well he's only jumped over a thousand times, six times in combat and 59 in the Congo. He knows quite a bit. The guy said, Jesus Christ, we don't have anybody whose done that! And I said, why did you ask me? [He replied,] because he says they'll do it with one battalion! And they did it with one battalion. So when you get into force requirements...

Rosenberg: I have two books on that, and I never saw that. That's nice to know.

MacArthur: Colonel Bradwell who commanded the air business down there said that when he was flying from Madrid, where we had arranged them secretly to refuel on the way down to Ascension Island in the South Atlantic, he got [?], and he said I suppose you want to jump at 1,200 feet? That's what we jump at in our exercises. He said [?] look at me as if I was an absolute goof, and said, we jump at 550 feet. The simbas are in the jungle, it's a small area, you'll probably have to make three passes to unload each airplane, and I'll jump on the first one, with twelve other men. We'll have machine guns and attack at night when the simbas are always nervous. I'll simply spray, and each plane will come down and drop a packet, and empty the plane. It will probably take two or maybe three passes to empty the plane and then we'll operate. From the time they dropped the first one until the first jeep was loaded with 10 little beret rouge heading into Stanleyville, was twenty four minutes.

Martin: He should have been with us in Vietnam!

MacArthur: Absolutely. I mention this only because for reasons that I mentioned earlier, you don't want to underestimate. Its better to overestimate the force requirements than to underestimate. And of course your budget is bigger too, if you overestimate.

Martin: Particularly if you overestimate spare parts requirements! Did you read that recent article?

Rosenberg: Were you in Belgium during the Berlin crisis in 1961?

MacArthur: Yes.

Rosenberg: I would be interested in anything that you would remember about the way the Kennedy Administration in effect went about working on NATO issues as they related to the Berlin crisis of 1961. There was a big push to change American defense policy and strategy at the time. It had been announced in terms of the move towards flexible response, and so on. And whether anything like that came through?

MacArthur: I don't remember anything like that. To us, the Berlin crisis was something separate than to the Belgians. And of course they have a very fine Prime Minister in Spaak, one of the abler people associated with NATO. Of course there was keen interest and some concern about the very dramatic increase in tension with the Soviet Union, but I don't remember any alteration or change in NATO planning. Of course I wasn't in the NATO circuit then anyway. I can't help, I'm sorry.

May: Do you have any recollection of the discussion of that as a nuclear crisis? People thinking that it might lead to a nuclear confrontation?

MacArthur: I think Ed would bear me out on this. I think whenever you have a question of increased tension between the Soviet Union and the West, then the thing was will these tensions increase to the point where, even though the Soviets will not plan an attack against NATO -- none of us believed during the Berlin crisis that that was a probability -- that some incident might occur where the reaction on the local thing would create another reaction on the other side and it would suddenly escalate until you had a serious problem, a problem of a limited form of engagement. That I think was really the biggest concern that our NATO allies had. Not that the Soviets in a calculated, cold decision would attack the United States or any of its allies, but that the great danger was the danger of a war that came about that nobody really wanted or had planned or calculated. That it would come about through circumstances that just happened.

Martin: The advantages of first launch are so great that it always makes you extremely nervous over whose going to make that decision, because if the other guy makes it first, you're in deep trouble.

Rosenberg: This can maybe spar some thought about the 1950's. In the discussions about the shield forces that began to be put forward particularly under Norstad, the major concern seems to be -- or maybe I'm misinterpreting it -- that you had reached a point in the mid to late 1950's that the Soviets were not going to launch a war of calculation -- that they'd say, we're planning for this, we're building up, today's a good day. Let's invade western Europe. Instead it might come about by some form of miscalculation equivalent to Berlin. Was there any specific type of contingency that might develop? Berlin was always there as a possibility, but was there anything else? For example in the 1960's Secretary MacNamara makes comments about Thrace, or northern Norway, but what other smaller contingencies was NATO worried about in the 1950s, perhaps even going back to before Eisenhower takes over? We've spent a lot of time worrying about the big war, but the question is, where were the smaller questions? Was there really an identification of that, even going far back?

Martin: I think there must have been with respect to Turkey, or we never would have put missiles in Turkey.

MacArthur: That's right, but also....

Martin: That's the start of the Middle East oil, etc...

MacArthur: Yes, as I was about to say, that's the start of the Persian Gulf problem.

Martin: Yes, it's a Persian Gulf problem, really.

MacArthur: Yes, I think that was in mind. I was later ambassador to Iran. And if you remember, in August of 1939, before war broke out, through Chip Bohlen and Johnny Von Herbach (?) the second secretary in the German embassy, we learned that despite the fact the British and the French were negotiating a non-aggression pact with the Soviets and had been since the beginning in July (I was based in the embassy in Paris then), the Soviets were secretly talking with Hitler and company. So Roosevelt wrote a letter based on the information that Chip had sent from Moscow, to the President to the Presidium, which was Stalin. I was the courier that carried that letter there. When I got there and delivered it to ambassador Steinhardt [?], Chip said he'd set up a meeting that evening at a diplomatic reception that happened actually to be in the German embassy, and we'd inform von Herbach of the fact that Steinhardt would be delivering this letter. We got off at the corner and pretended to be drinking, old friends getting together again, and Chip quietly told him about it. He said, you're too late. We initialed the agreement yesterday. Then he described the agreement, the Baltic states, the division of Poland and one thing or another, and than he added something that, at the time we reported but it seemed secondary, because the decision for Hitler's back door to be protected meant that within two weeks we would see a German attack on Poland. The thing I remember extremely well which we reported at the time, after he described the deal with Hitler, [was that] the Soviets were brutally insistent on a clause in the agreement, which in translation reads as follows: the area to the south of the Soviet Union, in the direction of the Persian Gulf, is the center of the aspirations of the Soviet Union. The Germans refused to include that in the Molotov-Ribenthrop Pact. Our concern went back to 1943, where at the big three meeting Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill reached agreement in Teheran, the Teheran meeting of 1943, that first, Iran would be treated as a liberated country and not an occupied country; and that second, six months after the end of war in Europe, the armed forces of the three powers (we had about 12,000 men on the LAC up at the Soviet zone, they controlled the north of Iran), the British and ourselves would be withdrawn. We and the British withdrew, the Soviets stayed on and tried to set up the Peoples Republic of Azerbaijan in northern Iran to breach the Turkish-Iran barrier. So with this background, going back, you can see why events in the Middle East, Turkey, the oil routes [were so important] -- which I said earlier were part of the tripod concept that Eisenhower referred to just casually when I was briefing him one morning. This was very, very much an area where something could happen which was of vital importance to us and our allies, which was outside the NATO Treaty area, but which if it got out of hand, could lead to God knows what.

May: This is a story I heard from another party that I'd like to check against you, on the Suez affair. Chet Cooper, who was at that time a liaison with the Joint Intelligence Committee, says that he was asked to check in Washington about the significance of Khrushchev's threat and rocket rattling. It was his view and generally the view in Washington that this was bluster. His story is that when he went into the Joint Intelligence Committee, he had never seen a more frightened group of people in his life. Does that check with your recollection?

Martin: I don't remember the Soviet threat, I'm sorry to say. My recollection of that is that the British and the French behaved very badly.

May: And inefficiently.

Martin: Yes, inefficiently, that's what I mean. They fouled it up. And also that Dulles should not have made the public statements that he made. They were very damaging to our relations with the two countries and individuals in them. Just after that, if a taxi driver found his passenger was American, he'd immediately stop and throw him out. The Americans couldn't get their trash picked up or coal delivered. There were violent domestic feelings.

May: You don't remember it having a nuclear dimension?

Martin: No, not at all. I also remember when I was in London, I was asked to speak to their equivalent of the NATO War College about some economic-military related matters. The first question I got was would the US take the same action on Panama that we took on Suez? And if not, why not?!

MacArthur: Mr. Dulles felt as though he had been deliberately deceived by Anthony Eden on this question.

Martin: Yes, it's hard to figure out.

MacArthur: And he felt very, very strongly about it. As a result of that, the relationship between the two was amiss from then on. Eden couldn't stand Dulles and Dulles couldn't stand Eden.

Martin: That's right.

MacArthur: It was sort of tough on the subordinate guys to try and keep peace in the family.

Wampler: Do you have any recollections of the December NATO meeting that cam after Suez, which was the first time you had any real high level contacts between the US and the British after Suez? The surprising thing is that things got on an even keel rather quickly.

Martin: Yes, I'd say so. As I said, we did a lot of things before that meeting -- about the procedures for nuclears, the increase in the NATO funding of bases, and so forth. Also, one other thing that happened during that period, when NATO was supposedly collapsing according to the press, was that we had for several weeks, twice or three times a week, informal council meeting, where only the ambassador and maybe one other attended, [with] no minutes, discussing what we were going to do about the Soviet invasion of eastern Europe. So there were three evidences of solidarity in terms of operations at the NATO council level at that period when we were supposedly breaking up.

Wampler: Can you remember anything about the nuclear release agreements that were ironed out that fall?

Martin: Nothing more than I said about the NATO resolution on that, which was worked out. But I don't remember any more details.

Rosenberg: It was a general kind of political resolution that they agreed to.

Martin: Yes.

Rosenberg: Why did it happen then, given the state of US-British relations?

Martin: Well we had been working on it for some number of months, and it just came to a head then. We behaved as if there were no problems, NATO did. Which I think is kind of interesting. Several historians have asked me about that crisis, and did NATO almost collapse. These three things are evidence that it did not have an impact on NATO.

May: Were you surprised a little bit later by the Sandys' White Paper, when Sandys announced this reliance on nuclear weapons, and severe cut backs?

Martin: I don't remember that, I'm sorry. What was the date of that?

May: That was 1957. The Defense White paper in the spring of 1957. It made quite a splash in the press, because it was quite a stark shift to a nuclear-based strategy.

Martin: No, I don't remember that, sorry.

Wampler: Its amazing that it seems like the memory that is at play here is that you remember things before 1954 better than after 1954, as if that was more of a crisis or important period than the period afterward, when we see all of these other problems coming home to roost.

Martin: Well before 1954 I was in the State Department making policy, and afterwards I was taking instructions, implementing and negotiating them.

MacArthur: I think the critical period was before -- the whole business about an approach to the German problem that would be meaningful, the birth of the Alliance. When we started out in that December meeting of the NATO Council in Brussels, when Eisenhower was appointed -- really it was like going out into the wilderness with a tent and a little equipment.

Martin: Yes, nobody had any idea.

MacArthur: It all had to be built up. It had moved so far that things at the time, I'm sure, were considered important. I feel very much like Ed that they didn't appear to those of us who were mixed up with it to be a major crisis.

Martin: I may say that one of the big arguments that I recall of the committee that was discussing how to implement the NATO Treaty after it had been signed -- I represented the economic bureau (I think Nitze technically did but I usually attended the meetings) -- was where to have the headquarters. The issue was Europe or the United States. One argument was that we are the power center, why shouldn't it be here? It was none of my business really, but I did make a suggestion for an alternative that I felt was sure to attract very good attendance of all the ministers at their meetings, which was to put it in between in Bermuda!

Wampler: Mr. Arneson, you said after you left the State Department that you went to the Imperial War College?

Arneson: Yes, the Imperial Defense College in London.

Wampler: What were you doing there, and were you in a position to have some sort of an entre into what the British military thinking was doing?

Arneson: Not really. I considered it a double sabbatical. It was very pleasant and very relaxed. I was there in 1955. They had a nice break, and I introduced coffee to the menu. I had a long lunch period and left about 4 in the afternoon. And you had 6 weeks vacation in the middle of the summer, so you could travel Europe. I got away from all this stuff. It really was a sabbatical.

Martin: I thought the NATO Defense College was a very important institution. I think I spoke for several years to every class there. What this did was enable middle-level and a little higher than middle-level officers to live together for a couple of months and get to know each other. So if you had a conflict situation, and you almost inevitably had a mix of nationality of the forces that had to work together, the top people would be people who knew each other and knew how to work together. They were able to be given an overall look at the problems and goals and so forth. It was a very desireable thing. We initiated the idea, and they had about 3 sessions a year with a group of officers.

MacArthur: To support what Ed was saying, when SHAPE was first set up and all these officers from different countries came together, they were sort of like strange dogs sniffing around at each other. Then thanks largely to Al Gruenther as chief of Staff, and General Eisenhower also, he treated these guys as not only equals, but also as though their were views were important. And finally, you'd hear a Brit saying, gee our guys back in London are out of their minds on this one. As Ed said, before they were thrown into an Allied command you got these guys used to living with each other.

Arneson: Our War College is a heck of a lot more difficult than the British Defense College. I'm sure everyone of us who went there lobbied for reciprocity, and I'm glad to hear something is being done. Of course for a long time the problem was the classification of restricted data.

Martin[?]: Did any of you ever see a nuclear test? Do you remember looking at nuclear weapons or anything of the sort?

Martin: No.

Arneson: I've seen half a dozen or so. I tried to get some people in the Department to go. I got Paul Nitze to go one time. There should have been more. I never saw a thermonuclear shot, but I saw the others.

May: Bob Bowie tells that it was quite late in his tenure at Policy Planning before he got information on stockpiles and that kind of thing.

Rosenberg: How well informed was State in the late 1940's, early 1950's on American real nuclear capabilites?

Arneson: It was very closely held. I remember General Marshall when he was Secretary called me in one day right out of the blue, and said, if we go to war with the Soviet Union do we bomb Leningrad? I had no reaction to that. First of all, I had no idea how many weapons we had.

Rosenberg: And you were the closest person in the Department to all that.

Arneson: Yes. I think it turned out that we had about 50.

Rosenberg: Yes, that's summer 1948.

Arneson: Yes. That's all come out of unclassified materials. I never knew the numbers.

Martin: Was he asking the question on the grounds that we had already decided not to bomb Moscow?

Arneson: He wasn't clear about that. In fact he sent me away and said, you come back tomorrow and tell me what you think.

Martin: Well you know where the logic for not bombing Moscow came from? There was a strategic bombing survey made after the war, and the European group of which I think Nitze was one member found a blip in production of war materials that was a fairly significant increase, and they couldn't find an answer to it until they noticed that just before that blip, they had bombed the Ministry of War production in Berlin. Nobody had to go to Berlin to get permission for this or that, so they concluded, never bomb Moscow!

Rosenberg: That wasn't what they concluded in Omaha. Ever since we've had this trouble.

Arneson: I understood that Leningrad was the center of all military communication. You were faced with essentially a Kyoto situation, which Stimson was. I came back the next day and said, yes, go ahead and bomb it. We didn't have to.

Martin: I was at a meeting a couple of nights ago, and three people were testifying who had just been in Russia for long periods. Paul Nitze was one of them. They had been to Moscow and Leningrad, [???] and a group of Soviets had arranged it. They found a lot of agitatation in Leningrad for succeeding from the Soviet Union.

Arneson: Well, may that conviction grow.

Rosenberg: Going back to the H bomb issue. This is favorite of mine -- I did a long paper on it once and I have always wondered if I was right. I used your article in the Foreign Service Journal.

Arneson: I was going to tell you about that. It's probably wrong too, though.

Rosenberg: Do you have any recollection of knowing, and being able to pass it on to Secretary Acheson about JCS studies that had been done on the effects of the air offensive on the Soviet Union and whether the bombers could get through or not? There was a report, for example, the Harmon report. The study was 133 bombs and an air offensive in the spring of 1949.

Arneson: I would think Policy Planning would have had that. I have seen it since but I didn't see it at the time.

Rosenberg: It was so closely held in the Defense Department that I do know that the way information got out was that it was kind of leaked out. A member of the Harmon Committee gave a copy to the Navy and then they spread it around at the time of the Admiral's revolt.

Arneson: Yes, Greg Herken had it in his book, The Winning Weapon.

Wampler: When the talks started in 1951, you had a good deal of involvement with the Canadians as well as the British. There are some documents released on the Goose Bay. I'm interested because this period was 1952-54, but the State Department won't publish any of these documents. I'm wondering what you can recall about those negotiations?

Arneson: What relationship between 1952-54?

Wampler: There are supposed to be US-British-Canadian negotiations on actions to be taken in the event of war with the Soviet Union. The entire thing was refused for publication. All we have are the 1951 documents, where you are trying to work out overflight, basing rights, and things like that at Goose Bay as part of SAC's operations. I'm wondering what you could recall about that?

Arneson: Yes. Ambassador Wrong called me in one time and said he was worried about it and he hoped we were too. How would we get together on this question of the use of Goose Bay and other bases? They had been rather troubled by the fact that up to now, most of the channels of communication had been via the military. Or as Bob Lovett would say, one feather indians. They didn't like that. Could we do it some other way, could we get specific decisions made, or should we just talk about this, or how should we get together? I said, well Secretary Acheson and I had been talking about this too, and we felt it would be wrong to try and specify that come A we do B, come C we do F. It doesn't work that way. The best we could do was have a frequent interchange of opinions and notes and ideas about where the hot spots in the world are, what are our assessments of Soviet intentions and capabilities, and so on. If we could come to a meeting of minds between the two countries on that sort of thing, I felt we could get what we needed when we needed it. Ambassador Wrong agreed. He said that's the way to do it. I was going up to Chalk River anyway. I was invited up there. That reactor up there is unique. It has a higher flux rate than any of ours. The Commission was using it for certain irradiation experiments. In fact it led to the first amendment to the Atomic Energy Act in 1951. You were allowed the use of restricted data for that purpose. Wrong said well if you're going up to Ottawa, why don't you stop by the Foreign Office and talk to the people there about this, this idea we've been discussing? So I did that. Arnold Heeny (sp?) was available, Robertson was available, Pearson had hoped to be available but he wasn't. We spent two days going through this kind of operation. It was concluded that we would try to be in close touch -- in fact I think we met almost every week or so for quite a while -- and if we could come to an agreement on the nature of the situation, permission should be forthcoming very quickly if we needed to go to Goose Bay with non-nuclear or nuclear components. The message would come from the State Department to the Canadian embassy, they would immediately get on the phone to Ottawa, and we would get an answer back in about 10 minutes. That was the idea.

I must say that unlike the British, who can be damn sticky at times, the Canadians are a marvel to deal with. There is no problem about being haughty about anything, or thinking they had better ideas than anybody else. I always enjoyed working with them. That worked out very well. Then we went on to do about the same with the British. I sat in on most of the Canadian talks, and I got in on a few with the British. The idea was the same: see where the world situation was, and in the event that we had to go, we would agree on going. For example, I can't imagine that if the Russians let go with everything they had on Western Europe that the British would be very long in asking us to come through with everything we had. It was in the shady areas that you had problems.

Wampler: Yes, it was the grey areas that they were trying to feel the US out on. You got the agreements worked out with Franks in the fall, October of 1951, which was the basis for the statement in January 1952 about consulting under the circumstances prevailing. Which has pretty much stayed the language up till the present. That's what they used when we bombed Libya.

Arneson: I heard people write about the fact that we just thought we could go right ahead and use these basis. Maybe LeMay did, but he was the only guy in the whole country who did. The Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff -- none of them claimed anything of the sort. They must get their permission.

Wampler: There was a good deal of disagreement within the US as to what the US would do even before they would come into a position to tell another country what they would do. So that complicated the matter somewhat.

Arneson: That's right.

Wampler: There's a number of specific questions which I could throw out here to try and probe your sense of lack of crisis after 1955, which seems to me to at least create a lot of problems. Does the Radford Plan recall anything for you?

Rosenberg: [It was] the so called reduction of American ground troops in Europe that got a big play in the press, and then in particular caused something of a panic for Adenauer. This is the summer of 1956, after the Joint Chiefs get some degree of unanimous agreement, prodded by the President, on the immediate use of nuclear weapons in the event of a war.

May: It's one of the few things that gets Suez issues off the front page of the papers in the summer of 1956. There was a leak of a proposed plan for very large scale reductions in US ground forces.

Martin: I have a vague recollection of it, but nothing specific.

Wampler: Another issue, maybe you can confirm or deny a sense I have is that, before 1954 you have a great deal of concern for trying tobring the French along. But after that you almost get this sense that you really have to write them off to a degree. You have to keep them in the Alliance, but with them sending people into North Africa, and the changes in government, there seems to be a sense that we really can't coddle them much more. You have to deal with the problems being faced -- the emphasis on the British, and even more, on what Germany is going to be doing. That seems to affect the balance of interest, and the pressures of the Alliance. Would you say that's true, until de Gaulle comes back in and really starts reasserting the French presence?

Martin: Yes, I think there was a period there when the French were just not playing ball at all. Partly it was isolationism and resentment of the German admission [into the Alliance}, and some disorganization in the French government. You had some difficult periods. The government and the Chamber of Deputies were split on a lot of issues. As a matter of fact in some of those periods, I've written some place that the French government was run better when there wasn't a cabinet. It was just the bureaucrats.

MacArthur: It was always musical chairs, they were changing governments so rapidly.

Martin: Oh they were, that's right.

MacArthur: Of course the French were a little bit disappointed when they sent General Ely over here to see if we wouldn't do something about Dien Bien Phu. And then President Eisenhower sent me over to see Prime Minister Laniel, whom I had worked with during the Vichy days when he was one of the important resistance leaders in Normandy, and a former member of the French []. We then furnished the French equipment. I think up to around 300 million dollars (I can't remember the exact figures now). But we were not yet involved with our forces. I attended a breakfast meeting with the President, Secretary of Defense and Admiral Radford and Mr. Dulles when General Ely was here, and he was asking us for air support for Dien Bien Phu, and even suggested the possibility of using a small nuke. Admiral Radford said they had two carrier groups standing a couple of hundred miles off the coast of Vietnam, and if that was desired, they could lay down a carpet of conventional bombs around Vietnam, or they could do whatever was required with a small megaton job. And I remember the President so well, because he said that was the last thing in the world we can do. I'm not quoting him directly, but the sense of what he said was, we've seen the aerial photographs of Dien Bien Phu. We know that with carpeting around the jungle and around the place, they'll just withdraw and the moment the bombers leave they'll be right back in again. Then he said, we will then have two alternatives: one, having committed American military strength, air in this case, and it was a total failure and didn't accomplish anything, we will then have to go in with ground forces; or two, we will have to retreat with our tails between our legs, having committed American military force and it didn't do the job and we don't do anything about it. And that will destroy the confidence of our other allies in our ability to carry out commitments. He said, as long as I am President, we will never commit American ground forces to Vietnam. And of course that was true, as opposed to Kennedy who put the 16,000 combat troops in there in 1963, I think it was.

But Radford was prepared to use the small nuke, which would rule out sort of automatically -- not in Dien Bien Phu, but up toward Hanoi. So I think in our relationships with the French, I didn't feel during that period they were so terribly tense. I served in France from 1938 to 1948, except for the 1942-44 period when I was interned in Germany, and I don't remember feeling that we were in any crisis relationship with the French, except that they were extremely xenophobic and very, very difficult allies to deal with. They always had something they would bring up at sort of the last moment. While they were essential, because France occupies the geographic keystone between Germany, Denmark, Norway, the northern part of Europe, and the southern part, Spain, Portugal and Italy and so forth, they were essential, so we would have to sort of grin and bear it a bit when they behaved as only the French can behave. But the business of crisis, I received Chaban-Delmas and on the other occasion Manel[?] -- perhaps it was personal relationships, but I didn't feel any animosity or any bitter feelings towards the United States. To me, they were just behaving like the French have always behaved.

Martin: Particularly the Parisian French.

MacArthur: If you ever negotiate with the French, you never attack the pyramid they build with logic. You can't even get a fingernail in the cracks. You attack the sand on which its based. Frequently, if you accept the basic premise, the foundation, which is a swamp, then you're lost if you try and wrangle out the details of the pyramid. The logic is impeccable if you accept the basic premise.

Rosenberg: Since we've advanced to Asian crises, do you recall anything about the 1954-55 crisis in the Taiwan straits? It has been argued that that was one area when the Eisenhower Administration appeared much more ready to use nuclear weapons, certainly than in Vietnam and certainly than it later would in 1958.

MacArthur: As I recall it, the feeling was that if it was publicly known that we were prepared to use whatever weapons we had available, it would have a very deterrent effect on any effort to take Taiwan, which could engage us. Therefore the thing to do was let it out that we would use whatever was necessary to do the job, and that if we took this stance, the chances of the other fellows unleashing an attack that would require some action on our part would be greatly reduced -- if they knew from the very beginning that we were prepared to do whatever it was. The decision was never taken, as I remember Ed, that we would use the weapons. But the fact that the news got out and became public, it was not entirely through the usual business of a leak. It was let out of the bottle.

Martin: It's a very tricky question, though. I think we have helped our position with an informal suggestion of a threat. But if we are ever caught having made that and not doing it, we've lost a lot of ground. It has to be handled with great discretion.

Rosenberg: Yes, and nuclear weapons are not particularly subtle.

Wampler: You're in Europe up through 1958-1959, and is the concern that you see on the European part the one that the US is trigger happy and will use those weapons, or concern that the US will not use them because of its increased vulnerability?

May: Or both?

Rosenberg: Depending on who you're talking to.

MacArthur: The fundamental thing was that as long as we were there, the chances of there being war were...the Soviets really weren't going to come in, at least in the minds of thinking people.

Martin: I think that's right.

MacArthur: Of course whenever somebody makes a statement and the press blows it up, you're going to get political reactions -- people in the parliaments asking questions and this and that and the other thing. But fundamentally, if at that time we said fine, we're going to pick up and leave, they would have come running after us -- don't go, don't go, don't go. And the media by its very nature wants things that will make hearts pound. You see it everyday, even today. The President's being attacked now because he said something about East Jerusalem, and it's blown up all over the place, and made into a great issue as if its the end of our relationship with Israel. So I think some of the things that appeared -- if you're not a part of the action and a party to what's behind it -- appear much more of a crisis or of a much greater degree of seriousness than they actually are in terms of realities.

Martin: The reaction can create a public opinion which limits your freedom of action. You have to be watching it.

Wampler: Dulles was concerned that an Alliance strategy that had a rather inflexible reliance on nuclear weapons could foment neutralism within the Alliance -- if you didn't have some kind of flexibility, and give the allies some kind of say in their use. These are concerns that have persisted throughout the Alliance.

MacArthur: And they probably persist today. Alliances are not just stationary things where you say, we've signed up and that's it. In every country you're going to have problems. We have our problems today with Japan on a trade issue that can affect our strategic business in that part of the world. These are things that we have to accept in an alliance. You can have a change of government, and the government that wanted to get elected takes a position that is contrary to the one before it. Then they come into power and then you have a problem. As I said, alliances are not stationary, solid things where once you've signed on everything is all right. The dynamic of politics within every country is in change, and with change comes perhaps a new thing that opens up some problem that at the moment seems to be quite serious, or is blown up again by the press which makes it even more sensitive to public opinion. Governments are responsive to public opinion, not to the point of going too far, necessarily, but there are problems and there will continue to be problems 10 years from now if we still have a NATO with our policy.

Martin: I think we have a real problem now with what's going on in the eastern block. There will be a lot of people that will say, let's destroy our nuclear weapons capacity, there's no more need for it, we don't have to spend any money on it. But Gorbachev could have a heart attack tomorrow, and what will that do? It's an extremely tricky situation right now, it seems to me. How seriously do we take the changes that are going on in terms of our military capacity? And given also the budget questions...

MacArthur: Can I just say one word. Today there isn't a person in the world that can say what's going to happen in eastern and western Europe, or in the Far East. Or in Africa or elsewhere. The post-World War II era took about ten years to develop, 1945-55, when it was stabilized by the Cold War into a period of stability. That has ended, and we're going to see -- it will probably be in 8 or 10 years -- in the years that lie ahead, where the dynamic of all these forces that are working, what happens. As I say, it will be 5 to 10 years, probably closer to 10 than 5, before, if we're lucky, a new era comes out that stabilizes in one way or another.

Wampler: Do you feel that the first stabilization relied a great deal on the fact that you had nuclear weapons?

MacArthur: Yes. I think it was completely that. I think the basic fact was that with nuclear weapons, and apparent determination of the United States to stand by its allies and use them if necessary [was very important]. You know [given a condition of] mutual destruction, there's nothing in that for the other side if they want to attack. I think without nuclear weapons there was no possibility of conventional force levels that could deter, and if they couldn't deter, at least if there was not actual war, it could [have been] so intimidating to the Europeans as to force them into a period of neutrality or neutralism, or something of that kind. I think the nuclear stand off was the key to the period of stability.

Martin: It was probably the key to the solution of the Cuban missile crisis solution too.

MacArthur: Yes.

Martin: The Soviets did an amazing backdown, against Castro's wishes, that would probably not have been possible if [nuclear weapons] were not in our hands.

Jennifer Sims: I have two questions. One of them is a long shot that you have probably not heard of, but starting in about 1956, the French, the Germans and the Italians were talking to each other about potential nuclear cooperation, which resulted in early 1958 in the signing of an agreement apparently between the three of them for nuclear cooperation. Did you ever hear anything about that?

MacArthur: I just don't recall.

Martin: This was power plants?

Sims: No, this was nuclear warheads.

MacArthur: I don't recall.

Martin: I don't recall that.

Arneson: I had a man in Paris for several years checking on the French program, but he was pulled out in the early 1950's. I won't explain why, but we lost a real source of information. So I can't answer your question.

Sims: The other question is perhaps too broad and too big, but it might be interesting just to get your insights on it. In the noise behind these intricate discussions going on about NATO nuclear planning, there was the US disarmament arms control policies going on in the 1955-60 period. In 1955 you had the Open Skies proposal, and then the negotiation of aerial inspection in Europe -- and that whole angle to US policy -- and Stassen's role in negotiating with the allies as well as with the Soviets on that. How did that affect perceptions on what we were planning to do within the Alliance nuclear planning?

MacArthur: Ed, that's yours, since during most of that period I was in Japan. Or your's Gordon.

Martin: I really don't recall that. My recollection of Stassen was his role in the AID agency, where he was on the whole a disaster. All talk and no substance.

Arneson: Yes.

Martin: And he continued to be, running for President 15 time by now. But I don't recall Stassen in this field. Who was he working for?

Rosenberg: The President.

Sims: He was the President's Special Advisor for disarmament.

Wampler: Mainly on UN talks.

Arneson: I think you can answer this question very simply. It's all a charade. I went through several years working on international control of atomic energy, and I learned the one thing that you must really believe in is flexibility. When a colleague of mine came to me in 1954, I was working for Patterson, he said, Gordon, can't we come up with something that shows flexibility? I said sure, why can't we say, I support the UN plan or any other no less effective plan. I think he thought he got the Holy Grail. But seriously, I think all of us can agree that a lot of talk, talk, talk gets nowhere.

Martin: There was something like this in Latin America in the early 1960's. The Brazilians made some proposals, as I recall it, for nuclear disarmament for the area. Verification seemed to be a little difficult.

Wampler: You get a sense of the priorities in that the Eisenhower Administration was prepared to give guarantees to the British that if you get some agreement on a cut off date, on production of nuclear materials, on testing, we'll make sure you get your stockpile before this becomes effective. We're not going to cut you off at the knees with any disarmament agreement we work out here. Plus they had the sense the Soviets were not going to agree to anything that could be effectively controlled anyway.

Arneson: We may have some unilateral disarmament on the part of the Soviet Union ourselves. Its very much in their interest to get their economy under control and not monkey around with weaponry.

Martin: It sure is.

Wampler: One rather mundane thing that goes back to the point David was making about how NATO meetings sort of give an impetus to agreeing on various statements of policy. It seems to me that a deadline was always imposed every year by Congressional deadlines. You had to go to NATO with certain figures about aid, and what they were going to need, and to do that you had to get to NATO to agree to something in December so you can go to Congress in January and February.

Martin: Yes.

Wampler: And every year this sort of gets played out. You have to watch what Congress was doing, and you had to watch what NATO was doing.

Martin: I think the evidence for this is that the major task for preparing for a NATO meeting and concluding it successfully was the press release. The communique.

MacArthur: Absolutely.

May: Was that always true? From the beginning?

Martin: That was always true from the beginning. I remember one night working until after midnight on the press release because Herve Alphonse for France and Paul Spaak of Belgium could not agree on the proper French translation of an English word. And we finally changed the English word.

Arneson: What was the other one?

Martin: I can't remember off hand. They debated for an hour. I was the US negotiator, and we had to change the word "coordination" or something like that. The Belgian French and the French French had different words to say it.