Berlin 1961

by Frederick Kempe

  Nevertheless, Khrushchev knew better than anyone how vulnerable his position could be. For all his work to advance communism in Africa and Asia, only Cuba had joined the Soviet camp under Khrushchev’s leadership, and by luck more than design. Some party leaders would never forgive Khrushchev for having denounced Stalin, which they saw not only as an attack on an individual but also on communist history and legitimacy. China remained poised against Khrushchev, and the head of Beijing’s delegation, Chou En-lai, would leave the Congress in a huff after laying a wreath at Stalin’s tomb.

  Still, Khrushchev looked leaner and fitter than he had been for months, as if he had been training for the event. “I propose we begin to work,” he told the gathering, interpreted into twenty-nine languages. “The Twenty-second Congress is now in session.”

  Even Stalin would have envied Khrushchev’s choreography. The Soviet leader monopolized the first two days with his two speeches, each some six hours in length. He navigated from one topic to another with inexhaustible energy, describing richly how the Soviet economy would surpass that of the United States by 1980—increasing its gross national product five times, expanding its industrial production six times, and providing every family a rent-free apartment. By 1965, he said, the Soviet Union would produce three pairs of shoes per person per year!

  He renewed his attacks on the dead Stalin, and by the end of the Congress would remove the dictator from the Red Square mausoleum, where he rested beside Lenin, and rebury him in less prominent ground beside a lower rank of communist heroes near the Kremlin wall.

  What most caught the attention of delegates and the world, however, were two bombshells related to Berlin. One was figurative and the other very real.

  Disappointing East Germany’s Ulbricht, Khrushchev said he would drop his insistence on signing a peace treaty by year’s end. His explanation was that Gromyko’s recent talks with Kennedy showed that the Western powers “were disposed to seek a settlement” on Berlin.

  Having offered Kennedy that carrot, Khrushchev then swung the nuclear stick. He departed from his prepared text to talk about Soviet military prowess, particularly when it came to missile development. He laughed that the Soviets had come so far that American spy ships were tracking and confirming the remarkable accuracy of their rockets.

  Still in a jocular tone and speaking impromptu, Khrushchev then jolted his listeners with a revelation: “Since I have already wandered from my written text, I want to say that our tests of new nuclear weapons are also coming along very well. We shall shortly complete these tests—presumably at the end of October. We shall probably wind them up by detonating a hydrogen bomb with a yield of fifty million tons of TNT.”

  The delegates stood and broke into stormy applause. No one to that date had ever tested such a powerful weapon. Reporters scribbled furiously.

  “We have said that we have a hundred-megaton bomb,” he added, encouraged by the crowd reaction. “This is true. But we are not going to explode it, because even if we did so at the most remote site, we might knock out all of the windows.”

  Delegates roared and applauded wildly.

  The atheist leader then turned his words to the Almighty. “But may God grant, as they used to say, that we are never called upon to explode these bombs over anybody’s territory. This is the greatest wish of our lives.”

  It was classic Khrushchev. He had taken some pressure off Kennedy by lifting the deadline on negotiating a Berlin treaty even as he smacked him over the head with news of a coming nuclear test. On the final day of the Congress, the Soviet Union would detonate the most powerful nuclear weapon ever to be constructed. The “Tsar Bomba,” as it would later be nicknamed in the West, had the equivalent of a thousand times the explosives used in the World War II bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  Again caught flat-footed, Kennedy knew that he had to respond.

  THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.

  WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 18, 1961

  During an otherwise genial White House luncheon for Texas news executives the next day, the conservative publisher of the Dallas Morning News, E. M. “Ted” Dealey, challenged the president. “We can annihilate Russia,” he said, “and should make that clear to the Soviet government.”

  Reading from a five-hundred-word statement that he had extracted from his pocket, Dealey declared, “The general opinion of the grassroots thinking of this country is that you and your administration are weak sisters.” He said that what was needed was “a man on horseback,” but that “many people in Texas and the Southwest think you are riding Caroline’s tricycle.”

  On edge from Khrushchev’s announcement and weeks of unrelenting pressure over Berlin, Kennedy responded with irritation. “The difference between you and me, Mr. Dealey, is that I was elected president of this country and you were not. I have the responsibility for the lives of a hundred eighty million Americans, which you have not…. Wars are easier to talk about than they are to fight. I’m just as tough as you are—and I didn’t get elected President by arriving at soft judgments.”

  Kennedy was facing the hardest judgment call of his life over how he would conduct a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, and Khrushchev was making the exercise more than academic. The plan he was reviewing after weeks of intensive, highly classified meetings had as its goal the preemptive destruction of the Soviet nuclear arsenal so as not to leave a single weapon for reprisal. In rich detail, it spelled out U.S. bombers’ flight paths, altitudes they must maintain to avoid detection, and which targets they would hit with what kind of nuclear weapons.

  By the time the plan had percolated through the bureaucracy, dozens of drafts had been debated and the Berlin Wall had already been up for three weeks. Blandly titled “Strategic Air Planning and Berlin,” the thirty-three-page memo reached General Maxwell Taylor, the president’s military representative, on September 5. Author Carl Kaysen, one of the administration’s young geniuses, concluded, “We have a fair probability of achieving a substantial measure of success” at a cost of “only” half a million to a million Soviet casualties. It included charts, however, showing that if surviving Soviet missiles hit the U.S., the fatalities could range between five and ten million, because of the population concentration in places like New York and Chicago. “In thermonuclear warfare,” Kaysen dryly observed, “people are easy to kill.”

  For the previous month, Kaysen had been working as deputy special assistant to National Security Advisor Bundy after gaining influence inside the administration on a number of widely differing projects, ranging from international trade to the cost factors of airborne alert systems. The forty-one-year-old Harvard economics professor had served in London during World War II, picking out European bomb targets for the Office of Strategic Services, the then-new U.S. spy service.

  Kaysen began his paper by noting the flaws in the so-called Single Integrated Operational Plan, or SIOP-62, the existing blueprint determining how Kennedy would use strategic striking power in the case of war. SIOP-62 called for sending 2,258 missiles and bombers, carrying a total of 3,423 nuclear weapons, against 1,077 “military and urban-industrial targets” through the “Sino-Soviet bloc.” It estimated that the attack would kill 54 percent of the Soviet population (including 71 percent of the urban population) and destroy 82 percent of its buildings “as measured by floor space.” Kaysen thought SIOP-62 actually underestimated casualties, as it was making estimates only for the first seventy-two hours of war.

  Kaysen maintained that two circumstances required that SIOP-62 be replaced or significantly altered. First, he worried about a false alarm, which could arise from a “deliberate feint” from Khrushchev or a “misinterpretation of events” by either side. He argued that “if the present state of tension over Berlin persists over a period of months, it is likely that, at some point, a Soviet action will appear to threaten an attack on the United States with sufficient likelihood and imminence” to trigger nuclear response.

  Kaysen asserted that the problem would come if K
ennedy, following a nuclear decision, decided he wanted to recall the force because he had either been mistaken or misled. Kaysen said the current plan left him little capability to do that. A recall would also require a stand-down of about eight hours for the part of the force that was launched, providing Moscow a “period of degradation” that it could exploit.

  Kaysen believed the larger problem—reinforced by Kennedy’s August inaction over Berlin—was that the president would never accept the level of massive nuclear retaliation that would be demanded of him to repulse any Soviet conventional attack on West Germany or West Berlin. He asked bluntly: “Will the president be ready to take it? Soviet retaliation is inevitable; and most probably, it will be directed against our cities and those of our European allies.”

  The clear message was that Kennedy, some ten months into his administration, was facing a Berlin crisis that threatened to worsen and a strategic plan to address it that he was unlikely to use. Kaysen was asserting that the ongoing Berlin crisis made it necessary not only to theorize but to get specific about a first-strike plan if matters turned against the U.S. on the ground.

  “What is required in these circumstances is something quite different,” he said. “We should be prepared to initiate general war by our own first strike, but one planned for this occasion, rather than planned to implement a strategy of massive retaliation. We should seek the smallest possible list of targets, focusing on the long-range striking capacity of the Soviets, and avoiding, as much as possible, casualties and damage in Soviet civil society.”

  The idea as well was to “maintain in reserve a considerable fraction of our own strategic striking power.” The author’s logic was that such a force would deter Khrushchev from unleashing his surviving forces against American population centers. Kaysen was wagering as well that U.S. efforts to minimize Soviet civilian casualties might also reduce the enemy’s lust for revenge that could broaden the war. Kaysen then provided in vivid detail a “more effective and less frightful” plan than SIOP-62 if the current crisis over Berlin resulted in a “major reverse on the ground in Western Europe.”

  It gave the president what he had been asking for throughout most of the year: a more rational nuclear war. It would allow him to destroy the Soviet Union’s long-range nuclear capability while limiting damage to the United States and its allies.

  Kaysen then laid out the details of a plan that Kennedy would read and reread before responding. U.S. strategic air forces—in small numbers, using wide dispersal and low-altitude penetration to avoid interception—would strike an estimated forty-six home bases for Soviet nuclear bombers, the bombers’ twenty-six staging bases, and up to eight intercontinental ballistic missile sites with two aiming points for each site. The total targets for the first strike would be eighty-eight.

  Kaysen reckoned that the first strike could be executed by fifty-five bombers, particularly B-47s and B-52s, assuming a 25 percent attrition rate that would leave the required forty-one planes. One could succeed with so few aircraft, he said, as they would “fan out and penetrate undetected at low altitude at a number of different points on the Soviet early-warning perimeter, then bomb and withdraw at low altitude.”

  Kaysen conceded the need for more studies and exercises to test his assumptions. “Two questions immediately arise about this concept,” he said. “How valid are the assumptions, and do we possess the capability and skill to execute such a raid?” He answered that the assumptions were reasonable, that the U.S. had the military means, and that “while a wide range of outcomes is possible, we have a fair probability of achieving a substantial measure of success.”

  If one could avoid bombing mistakes, Kaysen figured, Soviet deaths from the initial raid could be limited to no more than a million and perhaps as few as 500,000—still horrendous, but a considerable margin less than SIOP-62’s assumption that 54 percent, or more than a hundred million, of the Soviet population would perish.

  In a White House that was unaccustomed to such cavalier discussion of carnage, Kaysen’s report came as a shock. Chief Counsel Ted Sorensen shouted at Kaysen, “You’re crazy! We shouldn’t let guys like you around here.” Marcus Raskin, a friend of Kaysen’s on the NSC, never spoke to him again after he got wind of the report. “How does this make us any better than those who measured the gas ovens or the engineers who built the tracks for the death trains in Nazi Germany?” he frothed at Kaysen.

  Kennedy didn’t have the same misgivings, as he had been seeking precisely the analysis that he had been given. “Berlin developments may confront us with a situation where we may desire to take the initiative in the escalation of conflict from the local to the general war level,” the president wrote in the list of questions he wanted to discuss at a meeting on September 19 with General Taylor, General Lyman Lemnitzer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and General Thomas S. “Tommy” Power, the commander in chief of the Strategic Air Command. The level of detail in his questions underscored the president’s increasing scrutiny and understanding of nuclear strike issues. Kennedy was preparing himself to wage war.

  Question #1: “Is it possible to get some alternatives into the plan soon, such as having alternative options for use in different situations?” Kennedy asked. He in particular wanted to know whether he could move away from the “optimum mix” of civilian and military targets and in certain contingencies exclude urban areas, or extract China or European satellites from the target list. “If so, at what risk?”

  Question #2: If Berlin developments confronted Kennedy with a situation where he wanted to escalate from a local conflict to a general war level, the president wanted to know whether a successful surprise first strike was feasible against the Soviet long-range capability.

  Question #3: Kennedy worried that a surprise attack on Soviet long-range striking power would leave “a sizable number” of medium-range missiles still poised to attack Europe. In short, he wanted to know the costs of protecting Europe as well as the U.S. He asked whether including these medium-range strike targets in the initial attack would “so enlarge the target list as to preclude tactical surprise.”

  Question #4: “I am concerned,” Kennedy said, “over my ability to control our military effort once a war begins. I assume I can stop the strategic attack at any time, should I receive word the enemy has capitulated. Is that correct?”

  He posed four more questions along similar lines, wondering whether he could avoid “redundant destruction” and recall subsequent weapons if the first nuke aimed at a target achieved its “desired results.” If his decision to attack turned out to have been prompted by a false alarm, he wanted to know his options for recall.

  The following day’s National Security Council meeting failed to provide clear answers to many of the president’s questions. It also showed how divided Kennedy’s advisers remained over the notion of a limited nuclear war. The Strategic Air Command’s General Tommy Power said, “The time of our greatest danger of a Soviet surprise attack is now and during the coming year. If a general atomic war is inevitable, the U.S. should strike first” after identifying the essential Soviet nuclear targets.

  Power had directed the firebombing raids on Tokyo in March 1945 and was deputy chief of operations for U.S. Strategic Air Forces in the Pacific during the atomic bomb strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He had assisted General Curtis E. LeMay in building up the Strategic Air Command after he joined it in 1948, and under them it had become its own fiefdom. Brutal and easily angered, Power passionately believed the only way to keep nuclear-armed communists in check was if they believed they would be annihilated if they misbehaved.

  When briefed on the long-term genetic harm done by nuclear fallout, Power once responded with perverse humor, “You know, it’s not yet been proved to me that two heads aren’t better than one.” National Security Advisor Bundy was thinking of Power when he warned Kennedy that a subordinate commander had authority “to start the thermonuclear holocaust on his own initiative” if he couldn’t reach the presi
dent after a Soviet attack.

  Power argued to Kennedy that the Soviets were concealing “many times more” missiles than CIA spy photos revealed. He complained that he lacked intelligence on Soviet ICBM sites, and added that he believed the U.S. had only 10 percent photographic coverage of the Soviet Union. He told the president that twenty ICBM pads had been located, but that many times more might be in unmonitored areas. Lacking crucial data on the extent of the Soviet missile force, Power strongly recommended to Kennedy that he resume the U-2 flights he had promised Khrushchev he would prohibit.

  Kennedy brushed aside Power’s advice. Instead, he was fixated on getting the answer to his question of whether he really could launch a surprise strike on the Soviet Union without devastating retaliation. He also tasked the generals “to come up with an answer to this question: How much information does the Soviet Union need, and how long do they need to launch their missiles?”

  Martin Hillenbrand, director of the Office of German Affairs at the State Department, noticed that with each additional day Kennedy lived through the Berlin Crisis, “he became more and more impressed with its complexity and its difficulties.” For previous presidents, war was a cruel but desirable alternative to matters like Nazi viciousness or Japanese aggression. But for Kennedy, in Hillenbrand’s view, war had become “almost identical with the problem of human survival.”

  With that sense of moment, on October 10 Kennedy called together top administration officials and military commanders in the Cabinet Room to finalize nuclear contingency plans for Berlin. Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Nitze brought with him a document entitled Preferred Sequence of Military Actions in a Berlin Conflict.