130. Memorandum of Meeting0
PRESENT
| The President | ||
| Mr. Robert Bowie | ||
| Mr. McGeorge Bundy | ||
| Mr. Carl Kaysen | ||
| Mr. Robert McNamara | } | for about the last half of the discussion |
| Mr. Roswell Gilpatric | ||
Mr. Bundy reviewed the calendar of decisions that are to come to the President with respect to NATO nuclear matters and indicated that none of these can be looked at individually. He mentioned the MRBM decisions, the problem of assisting the French missile development, the dispersion of additional tactical nuclear weapons to NATO strike aircraft. The President then asked whether Secretary Herter had not originally made the Polaris offer and he had not repeated it at Ottawa for two purposes: first, to dissuade the French from their course of building a national nuclear capability, and, second, to deal with the problem of whether the Germans would be stimulated to do the same thing. Since we are clearly failing in our first aim, is it wise to go ahead simply on the grounds of dealing with the Germans? Mr. Bowie responded by saying that he would put it in a somewhat different way. The French were by no means united in their support for a national nuclear capability. This [Page 367] was the idea of deGaulle and a rather small group around him. Many other Frenchmen opposed it. One of our aims in making the original proposal to commit a Polaris force to NATO was to offer to those Frenchmen who opposed the present policy an alternative which they could support and which they could offer to France. Mr. Bowie then went on to discuss the technical problems of the French missile and nuclear weapons programs, in particular, the difficulties the French will have in making a warhead small enough to carry on the missile they are now developing. For this reason our own experts believe that it will take three or four years beyond the present target date of 1967 before the French will have a usable nuclear-armed missile. Further, it will cost much more than the French now expect to spend. The President asked whether the continued denial of France’s wishes on our part won’t simply stimulate the French to combine with the Germans, whatever we offer the latter. Mr. Bowie indicated that he did not think the present German Government would, in fact, behave this way. In his judgment that government was strongly oriented to the notion of collective defense in NATO, and if we could provide a collective nuclear defense, they would welcome it. DeGaulle, on the other hand, was clearly against a collective defense, and it was for this reason that it was no use to attempt to move him toward a more cooperative relationship with NATO by meeting his desires in the nuclear missile field. These desires arise precisely from his preference for individual over collective defense and, therefore, it could not be in our interest if our policy had to be to outwait deGaulle and provide an attractive alternative to individual defense which deGaulle’s successors would welcome, especially under the pressures of mounting difficulties and costs in France’s own program. The President asked whether we were not offering MRBM proposal basically to the French and Germans and whether the others were simply uninterested. He further expressed concern that we were pouring our money into the ocean in this proposition in order to satisfy a political need whose use was dubious. Mr. Bowie agreed that the need was primarily political and not military but urged its reality and importance nonetheless. The President asked whether the Europeans really would satisfy their political desires through a force on which the U.S. still exercised a veto. Mr. Bundy explained our thoughts on how the processes of discussion in the North Atlantic Council could educate the European governments to the facts of nuclear life in such a way that the force, even though under an American veto, would still meet their concerns. Mr. Bowie pointed out that it was more appropriate to use the term “joint control” than the term “veto.” He distinguished the case of response to general nuclear attack in which there could clearly be no discussion, and any other case in which there would be discussion in which the other European powers would certainly want us to join. Secretary McNamara [Page 368] emphasized the consensus that there was no military need for the MRBM. He further stated that those who thought there was military need by this indicated a lack of understanding of the nature of the nuclear control problem which was in itself dangerous. On the other hand, he did grant the political need. He cautioned, however, that there was a possibility that the creation of this force would compete with the increase in Europe in conventional capability that was far more important. There was some general discussion on the relation of this force to stated requirements of General Norstad for missiles and their implication in competing with the conventional forces, and then the discussion broke off.
- Source: Kennedy Library, National Security Files, MLF. Secret. Drafted by Kaysen on March 16.↩