18. Letter From Prime Minister Macmillan to President Kennedy0
Dear Mr. President: David Ormsby-Gore is back here after consultations and I believe that Dean is returning to Washington and will no doubt be telling you the same things. It looks as though the Russians have quite lost interest in the Geneva talks and that it is pointless to try to press Tsarapkin further there. The question is what to do.
In the ordinary way I think that you and I might address simultaneous letters to Khrushchev expressing the great importance that we attach to these negotiations and the serious consequences that would flow from their failure. The object would be to engage Khrushchev personally and publicly in the success or failure of the Conference and make it a test of his good faith in the whole disarmament field. If we adopted this course the messages might go in about two weeks’ time and meanwhile we would have to consider carefully their exact content and our future action should they meet with a dusty answer. My own feeling is that the Russians will only be induced to reconsider their present negative policy when they have been made to understand that this attitude if maintained will lead to a resumption of testing, the consequent spread of nuclear weapons, and will make renewed negotiations on general disarmament valueless. Just how we should get this across to Khrushchev and how we should play the hand thereafter could no doubt be worked out between our people.
However, I am writing to you personally on this because of your message about your possible visit to Khrushchev. I do not know what your present intentions are, and of course I have kept this news to the smallest possible circle here and the staffs in the Foreign Office know nothing of your intentions. It has occurred to me that, as an alternative to our sending these open letters, you could perhaps put emphasis in any message to Khrushchev on the importance of the Tests Negotiation. You might say that you are very disappointed by the lack of progress and express the hope that, if sufficient progress can be made in Geneva meanwhile, your meeting might be made the occasion if not for signature of the agreement at least for final discussions about it. I do not know what your estimate of the position is, but I suppose that such a course might involve you in publishing the fact of your meeting fairly soon in order to explain why you were prepared to continue negotiating patiently at Geneva and why you were not authorising an early resumption of United States testing. I imagine that it might be unwise to put Khrushchev [Page 53] publicly on notice that the subject of tests was the one important matter which you would particularly wish to discuss with him, because then he would no doubt say that Berlin was something that he would regard as of particular importance.
I should be very interested to hear what you think about this.1
Yours very sincerely
- Source: Department of State, Presidential Correspondence: Lot 66 D 204, M-K, 1960-1961. Top Secret.↩
- In a draft reply dated May 16, Kennedy stated that he might be meeting with Khrushchev. Since he did not wish to single out the test talks as the primary object of his discussions with Khrushchev, he also did not believe “we” should write letters to him on that subject before the meeting. Kennedy stated as a “preliminary thought” that if the United States did not “conduct a test prior to the resumption of disarmament negotiations in August of this year, the difficulties of our doing so thereafter would be much increased.” (Kennedy Library, National Security Files, Departments and Agencies Series, ACDA, General 4-5/61) See the Supplement. No final version of this reply has been found.↩