109. Editorial Note
John McCloy, Presidentʼs Adviser for Disarmament, who was in the Soviet Union for bilateral disarmament talks with Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Zorin, met with Chairman Khrushchev on July 26 and 27, 1961. Ambassador Thompson reported on their discussions in telegram 323 to the Department of State, July 28. Khrushchev “asserted Sovs not testing clandestinely and assured McCloy would not do it in future either. Said strong pressure on him to resume tests because many inventions and discoveries had accumulated and designers want to test them. This pressure now stronger in view Berlin situation and threat of war if peace treaty signed.” Khrushchev “conceded no agreement in Geneva in sight since US would not agree to troika and Sovs could not abandon it.” For text, see Foreign Relations, 1961–1963, volume VII, pages 110–112.
In a July 28 memorandum McGeorge Bundy recorded the Presidentʼs decision to send Arthur Dean back to Geneva about August 20 “to make one last effort” to obtain Soviet agreement to the draft test ban treaty. Should there be no progress within a week, “the President will then announce that in light of Soviet folly he now has concluded that no workable treaty is possible.” Bundy also noted that the “President may, at some appropriate point, reach a decision to authorize stand-by preparations for tests of nuclear weapons, such tests to begin not earlier than 1962.” For text, see ibid., pages 114–115.
Secretary of Defense McNamara informed McCloy in a letter of July 28 that he was recommending that the Committee of Principals propose to the President the initiation of preparations to resume nuclear weapons testing. It now seemed evident, McNamara stated, “that the Soviet Union is not interested in a treaty to discontinue nuclear weapons tests except on terms unacceptable to the U.S.” McNamara proposed a sequence of events starting with “an early announcement that preparations for nuclear tests will start at once, but that the decision to conduct tests will depend on the results of test ban negotiations over the next five or six months,” and culminating in the resumption of tests if treaty negotiations were unsuccessful. McNamara stated further that, following six months of underground testing, ten tests “might be made in and above the atmosphere, on the surface of land or water and underwater, but designed to produce a minimum of radioactive contamination.” For text of McNamaraʼs memorandum, see ibid., pages 116–124.