245. Memorandum for the Record of Telephone Conversation Between Eisenhower and Burke1
SUBJECT
- Telephone conversation between the President and Admiral Burke, 1130, 26 Mar 1960
1. The President called me to discuss augmentation of the Polaris submarine program. Following are the highlights of this discussion.
2. The President pointed out that the Navy has quite a bit of money in the FY ’61 budget for attack submarines and said he thought attack submarines seem to have rather limited usefulness because other people do not have much shipping. He acknowledged that he [Typeset Page 1018] was not taking into consideration use of submarines to attack enemy submarines and pointed out that he wondered whether the Navy might consider using this ’61 money budgeted for attack submarines to be applied as long leadtime funding for additional Polaris boats.
3. I told him that the ’61 budget had money in it for 3 attack submarines in an amount of about $171M. I pointed out that this was about equal—not quite but within shooting distance of what the long leadtime items would cost for 6 Polaris submarines. I then explained that the disadvantage to this would be that it is partial funding. However, since we have already put in for long leadtime items for 3 Polaris boats anyway, I thought that Congress would understand such a change. The President said then that Mr. Stans had talked with him and had said that actual expenditures for 6 new ones would require operational authority in FY ’61 of only $200M. Completing these 6 boats would require $600M more in future years and the expenditure in ’61 would be only $21M. I said that essentially Mr. Stans was correct. The expenditures are not very great under such a proposal in ’61.
4. The President then indicated he thought we should do this as long as we were not unduly reducing our attack capability against enemy submarines by such a course of action. I agreed and said that, in my belief, over the long run such a course of action would be better. I pointed out that we can build attack submarines a little bit faster than we can Polaris boats primarily because we know more about the building process of regular attack submarines. I explained that taking such a course of action did not mean cancellation of attack submarines in FY ’61 but rather deferral until a later date.
[Facsimile Page 2]5. The President ended up the conversation by telling me to think over this proposition and toward the middle of next week come in and talk with Mr. Stans and Jerry Persons because he, himself, was going to be tied up with Prime Minister Macmillan.
- Source: Discussion of augmentation of the Polaris submarine program. Top Secret; Hold Closely. 2 pp. Naval Historical Center, Burke Papers, Originator File.↩