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is that the Defense Department can deploy a lot of collateral pressures; it
can do a lot of the things it advocates without getting the concurrence of
anybody else simply by moving ahead and creating a momentum. The State
Department, on the other hand, does not have such a constituency in the
country and the ACDA has even less. What influence would a foreigner
have, when all is said and done? The degree of influence they would have,
even if they were treated as an agency of the government, would depend on
what power they were thought to possess and what they were thought to be
capable of doing. Iceland will never have the influence of Great Britain,
for example, no matter how many consultative arrangements we make.

Consultation, which I strongly favor, is an escape for many Europeans.
It is advocated in Europe by many people who, if they didn't have that excuse,
would find some other excuse for getting out of the nuclear business and
preferably out of the military business. We have to be very careful, in
pushing our elaborate military theory, not to create a sense of impotence
in Europe. I have always believed that it is in the interest of the United
States to have some countries assuming their own responsibility in the nuclear
field. Soviet policy has consistently attempted to isolate the United States
in the nuclear field and to see all other countries denuclearized. For as
soon as that is done, all the pressures of all the pacifist groups, of all
the communist front organizations, and of all the sincere left-wing groups
in various countries are going to be focused on the United States. In my
view, it is not in our interest to be the only nuclear country in the free
world.

Now I would make three requirements for assisting countries seeking
nuclear capability of their own. The situation of such a country, taking
into account its location and opponents, has to be such that nuclear

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weapons are required. Secondly, its objectives should be at least to a
certain extent compatible with ours. Thirdly, its foreign policy ends
must be such that they do not generate threats of nuclear war in which we
are not interested. These three conditions are met only, in my view, in
Europe. Countries in the Middle East have too many quarrels among them-
selves which predominate over our objectives. In the Far East, it will
probably remain doubtful whether India's objectives really parallel ours
until or unless it is attacked. I would let things develop in Japan, too,
before making any final judgment, because rapid and dramatic changes have
occurred there very often.

But in Western Europe nuclear technology already exists, and by in-
digenous efforts. To pursue our present strategy, we'd have to break the
back of this nuclear technology; and any such course would strengthen
domestic forces in those countries that are basically inimical to us. This
is why I have, on the whole, favored supporting those European efforts to
which there already has been a substantial national commitment. The
formula of the McMahon Act, by which we can assist if a certain level of
technical competence has already been reached, can be useful here.

Now our assistance can take various forms. In Europe, I would favor
giving assistance to the programs that now exist, using our influence in
the direction of integrating them into an all-European framework with a
control mechanism in which we do not have a veto. (I don't believe much
in voting mechanisms anyway, for an issue as important as going to nuclear
war.) In other areas of the world -- if India, for example, found itself
confronted with a Chinese nuclear threat -- I would be in favor of something
like the dual-control arrangements that have existed in Europe: that is, I
would not give the Indians assistance with no strings attached. I think we
have to give up our passion for logical purity, which is to say, "if we do

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this for the French we must do it for everybody else". I would say, "we do it for those people who serve our interests". And if it does not serve our interests to help the Indians, we will jolly well not help the Indians. Such circumstances do not admit of solution like a classroom exercise in deductive logic.

Well, I have stated my views in rather general terms and I have talked much too long. I would like to conclude by again pressing the really fundamental point. I think we now have the technical capability to design almost any weapon system that anyone can imagine. But we tend to take refuge in debating technical gimmicks when all the time the real problem is political and psychological. If we want to know what is going to happen in NATO, it is infinitely more important to understand how our policies have affected the domestic political structures of the various countries with which we have had to deal. Our strategic doctrines and our methods of advocating them have, in a way, undermined the political parties and forces that formed NATO. We may well wind up with countries fighting hard for our strategic doctrine so that we won't be able to implement it.

We have a stake in such intangibles as the national morale of other countries, and you cannot program that sort of thing into a computer. People today speak of a lack of will in Great Britain, and there is something to it. If we are honest with ourselves, we have to admit that our policy in Suez broke the psychological back of the British (even though the British were perhaps unwise in their effort in the first place); likewise, our decision about SKYBOLT, notwithstanding that cost analysis in the Pentagon proved SKYBOLT an unrewarding weapon, was very rough on a country that had staked its entire military program on it. A decision taken 3000 miles away, in which Great Britain had no real part, scrubbed the whole bomber command of the RAF with its long historical tradition. It is quite possible, too, that

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a weapon which is 10th on our priority list may be the only weapon that
another country can afford. The pure cost approach to weapons does not
take into account many of the intangibles on which history often depends,
and in the area of such intangibles we are now heading into what will perhaps
be the most revolutionary and difficult period of our history. Unlike most
people, I believe that the next 10 years are going to be rougher than the
last 10 years. And now, ending on this happy note, I will answer questions.

QUESTION: Concerning the danger of building up a tradition of veto power, which you talked about in the context of what might happen in Latin America or some other place, do you think that that is already built in in the U.N.?

ANSWER: Well, I think there are various organizations in which there is already a built-in veto. To some extent this is true in the U.N., although a lot depends on what we do. If we had gone to the U. N. last October before the missile crisis and asked them what to do, we'd still be talking and the missiles would still be there. But once we had moved, the only way other countries could gain any influence over our actions was to endorse them. So, a lot depends on our actions. Then there are vetoes in the Organization of American States.

One of the big problems we have is coming to understand that our own
actions create situations which affect the voting pattern of others. If
we say we will act only if the U.N. approves, only if the OAS approves,
only if NATO approves, then the built-in vetoes that have operated on a
number of occasions will continue to operate. On the other hand, if on a
number of occasions it becomes clear that we are going to act on our best
judgment as to our national interest, regardless of what others say, we

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will be amazed, I think, at how many countries will support us. Not because they "like" us (the idea that countries "like" other countries is in any case rather a sentimental one), but because its the only way they can gain influence over our actions. In too many cases over the last 10 years, there have been built-in vetoes operating against us rather than against the Soviet Union -- in the U.N. and in some other institutions.

QUESTION: What do you think of the utility of the test ban?

ANSWER: I was hoping that I could avoid that question. Well, let me separate it into two parts. Let me speak first about technical arguments with respect to the test ban. On the technical side, one of the things that I find extremely disconcerting is that it is possible to constitute a panel of world-famous scientists who would prove that we are running no risk whatsoever. But it is equally possible to constitute a panel of world-famous scientists who would tell you that we're running an unacceptable risk to our National security. The way scientists have been used by the political process here is one of the most worrisome aspects of the whole enterprise. So, on the technical side, I would think that if we energetically pushed underground testing, and that if we can install a reliable system for testing in outer space, then we are not running an excessive risk.

I am, however, appalled by the manner in which the test ban was sold to the American public. That, I think, is going to be the worst price we're going to pay for it. When the President of the United States speaks about leukemia, bone cancer, and the like in words that Linus Pauling could have written; when he says that arms automatically produce war, or practically says that; and when he gives the impression that the test ban is automatically a step towards peace, then I get concerned about the moral disarmament of the West. I am worried, if it becomes government policy to argue that all weapons development is both futile and

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dangerous, about how one can get younger people to enter the field. I'm worried about what will happen two years from now when the Russians start turning on the pressure again (and this, I'm certain, is going to happen). If then all over Europe and Asia the President's words are quoted, that in a nuclear war the surviving will envy the dead, neutralisms may be inevitable.

Yesterday, Harriman said that the test ban went through because Khrushchev wanted to prove to the Chinese that the policy of peaceful coexistence works. A more fatuous statement cannot be imagined. The Sino-Soviet debate isn't about the ability of the Russians to make a settlement with us. If that were the issue, the Chinese would also be trying to negotiate a settlement so as to prove to the Russians that they can do it better. The real issue is much different. The only argument able to convince the Chinese that the Russian policy is right would be for the Russians to say, "Look, you suckers, you want to risk a nuclear war with the Americans. We are going to defeat them without a nuclear war." That is, the only convincing argument for the Chinese would be a demonstration that the test ban is decisively to our disadvantage. But I don't believe that that is what Harriman had in mind.

The notion that we have to pay a price to the Russians to prove to them that peaceful coexistence works seems to me to be a complete misunderstanding of the nature of the Sino-Soviet dispute, which we did not cause and which we cannot really affect very much. And the whole framework of this treaty -- the fact that there is a clause in it that says that we are going to see to it that the non-aggression treaty will be seriously discussed between us and the Russians -- means, in a way, that our NATO allies have been committed to a certain course in the negotiation of which they had no part.

One has to ask oneself, why are the Russians interested in this non-aggression treaty? They can't believe that if we are willing to launch an aggressive nuclear war, that a treaty is going to stop us.

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They must see in it a tool which they can exploit a year or two from
now.

So, all together, what I deplore is not the treaty itself. If the
treaty had been sold in more moderate terms, I would be willing to go
along. As it is, I deplore the political framework; I deplore the
fact that nine months after the Cuban missile crisis, American negotiators
are running to Moscow and slapping backs and acting as if absolutely
nothing had happened -- from which the Russians must draw the conclusion
that no matter how provocative they are, they can always relax tension
by just behaving in a more civilized way in personal relations. I
deplore the fact that the entire negotiations and the final settlement
are going to take place in Moscow. This enables Khrushchev to appear
as a great peace-maker to the Russian people. If, a year or two from
now, he starts the Berlin crisis again, he is going to be able to pose
as the one that has been assaulted by the West. The Russian people
will have had a visible demonstration that their man is peace-loving;
they will believe that we are the aggressors.

QUESTION: Would you comment on whether we handled the Cuban situation about as well as we could have, or whether we should have taken it as an opportunity to go in there and clean them out?

ANSWER: One of the occupational diseases of Harvard professors is that they always think they could have done things better than those in positions of responsibility. Speaking about it from the vantage point of irresponsibility, I think that we handled the Cuban crisis well during the week of the crisis, and then let it peter out in a very unfortunate way. A newly established communist regime 75 miles from our border is a threat to our security, not because of any danger that it will attack us, but because it is a symbol throughout Latin America of American impotence. If Castro had been overthrown at any stage, those

-27-

people in Latin America who are primarily demagogues catering to
the Left would know that if you challenge the United States you
just don't have a political career. This sort of consideration would
be more important in their calculations than building water works in
Rio de Janeiro, which is alright on its merit.

I don't think we should have let the Soviets off nearly as easily
as we did. We had insisted for years in the disarmament negotiations
on inspection, and when we finally had an opportunity to inspect arma-
ments, what did it turn out to be? -- some American sailors peering at
some shrouded shapes on Soviet merchant ships. So even the principle
of inspection was compromised in Cuba. The eagerness with which we
rushed out of the crisis must have taught the Russians that we were
as scared as they had been. I am not sure we should have landed --
after all, in Castro, we are dealing with a man who, while a communist,
isn't a disciplined communist. I think that by simply insisting on our
inspection proposals, we could have jockeyed Castro from one humiliation
to another. Since the Russians had already agreed to pull out their
missiles, they weren't going to fight a war, in my view, over the
issues that remained to be settled in Cuba. But the readiness with
which we accepted the international Red Cross as an inspecting agent,
and the ease with which we then let the communists negotiate themselves
out, was, I think, unfortunate. They might have learned from this that
no matter what they do, no matter what disadvantage they get into, they
can always extricate themselves and relax tensions with clever diplomacy.
One of the things that the "spirit of Moscow" is doing now is protecting
the Soviet garrison in Cuba. But that issue is finished now. I mean,
we can't start a Cuban crisis in the present heady atmosphere. So in a
way it's no accident that Castro, last Friday, the same day that we
initialed the treaty, could speak of revolutions all over Latin America.
He knows very well that we can no longer do anything overtly against him.

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QUESTION: I understood, I think, your criticisms of our various military and political policies, but I feel at a loss to tell anybody what you propose that would give a reasonable assurance of the survival of the United States for the next 10 or 20 years -- or however far you want to look.

ANSWER: I don't like the method of discussion in which, in order to point out a weakness, you necessarily have to know a remedy. Even though I possess the typical lack of humility of Harvard professors, I do occasionally admit that 20,000 people in the State Department and 30,000 people in the Defense Department could come up with a better solution than I if they put their mind to it. I don't pretend that I have all the answers. I don't have to be able to set a broken bone in order to recognize that a bone is broken. I am not here to argue that I have a master plan and that the world would have been safe if only Washington had accepted the details of my prescription when I was commuting regularly to Washington. It is much more complicated than this. All I can do is indicate some directions in which I think we ought to go.

I am impressed in Washington by the degree to which knowledge of the direction in which the top people want to go affects the specific proposals that are made from lower down. If it is known that the Secretary of Defense and the President are very skeptical about tactical nuclear weapons, you will not get very many sophisticated plans for tactical nuclear weapons. You'll then get either arguments to prove how these weapons cannot be used or proposals of a lobbying sort which make extreme claims. If it is known that the Chief Science Advisor and the President have serious doubts about weapons development, this puts a certain crimp on the thinking of the people further down. If it is known that the President wants certain kinds of negotiating proposals, he'll

-29-

get these kinds, and if it is known that he doesn't want them, then
on the whole he won't get them. So a lot depends on what the top
people want.

Now, you ask me the direction in which I would try to go. I will
mention a few suggestions. In the strategic field, I would continue the
development of a posture of a flexible response, but I would decrease
the emphasis on it as the mainstay of our NATO policy. I would pursue
flexible response as something that we can afford, something that might
come in handy, but I would not hang our whole NATO policy on it. I
would also decrease the pressures we have been applying in behalf of
conventional build-up (I'm speaking about NATO policy); I'd settle for
a re-equipment of the divisions that are now there and for a standard-
ization of their logistics. Thirdly, I would re-study the whole question
of tactical nuclear weapons and build it more integrally into our
strategic doctrine. Fourthly, I would be much more sympathetic to the
strategic nuclear aspirations of the Europeans, not simply from a
purely strategic point of view, but from the point of view of political
and psychological implications. I would show more compassion for their
concerns. They live on a continent covered with ruins which testify to
the fallibility of human foresight. The fact that they want to protect
themselves against the worst contingency does not strike me as dis-
honorable. Those who say that everything is going to be well are very
often evading responsibility.

Fifthly, I would try to make a different analysis as to who our
friends are and who our opponents are in these countries. I don't
believe that everybody on the Left is necessarily our friend and that
everybody in the Center or on the Right is necessarily our enemy. I
would place much more emphasis on close political consultation and
less on homogeneity of strategy. In the underdeveloped areas,

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I believe I would take a much stronger stand against people like Sukarno and Nasser when they send military forces outside their territory. I think that one of the chief lessons the underdeveloped countries have to learn is that we can vindicate our interests and that we will do so. In view of the way the leaders of these countries deal with their domestic problems, it seems a terrible misconception to believe that in foreign policy they would make their judgments entirely on the basis of abstract morality.

So, there are many things I would do differently. Now many of the people who are now in power in Washington are old friends of mine. They are all people of superior intelligence. Even though I speak here very flippantly, I can assure you that it was a very painful decision for me to go into opposition to people with whom I've been associated ever since I was a graduate student, and whom I admire very much, and who are in many ways the bulk of my friends. I have not gone into opposition because I think they're a hundred percent wrong. I think that the difference between successful and unsuccessful policy from now on isn't going to be measured in orders of magnitude as atomic and hydrogen explosions. Instead, differences are going to take the form of new answers. My concern is that we are missing the nuances. Much of what I said is consistent with much of what is being done, but the nuances would be different. I believe that those nuances make a great deal of difference.

**QUESTION:** What's the matter with Congress? Why doesn't Congress participate in some good discussion on these matters?

**ANSWER:** Well, I think there are a number of reasons for it. One is that the problem is to find new answers. The Congress is well equipped to find scandals, or to find things that are obviously wrong. But it is hard to

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demonstrate that, once you have sold out in New Guinea, you make a
crisis in North Borneo almost evitable. One of the things that the
people in Washington always say when you argue with them is, "We get
extreme pressures here and extreme pressures there, but we move in the
middle, and are flexible and adaptable. This is the wise course." The
trouble is that once other countries know that that's the way you are,
they generate more of the pressures that you claim you are trying to
avoid. If the United States doesn't operate according to some fixed
concept, then the only way you can get the United States to act is by
creating pressures right and left. That, I believe, is what happened
in New Guinea. I couldn't care less whether the Dutch are in New
Guinea or not, but the conduct of affairs there was appalling. The
Russians sold a lot of arms to Indonesia, the Indonesians then landed
paratroopers in New Guinea, the Dutch appealed to the U.N., the
Secretary General of the U. N. announced the startling doctrine that
he can intervene only when both parties agree (in other words, the
U.N. can protect an attacked country only if the aggressor agrees to
having it protected), and then the United States used its influence
to get the Dutch out. That sort of thing, I think, apart from the
merits of the dispute, creates an atmosphere favorable to more pressures
against the United States all over the world.

Now how can you prove that before a Congressional Committee? It is
an assertion depending on intangibles.

The second problem is that Congress, like most American leaders,
really concentrates on problem solving. If you have a problem, you
then get a lot of focus on it from most Americans. The real problem in
foreign policy, however, is to prevent problems from arising. And that

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you can do only on the basis of educated guesses. If in 1936 the
French had moved against the Nazis, we wouldn't know today whether
the Nazis had been aggressors or moderate nationalists. I cannot
prove to you today that our present strategic doctrine and overly
sophisticated weapons demoralize the Europeans; I may be absolutely
wrong. Ten years from now we'll know. By that time it will be too
late to do something about it. This kind of thing is very hard to
put before Congress, and in any case few congressmen have enough
confidence to take on the Executive Branch. We make a great fetish
of the expert. When McNamara gives you his "military judgment" that
the test ban is absolutely safe, he isn't actually giving you his
military judgment - he's giving a series of educated guesses based on
a lot of information. But he can't even get into the question of its
impact on the morale of the Europeans. Moreover the emperical
evidence available is almost the opposite of what I have asserted here,
because we can always find a lot of people to tell us what we want to
hear. Human psychology, the structure of Congress, and the nature of
the modern executive branch, make it very, very hard to get a consistent
opposition going.