Berlin 1961

by Frederick Kempe

  Cool and rational, at age fifty-four Nitze had already become perhaps the most crucial U.S. player behind the scenes influencing policies that guided the development of nuclear weapons and governed their control. Reflecting on the failure of well-meaning actors to avoid conflict, he never forgot his experience as a young boy when he witnessed the beginning of World War I while traveling through his ancestral home of Germany, where he saw Munich crowds cheer the coming disaster.

  Assigned by presidents Roosevelt and Truman to survey the impact of World War II strategic bombing, Nitze saw German big cities in ruins and scrutinized the impact of atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. However, nothing shaped his views about the importance of U.S. nuclear capability more than a preoccupation with strategic vulnerability that had grown out of his study of Pearl Harbor.

  As Truman’s chief of policy planning after the war, replacing the fired George Kennan, Nitze was the principal author in 1950 of the pivotal paper United States Objectives and Programs for National Security, or NSC 68. In a world where the U.S. had lost its nuclear monopoly, NSC 68 provided the rationale for significantly increased defense spending and formed the core of U.S. security policy for the next four decades, with its warning of the “Kremlin’s design for world domination.” Nitze believed that if Truman had not approved the development of the hydrogen bomb in that year, against considerable opposition, “the Soviets would have achieved unchallengeable nuclear superiority by the late 1950s.”

  As two Democratic hawks, Acheson and Nitze were chairman and vice chairman of the party’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, which laid the foundation for Kennedy’s defense stance and notions of “flexible response” after his nomination.

  Like Acheson, Nitze considered Berlin a proving ground for broader communist objectives to psychologically defeat the West by showing its impotence in the face of increased Soviet capabilities. Thus, he agreed with Acheson that the notion new talks could defuse the crisis was nonsense.

  On August 13, Nitze had been at first furious that the U.S. had failed to respond in any way to the Berlin border closure. However, as the Pentagon further considered its response, he saw intelligence indicating that three Soviet divisions and two East German divisions had encircled Berlin. This suggested that Moscow was setting a trap in which the U.S. might knock down the barrier only to see the Soviets occupy all of Berlin. The Pentagon opted not to recommend a move against the Wall for fear it would bring a general war for which the U.S. was unready.

  Now it was Nitze’s task to sketch out how the U.S. should get ready in preparation for another Berlin confrontation. After August 13, he was asked to bring together military representatives from Britain, France, and West Germany to agree on how to respond to the next Soviet provocation in Berlin.

  To safeguard Berlin access, the document they produced laid out four detailed scenarios that would gradually escalate from small-scale conventional action to nuclear war. In drafting it, Nitze had seen “permutations expanded like possible successive moves in a game of chess,” until someone suggested “it would take a piece of paper the size of a horse blanket to write them all down.” It was then that the group came up with an abbreviated military response plan for Berlin that they called the “Pony Blanket.” Nitze was satisfied that he had transformed a program of mounting pressures into an organized and coherent framework that gave America and its allies greater confidence.

  Kennedy arrived late at the NSC meeting to discuss the paper. Rusk had reported to the group that Moscow would withdraw its deadline on the East German peace treaty if talks with the U.S. proved promising. However, Rusk still believed a military buildup was necessary in Europe. Secretary McNamara then sketched out his recommendations.

  Kennedy quickly approved them all. They included the deployment to Europe, starting on November 1, of eleven Air National Guard squadrons; the return to Europe from the U.S. of seven Air Force squadrons from the Tactical Air Command; and the pre-positioning of sufficient equipment in Europe for one armored division and one infantry division. Through rotation, Kennedy would ensure he had at least two combat-ready battle groups plus their support elements. At the same time he would deploy to Europe the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment and its intelligence detachment from Fort Meade, Maryland.

  The president remained most concerned with how he would manage a limited nuclear conflict. His nightmare was losing control and witnessing the “funeral pyre” he’d spoken of at the United Nations less than a month earlier. Questioning Nitze’s document, what concerned him most was whether it would really be possible to use nuclear weapons selectively without escalation to all-out war.

  On that point, Nitze disagreed with his boss McNamara and believed that an initial limited use of nuclear weapons “would greatly increase the temptation” of the Soviets for a strategic strike. Thus, he argued, “it would be best for us, in moving toward the use of nuclear weapons, to consider most seriously the option of an initial strategic strike of our own.” He thought it was the only way to be victorious in a nuclear exchange, because the U.S. could lose if it allowed the Soviets the first blow.

  Characteristically, Kennedy quietly absorbed the details and the gravity of their conversation, interposing occasional questions, while the men around him continued to discuss the most chilling of scenarios.

  Rusk was concerned that the military strategists had forgotten the moral context: “The first side to use nuclear weapons will carry a very grave responsibility and endure heavy consequences before the rest of the world,” he said.

  Kennedy did not resolve the division of opinion in the room, but the group agreed to draft new instructions from the president to General Norstad, his Supreme Allied Commander Europe, to provide “clear guidance” on U.S. intentions for military contingencies.

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  FRIDAY, OCTOBER 20, 1961

  In the ten days that followed, the president was occupied by little else apart from Berlin and its related nuclear questions, his hopes for negotiations with Moscow, and his growing difficulties with his own allies.

  The Washington Post reported on efforts to end racial discrimination in Maryland restaurants. A story on the front page of the New York Times reported that Supreme Court justices were hearing arguments related to antidiscrimination sit-ins in the South. Police were enforcing carefully laid school desegregation plans while white-robed-and-hooded Ku Klux Klansmen protested.

  However, the president was preoccupied by thoughts of war and how he would conduct it. His concerns were infecting the American public. Time magazine ran on its cover a color portrait of Virgil Couch, head of the Office for Civil Defense. A banner headline announced: [NUCLEAR] SHELTERS: HOW SOON—HOW BIG—HOW SAFE? Couch advised Americans that planning for nuclear attack should be as normal as getting smallpox vaccinations.

  With Khrushchev’s fifty-megaton announcement from three days earlier still reverberating, the president called together his top national security team to put the final touches on military instructions for NATO. It would not be an easy meeting.

  His Joint Chiefs were engaged in verbal combat over Kennedy’s planned conventional military buildup in Europe and its potential impact on the credibility of the U.S. nuclear deterrent.

  Already, France’s de Gaulle and Germany’s Adenauer were arguing that Kennedy was too eager to negotiate West Berlin’s future with Khrushchev while doing too little to convince Khrushchev that the president would be willing to use nuclear weapons to defend the city.

  It seemed that only Macmillan agreed with Kennedy’s heightened desire for talks with Moscow. Having been so at odds with Kennedy’s hawkish approach toward the Soviets the previous spring, the prime minister saw with satisfaction that Kennedy was now embracing the more conciliatory British position toward Moscow. He was encouraged as he watched Kennedy grow increasingly “fed up” with both de Gaulle and Adenauer.

  With the Allies deeply at odds over how to handle Berlin strategy, Kennedy made his move to settle diff
erences. At the table for the 10:00 a.m. meeting in the Cabinet Room were the president’s brother Bobby, Rusk, McNamara, Bundy, and Lemnitzer. Beside him was Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric, who had taken the Pentagon lead on Russian nuclear threat issues. The other major players on Berlin policy were also there: Nitze; Berlin Task Force chief Foy Kohler; the State Department’s leading German hand, Martin Hillenbrand; and—so often during crucial moments of the Berlin Crisis—the outside agitator, Dean Acheson.

  Lemnitzer opened the meeting by reporting to the president on the “significant disagreement” within the Joint Chiefs about the necessity for a rapid military buildup. Air Force chief General Curtis LeMay and the Navy’s Admiral George Whelan Anderson Jr. shared General Norstad’s view that no large-scale conventional buildup was required in “the immediate future.” But Lemnitzer and General George Decker, chief of staff of the U.S. Army, agreed with McNamara that such a buildup was required right away.

  Rusk laid out Norstad’s logic that a Berlin dispute would escalate so rapidly to nuclear war that a conventional buildup would be irrelevant. Beyond that, said Rusk, Norstad feared that the conventional buildup could “degrade both the credibility and capability of nuclear forces.” In representing this view, Norstad had joined ranks with both the French and Germans against the president.

  As so often happened at complex times related to Berlin, Kennedy sought Acheson’s opinion. The memo summing up the meeting, drafted by Bundy, said with a tone of derision: “From that point on the meeting was dominated by Mr. Acheson’s arguments.” Bundy put it more graciously later: “As usual, Mr. Acheson was the belle of the ball.”

  Acheson had no patience for Allied sensitivities. He said U.S. officials at a moment of great national urgency were spending too much time getting agreement from the French, British, West Germans, and others, when it was the U.S. that would have to shoulder the burden. Acheson argued that the U.S. needed to move new divisions to Europe by November, irrespective of what the Allies might think or say.

  Acheson believed the president’s demonstration of intent by sending conventional forces to Europe would help “diplomatically and politically.” He disagreed that nuclear logic diminished the need for American conventional action. Serious military movement by the U.S. is “an ominous thing,” he said, that conveyed “the serious purpose of the American government.”

  Kennedy said he worried about “the gold drain,” meaning the cost of such a move. McNamara and Gilpatric assured him that further negotiations with Allies could help spread or defray the costs.

  A few hours after the meeting, Bundy would send a top-secret presidential letter to Norstad to which he attached the so-called Pony Blanket. Titled “U.S. Policy on Military Actions in a Berlin Conflict,” it would be approved by the president three days later as National Security Action Memorandum No. 109. Organized under four Roman-numeral stages, it laid out the graduated steps to be taken if the Soviets cut off access to Berlin.

  Stage I: If the Soviets and East Germans interfered with West Berlin access but didn’t block it entirely, the plan prescribed U.S., French, and British probes up the Autobahn of a platoon or less on the ground and a fighter escort in the air. The document noted that such a response was sufficiently limited to avoid any risk of war.

  Stage II: If the Soviets persisted in blocking access despite Allied actions, the West would escalate and NATO would begin supportive noncombatant activities such as economic embargoes, maritime harassment, and UN protests. The Allies would reinforce their troops and mobilize to prepare for further escalation. The document warned that without further buildup, Allied options would be limited and could create delays that could weaken nuclear credibility, threaten West Berlin’s viability, and erode Alliance resolve.

  Stage III: The West would escalate further against a continued communist blockade of West Berlin. That would include expanding ground operations on East German territory by such measures as sending three armored divisions up the Autobahn to West Berlin and establishing local air superiority through strikes on non-Soviet airfields. “Military overpowering of determined Soviet resistance is not feasible,” the report conceded, then added, “The risks rise, as do the military pressures on the Soviets.” Most controversially, Kennedy was calling at this point for global actions against Soviet interests. That would include exploiting U.S. naval superiority as part of a maritime blockade, which would further delay the moment of nuclear truth while diplomats bargained.

  That brought the report to the most ominous Stage IV: Only if the Soviets still did not respond to substantial use of Allied conventional weapons would Kennedy escalate to nuclear war. He would then have the choice of one or all of the following: selective strikes to demonstrate the will to use nuclear weapons; limited use of nuclear weapons to achieve tactical advantage; and, finally, general war.

  With considerable understatement, the paper warned, “The Allies only partially control the timing and scale of nuclear weapons use. Such use might be initiated by the Soviets, at any time after the opening of small-scale hostilities. Allied initiation of limited nuclear action may elicit a reply in kind; it may also prompt unrestrained preemptive attack.”

  It was a sobering document. Ten months into his presidency, Kennedy had laid out the military sequence that could result in nuclear war over Berlin.

  In his accompanying letter to General Norstad, Kennedy wrote, “This requires vigor in preparation, readiness for action, and caution against going off half-cocked.” He said all contingencies required rapid additions to his forces and deployment to the central front. He told Norstad that if the Soviets deployed sufficient forces to defeat the West, then the response, for which he would receive specific directions, would be nuclear.

  Kennedy argued to a skeptical Norstad—and by association, the French and Germans—that building up Allied conventional forces would not contradict the message he wished to send the Soviets that he was ready to go to nuclear war if necessary. “It seems evident to me,” Kennedy wrote Norstad, “that our nuclear deterrent will not be credible to the Soviets unless they are convinced of NATO’s readiness to become engaged on a lesser level of violence and are thereby made to realize the great risks of escalation to nuclear war.”

  A flurry of diplomatic activity—memos, phone calls, meetings—accompanied Kennedy’s preparations for war. As so often at times of high stress, the president asked a wide group of experts to weigh in. Kennedy had asked them to be frank, and his trusted ambassador to the United Kingdom, David Bruce—a former ambassador to Germany—did not hold back.

  Bruce said that through Kennedy’s acceptance of the Wall without any military response, the president had made the U.S. presence in Berlin more vulnerable and had eroded West Berlin and West German morale. The Soviets had always accepted the U.S. role in the city only because of the military impossibility of removing it.

  Bruce warned the president that the Soviet objective wasn’t West Berlin itself but rather possession over time of “West Germany with its immense resources.” He worried as well about Kennedy’s wavering on the American commitment to the long-term goal of German unification. Bruce told Kennedy that it was those promises that had convinced Adenauer in 1953 to refuse “the tricky but tempting Soviet offer of reunification in favor of alliance with the NATO countries.” In other words, Bruce was saying, Kennedy’s willingness to depart from this commitment invited a German response that Washington might not like.

  Using a captivating turn of phrase, Bruce argued that the reality of Germany’s division was not sufficient reason to give it official recognition as a permanent matter: “For no government in Western Germany could survive the open acceptance by its allies that what has at least until now been hope deferred is to be dismissed as forever hopeless” (italics added). Bruce was blunt: Kennedy had to face the historic burden of the problems he had helped to create. “We are close, I suppose, to the moment of decision,” he wrote. “I would consider it essential that we take, and make
credible, the decision to engage if necessary in nuclear war rather than lose West Berlin, and consequently, West Germany.”

  HOT SPRINGS, VIRGINIA

  SATURDAY, OCTOBER 21, 1961

  Kennedy sensed that time was short.

  Worried that Khrushchev might take military action soon, the president opted to launch a preemptive nuclear strike of a different sort that would reach Khrushchev as a humiliating blow at his October Party Congress.

  Kennedy decided to make public previously secret details about the size, power, and superiority of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Kennedy’s satellite intelligence was making increasingly clear the extent of American nuclear dominance, but he reckoned Khrushchev lacked similar intelligence on U.S. capabilities.

  President Eisenhower had never revealed what he knew about Soviet military inferiority because he did not want to accelerate Soviet efforts to arm up. It was lack of that intelligence that led Kennedy to falsely charge that Eisenhower had allowed a “missile gap” to form in Moscow’s favor. Ironically, Kennedy now argued that showing America’s hand was necessary to keep America safe. Not coincidentally, it was also smart politics.

  Kennedy feared that he was looking weak to Moscow, the Allies, and Americans, when in truth he was strong enough to defeat Moscow or any other country in any military conflict. The president thought it would be too belligerent for him to send that message personally, so he picked for the job the number-two official at the Defense Department, Roswell Gilpatric, who was already scheduled to speak on October 21 to the Business Council in Hot Springs, Virginia.

  It was an unlikely audience for such a significant moment, but the spokesman Kennedy had chosen was ideal. Gilpatric had become a personal friend of Jacqueline Kennedy, who called him “the second most attractive man” at the Pentagon, after McNamara. Kennedy liked and trusted the smooth, Yale-educated Wall Street lawyer. A young Pentagon strategist named Daniel Ellsberg drafted the speech, but the president himself collaborated on it with Bundy, Rusk, and McNamara.