Foreign Relations of the United States, 1948, Germany and Austria, Volume II

Policy Planning Staff Files: Lot 64 D 563: Box 20036

Minutes of the 286th Policy Planning Staff Meeting, Washington, September 28, 1948, 11 a.m. to 12 noon

Washington, September 28, 1948, 11 a.m. to noon

top secret

Present:	George Kennan	John Davies
	George Butler	Gordon Merriam
	Ware Adams	Carlton Savage

Ambassador Bedell Smith

Frederick Oechsner, P

Ambassador Smith gave his views on the outline for an NSC paper on Berlin. The following is not a quotation, but is the gist of his remarks:

I (Ambassador Smith) will give you my personal views on these questions. I have never made any secret of them, so you will probably find little new in them. I offer them solely as my personal views because some of the questions would clearly require general staff studies to provide adequate answers.

I preface these personal views with the remark that I regret very much that we are in Berlin at all. I know that some of our people in Berlin do not agree with me, but for what it is worth I have always felt that we should never have let ourselves get into an exposed salient like Berlin under such conditions. From the military point of view it makes no sense whatever to have U.S. forces in an enclave that could be chopped off with ease. From the political point of view, Berlin has become the important symbol it now is largely because we ourselves have made it so. However, that is all water over the dam; my hope for the future is that the U.N. will offer a chance for us to get out of Berlin.

Turning to the outline, the foregoing is my attitude toward the question of the importance of our remaining in Berlin. To leave Berlin would indeed, as I am told, throw appal [a pall?] over Western European hopes for security, and be an ill omen to the people of Vienna which might be next on the list. I am not competent to discuss the current talks with Canada and the Brussels Treaty Powers.¹

Regarding our ability to stay in Berlin, we could in fact stay there. The Russian pressure against us would continue persistently. They would not move in with troops to put us forcibly out of Berlin, but they could and would take indirect measures of many kinds to make it difficult for us to stay. It would suit them to let us stay on indefinitely, suffering the steady drain of the airlift upon resources diverted from our military preparations or from the ERP. Our position in Berlin would tend to have less and less meaning and purpose, but we probably could stay on there for a considerable time, at least as far as maintaining ourselves in our own sectors is concerned, although we could probably not accomplish much for the Germans there. Our present hysterical outburst of humanitarian feelings about the latter keep reminding me that just 3½ years ago I would have been considered a hero if I had succeeded in exterminating those same Germans with bombs. I do not expect the Russians to take any direct military action which would precipitate a conflict. They will harass the airlift; we may occasionally lose a pilot or a plane. Summing up I should say, therefore, that we can, if we wish to, stay in, Berlin, at great cost, at some hazard, and with diminishing effectiveness except for the business of supplying ourselves, mainly to maintain our symbolic presence there.

As to the likelihood of war, there is a real possibility of it in the Berlin situation. If we had no exposed salients like that, but instead a firm continuous line around our own zone—a line which the Russians could not cross without the onus of direct aggression, there would be relatively less likelihood of war because I believe that the Russians do not themselves wish now to face war deliberately, although this question is of course under constant review by them. They are unable to appreciate the violent reaction of our people to any loss of American life, so that there is of course the possibility of a miscalculation on their part of the probable consequences of harassing actions that they might take; but I feel so confident they would not now undertake a deliberate military attack on, say, one of our concentrations of aircraft at Wiesbaden, that I would not hesitate to go there and sit on the field myself. I do, however, think that although a clear-cut zonal line severing us from them would minimize the danger of armed conflict now, the confused relationships existing in Berlin and the corridors leading to it have present potentialities for incidents that could readily lead to war.

As for evacuating Berlin, the problem of getting ourselves and our equipment out is a simple one. The evacuation of Germans who have become openly anti-Soviet would be another problem. The Russians would oppose it of course, in every way possible. At the same time, we do now have a moral commitment to take care of these Germans as a result of what we have done and said lately with respect to them. As for preliminary steps to evacuating Berlin, as I have already said, the matter is now in the U.N. and I would hope that action in the U.N. will provide a means of getting out of Berlin.

I do not want to see us go to war over Berlin. The idea of moving the capital from Berlin to the juncture of the three major zones is, of course, logical and sound and I have always thought that this should be done.

As for the idea of placing Berlin under the U.N., I would say that any U.N. action that enables us to get out of Berlin would be very desirable.

Now that the case is in fact before the U.N., we should encourage any action that would get us out of Berlin. U.N. action looking toward the removal of all occupation forces from all of Germany would be another question, one in which we would have to consider first what could be done to reassure France about her security, maybe by stationing U.S. troops in France.

So much for the specific questions raised. Now for a word about the general outlook. I personally think that time is on our side in the relative strength of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. I think that, especially with our present plans in development, we are gaining strength much faster than the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union’s recovery from the war is progressing slowly. It does not compare with recovery in Western Europe, even in Moscow which itself is the show-case of the Soviet Union. I think that industrial potential is developing slowly there, and that military potential is likewise developing slowly. Without any evidence whatever to go on, I feel, simply from my “woman’s intuition”, that the Russians have not got the “A”-bomb and will not have it in quantity five years from now. They simply have not got the degree of technological precision for large-scale mass production required for atomic bomb processes. Their scientists’ notebooks are no doubt complete with all the necessary scientific data required but the Soviet Union simply does not have the degree of technological precision for mass production that it would take to make atomic bombs in quantity. I have no doubt they have been working as best they can at it and may even have already developed some simpler types of atomic weapons, but I do not think they would be in a position to use atomic bombs during the next five years. Speaking as a soldier, if I were told to choose, I would rather fight the Soviet Union five years from now than at present, because our potential is progressing at a much faster rate than theirs, and will last longer.

1. The reference here is to the negotiations in Washington during the summer and fall of 1948 for a North Atlantic Treaty. Documentation on these negotiations is included in volume iii .