35. Memorandum From the President’s Deputy Special Assistant for National Security Affairs (Rostow) to President Kennedy0
Mr. McCloy wishes to meet with you and the Secretary of State—if not with a wider circle—on Tuesday or Thursday1 of this week. He has a New York engagement on Wednesday2 which he would cancel if Wednesday is your only possible opening.
His items of business are these:
- 1.
- He must meet next Monday with the Russians on a bilateral basis. Before that time, he wishes you to clear his position, including especially the position that general and complete disarmament can only be achieved in a world of law. This is the fundamental proposition which he would set against the Soviet proposition that general and complete disarmament is, in itself, the objective, and that until general and complete disarmament is achieved, inspection and control must be on the basis of veto by the USSR.
- 2.
- He wishes to go over with you and Mr. Rusk his reply to the Soviet aide-mémoire on the test ban treaty.3 He states that he will have a better draft tomorrow morning than the one that was sent to you at Palm Beach.
- 3.
- He wishes a decision on what to do with Dean in Geneva. After Vienna, there is evidently little for him to do. The newspapers are beginning to mock the whole exercise. If we leave him there, we are also in the danger of falling into the Soviet trap of merging the test ban talks with the disarmament talks which begin on July 31.
- 4.
- He wishes to begin consideration of the effect of the Vienna meetings on what proposals we make for disarmament at the meetings which begin on July 31.
I called Mr. McCloy’s attention to the attached cable of June 9 from New York.4 Yost believed the USSR has overplayed its hand and is vulnerable to attack because it had bluntly stated that international controls are impossible without veto prior to “general and complete disarmament.”
[Page 96]I suggested that McCloy consider two fundamental principles in the design of his disarmament proposals: first, that we are prepared to proceed by steps towards general and complete disarmament in which the degree of effective international control would be proportioned to the degree of disarmament actually achieved; second, that we emphasize, as he proposes, that general and complete disarmament does demand effective international rules of law. I emphasized that we might wish to avoid the trap of being like the Russians in merely debating what the end of the road would look like and not proposing principles for moving along that road.
I also suggested that he consider using the problem of guerrilla war and its effective international control as an illustration of why general and complete disarmament requires not merely the destruction of arms, but the substitution for sovereignty of effective and enforceable rules of international behavior.