Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, Volume VII, Arms Control and Disarmament

165. Minutes of Meeting of the National Security Council⁰

Washington, March 28, 1962, 10:30 a.m.

The President opened the meeting by saying he was glad to have the Secretary of State and his team back;¹ that they had done a good job and he had heard from the Secretary, in particular, of the helpfulness of Dr. Wiesner, Commissioner Haworth and Dr. Press.

The Secretary of State said he wanted to report on three topics: testing, general disarmament, and Berlin. On testing, it was utterly clear that the Soviets would accept no inspection in the USSR, in any way, shape or form. They had made this position plain in public and in private; Gromyko had told the Secretary privately that even one foreigner loose in the Soviet Union could find things out that could be most damaging to the USSR. There seemed no room to negotiate on this point, nothing to talk about and no Soviet proposal except a draft of November which contained no provision whatever for inspection. The Soviets had argued that inspection was not necessary, adding hints that they had special instruments which could provide all the necessary information, but they had refused the challenge of Lord Home to produce their instruments or to deal with the arguments of Western Scientists on this point.

Thus the problem was that of getting our position clear to other countries. The Secretary felt able to report that in Geneva at least two points had now been made clear. One was that the notion of espionage is nonsense. The Secretary referred to the paper, prepared for his use by the U.S. Delegation, which made clear the impossibility of serious espionage under the system of control and inspection of the April treaty. Secondly, he thought the Neutrals now understood the difference between detection and identification. In making this distinction clear, the support of the scientific group had been particularly helpful. As a result, the Burmese had told the Secretary that a secret vote on these issues would go 12-5 for us against the Soviet Union, although for political reasons many delegations could not make a public statement on our side. The Secretary thought Brazil and Mexico might be very helpful. But he thought we had much more work to do with the nonaligned countries in general.

The President asked whether we should plan to make a statement on these matters, and after some discussion it was agreed that a draft should be prepared for possible use in the President’s press conference on Thursday, March 29th.² Such a statement might be based on a welcome to the Secretary and then go on to make some of these basic points in support of the U.S. position and in clarification of the adamant Soviet refusal to accept any inspection whatever.

The Secretary then pointed out that we would get pressure to delay our tests. Some delegations will urge us not to “wreck” the conference by testing. The Secretary remarked that Soviet testing had not wrecked discussion in 1961 nor had we received pressure from other countries not to talk to the Soviet Union because of its tests. We thought the Disarmament Committee’s work would go on for a very long time indeed, although there would be interim points like the reporting dates scheduled for June 1st. He had looked at the forward calendar and it looked to him that there would never be a really good time for testing. We must resist such pressure for delay.

Turning to the problem of general disarmament, the Secretary remarked that the Soviets had brought in a complete treaty covering complete disarmament by stages.³ But the Soviet position clearly allows only for inspection of disarmament and not of retained armaments. Gromyko had remarked to the Secretary that the attitude toward inspection which was evident on the testing issue would be multiplied many times in the field of general disarmament. The Secretary himself believed that the requirement for inspection would be much greater in the general disarmament field. There is thus no sign of an agreement on this critical point in the field of general disarmament.

There remained what the conference had taken to calling “collateral points” on which some agreement could perhaps be reached: examples were outer space, surprise attack, and the nondiffusion of nuclear weapons. But in the latter case the Secretary foresaw complex and tough negotiations with respect to our possible need for a NATO deterrent force. Gromyko had said that we must not use third parties in order to provide weapons to Strauss. He also noted that the Soviets wished a non-diffusion agreement to be quite specifically limited to the two Germanies, perhaps because a more general agreement might collapse for reasons external to Europe, like a Chinese failure to conform.

Mr. Foster, in response to a request for a comment by the Secretary, said he had only two additional points to make; one was the moderation of the eight neutrals, which was in large part the result of the Secretary’s own effective presentations. The second was that we did perhaps make a slight advance in keeping the conference on the procedural tracks we wanted instead of those desired by the Soviets. We have avoided making the Soviet treaty the main item on the agenda and we are securing agreement to our proposal to have two permanent co-chairmen, U.S. and USSR. On balance, the tone of the meeting was better than we had expected.

The Secretary then made the comment that from a number of sources the delegation had received the impression that Soviet armed forces may be significantly weaker than we think. Thus it had been argued that our proposal of a 30% reduction would create an imbalance against the Soviet Union, and some of the satellites had indicated that this imbalance would be produced because we were stronger in strategic forces than the Soviet Union. The Soviet Government also seemed embarrassed by our proposal for handing over 50,000 kgs. of nuclear materials because they did not wish to admit an inferiority of nuclear resources—so they had taken the strange course of asserting that 50,000 kgs. is an insignificant amount.

Mr. McCone asked the Secretary to comment on the difference between the present Soviet position of inspection and the position in favor of inspection that had been stated very plainly by Khrushchev in a letter to President Eisenhower in 1959. The Secretary said that the Soviets had clearly reversed themselves.

Then followed a discussion of means of influencing neutral opinion. It was suggested that one important forum was the UN, and Dr. Wiesner also urged visits to leaders of selected countries, because without face-to-face encounter one could not tell just what kind of ignorance or misunderstanding one might need to deal with.

[Here follows discussion of Berlin, space negotiations, British Guiana, Indonesia, and Laos.]

0. Source: Kennedy Library, National Security Files, Meetings and Memoranda Series, NSC Meetings, 1962, No. 498, 3/27/62. Top Secret. The source text, which is dated March 29, bears no drafting information. A summary of this NSC meeting from Gerry Studds (S/S-S) to various Department of State and ACDA principals, March 29, and the NSC record of actions of this meeting, March 28, are both in Department of State, S/S-NSC (Miscellaneous) Files: Lot 66 D 95, Records of Action by the National Security Council. A memorandum of discussion of this NSC meeting, March 28, was prepared by McCone. (Central Intelligence Agency, Meetings with President 12/1/61-6/30/62) See the Supplement.
1. Secretary Rusk returned to Washington from Geneva on March 27.
2. For text of the President’s statement on nuclear test-ban inspection at his March 29 press conference, see Documents on Disarmament, 1962, vol. I, pp. 215–217.
3. Reference is to the Soviet draft treaty on general and complete disarmament (U.N. doc. ENDC/2) submitted to the Eighteen-Nation Disarmament Committee on March 15. For text, see ibid., pp. 103–126.