40. Memorandum of Conference With President Kennedy0
OTHERS PRESENT
- General Lemnitzer
- General Decker
- Vice Admiral Russell
- General LeMay
- General Shoup
- General Clifton
General Lemnitzer opened the discussion with a briefing on what happened on the Hill.
[Here follows discussion of JCS testimony that morning before the Senate Armed Services Committee on the call-up of reserves in the Berlin crisis and of aircraft procurement.]
General Lemnitzer then continued the discussion of the Committee reaction and stated that they had been very greatly concerned about the question of when the President might use nuclear weapons if we actually got into war. They also wanted to know how long we could fight a conventional war prior to employing nuclear weapons with the buildup now being anticipated and asked for. It was the sense of the Committee that we must prove our willingness and agree to use nuclear weapons if this crisis continues. They had the feeling that our de-emphasis on nuclear weapons might encourage Premier Khrushchev to think that we would not be willing and able to use nuclear weapons, and consequently, they urged the Administration to hold this line firmly so that Mr. Khrushchev might not misinterpret our conventional buildup.1
The President then talked about the difficulty in Central Europe with a conventional war and stated that he felt that the critical point is to be able to use nuclear weapons at a crucial moment before they use them. He inquired as to our capabilities of making such a decision without letting the enemy know that we are about to do it.
General LeMay first responded to this inquiry with a description of when and how SAC could be used and the amount of warning time under various conditions that the Soviet Union could derive from our attack approach. The President then asked several questions about the Soviet capability to detect and to react.
[Page 124]There was a further discussion of the command and control centers which now exist especially in regard to the NATO use of nuclear weapons. General LeMay pointed out during this discussion that there is a SAC Airborne Command post which could be used in case of disaster and Admiral Russell pointed out that the Navy has a Command Post afloat.
During this latter discussion the President directed that we get out all the letters of agreement with our allies, especially the British, the French, and the Canadians, to our consulting them before a nuclear attack is launched.
During this discussion, General LeMay told the President that we could take off from the bases in Spain without any previous notification, but all the rest had strings on them, one kind and another.
[Here follows discussion of the Berlin crisis and Cuba.]
General Lemnitzer then pointed out that the program on Capitol Hill was pretty well set, but that civil defense didn’t get much play in the hearing. The President asked some specific questions and General Lemnitzer said the Nike-Zeus was not mentioned, but that Senator Symington had made quite a point about manned bombers. There had been some discussion of the B-70, but the greatest concern in the Committee was the adequacy and modernization of our fighter bomber force.
One additional point from the Committee was that they feel we should take stronger measures to “fire up our production lines” for the long pull even though we may not be taking much end product from these production lines at the moment.
[Here follows discussion of Cuba and the Berlin crisis.]
General Lemnitzer then reported that the Joint Chiefs had been reviewing our overall National Security Council policies in an effort to derive a new statement of military policy. He pointed out that the Joint Chiefs had not confined themselves to the military policy section, but had studied and commented upon the overall NSC policies, but had paid the most attention to the military section. He said that this recently completed review had been forwarded to the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Defense had Mr. Gilpatric and Mr. Nitze both going over it and coming up with a paper of their own,2 which included portions of the JCS paper described above.
The President directed that they discuss this more completely at their next meeting, and, in the meantime, he would probably get a look at [Page 125] the McNamara paper too. (Note: This matter has been deferred as the result of the developments on the Berlin situation.)
[Here follows discussion of Berlin and NATO.]
- Source: Kennedy Library, National Security Files, Chester V. Clifton Series, Conferences with the President, Volume I. Top Secret. Drafted by Clifton.↩
- This issue was also discussed at the meeting of the National Security Council on July 20. (Memorandum by McGeorge Bundy; ibid., Meetings and Memoranda Series, 489th Meeting of the NSC)↩
- Apparent references to the July 5 JCS draft of military sections of a basic national security policy and the ISA draft then in preparation (forwarded to the Secretary of Defense on July 28). See Document 39.↩