Kennedy's Wars by Freedman Lawrence;

Author:Freedman, Lawrence;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2000-03-12T16:00:00+00:00

DETENTE ON HOLD

The Americans realized that relations were cooling again. The theme music of compromise was toned down. Ambassador Foy Kohler reported back to Washington that the Soviet leader had lost his bounce and vivacity.10 The strong economic growth, which had help support the regime, was no longer so evident as problems in the agricultural sector multiplied. In 1961 Khrushchev had described the United States as a “worn out runner,” to be overtaken by the Soviet Union in 1970.11 This now looked like another of his barren boasts. The Cuban ploy having failed, the Soviet Union still needed to repair its position, working to bridge the reverse missile gap by investing in military strength, even at the expense of hard-pressed Soviet consumers, whose hopes for greater prosperity were now being scaled down. Meanwhile Khrushchev lacked the strength to pursue either a more conciliatory policy or a more aggressive one. The intelligence community concluded in March that the cold war was at least temporarily on hold.

So for the moment, as Kennedy observed in a letter to Harold Macmillan on 21 March, it seemed that the Sino-Soviet dispute had made it less likely that Khrushchev would be able to offer concessions. If, as he surmised, Khrushchev did not care that much for a test ban, then the Chinese factor would probably dominate. This is why he did not agree with the prime minister’s proposal for a summit to sort out the inspections issue.12 He was prepared to explore just how far they could reduce the number of inspections, or whether they might present them in a more acceptable way to Khrushchev, but the politics of the situation looked to be against them.

Meanwhile, opposition to a test ban at home was gathering pace. On 21 February the five senior Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee privately said that they would be unable to support a treaty based on the current American position. Kennedy knew that as things stood, he was unlikely to achieve the two-thirds majority in the Senate necessary to secure treaty ratification.13 In congressional hearings the inspection issue dominated. In the administration the Joint Chiefs and McCone argued that a treaty would impede improvements in U.S. nuclear capability without any true guarantees on Soviet behavior.14 The political debate was now turning on speculative and hypothetical analyses of how the Soviet Union might be able to beat any system of verification rather than on broader geopolitical considerations.

The only pressure Kennedy was receiving in the opposite direction was from Britain. Harold Macmillan had long been convinced that détente of some sort with Moscow was vital and that there was nothing worth fighting for on the current East-West agenda. Nuclear testing had proved to be a divisive issue at home, and he saw political advantages in presenting himself as a man of peace. He shared Kennedy’s concerns about the Chinese nuclear program but, with his mind constantly wandering back to the two wars he had experienced, the idea that the logical outcome of nuclear proliferation might be a German bomb appalled him more.

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