Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, Volumes VII, VIII, IX, Arms Control; National Security Policy; Foreign Economic Policy, Microfiche Supplement

10. Memorandum from Battle to Swank, April 21¹

April 21, 1961

The Secretary’s Remarks to the Disarmament Consultants

The attached copy of the Secretary’s remarks, as delivered to the disarmament consultants on April 14, is referred for approval.

The Disarmament Administration plans no distribution of the Secretary’s remarks, except for one copy to Ambassador Stevenson.

L.D. Battle

Attachment

SECRETARY OF STATE—DEAN RUSK

Comments to Consultants on Disarmament Problems

New State Auditorium—Friday April 14, 10:15 A.M.

Mr. McCloy, ladies and gentlemen: Jack, I was surprised to discover there were still four deans left at Harvard. They are most welcome. Let me say to you gentlemen that we are extremely grateful to you, all of you, about half of whom I find are old friends, for coming here to give us some emergency help on this very serious question we have in front of us. I’m going to speak very simply and very quickly if you don’t mind. This is Pan American day and the President is going down to the Pan American Union in a few minutes to make a speech and I have to join him for that. I’ll come back later for questions when we have a chance. I’m reminded a little bit of the story told by a Princeton colleague who reminded us that when a Royal Statistical Society was first organized in England in the middle of the last century, their first coat of arms was a large sheaf of wheat, loosely gathered by a ribbon, on which was a latin motto which translated “Let others thresh it out.” Incidentally, their professional pride got the better of them and they changed the motto a little later.

I’m not going to speak officially today in a sense because I don’t know what our official policy is going to be in these matters until you people tell us and Jack McCloy tells us. I would like to make some personal comments. The first is, whatever your particular assignment may turn out to be, and whatever the subject you are working on in connection with disarmament, in the background is the fact that “disarmament” is merely another way of looking at the entire range of American foreign policy in all of its complexities and all of its agony. Disarmament is not a subject which we can pursue off here on this trail while the rest of the world is grappling with its problems out there in the great jungle. To the extend that we extract disarmament we lose reality and we come up again, as Government’s have done so often in the past, with proposals in the field which we ourselves don’t believe and which others don’t accept as creditable.

I think we can assume that the reduction of arms is a fundamental objective of American foreign policy. We would for many reasons like to be able to reduce the arms burden, to limit the arms race and in this way find some way of reducing tensions. I will not take your time at the moment to talk about the cost of arms, but it staggers the imagination even to begin to dream about some of the things that the human race could do if this burden were lifted. I think we have to face these days, perhaps more than ordinarily, the possibility that arms themselves are a primary source of tension. When long range missiles loaded with hydrogen war heads are in position and ready to go, I think in a special sense we can say these days that arms are an independent source of tension, regardless of the other political problems with which we have to grapple. But there is no question, I think, about the readiness, willingness, of the United States to disarm if given half a chance. Indeed I would suppose that most of my adult life, and that holds for you, too, I have been living with the consequences of the weakness of those who were willing to keep the peace. I won’t review that sad record, but between the two world wars this country was almost completely disarmed; some of our finest soldiers in world war II spent 17 years as first lieutenants in a country which neglected its armed forces. When I was called to military service in December, 1940 as a reserve officer, more than a year after the war in Europe had started, we had 190,000 men in our army. After world war II when we demobilized so precipitately and suddenly, I have the awful feeling that we subjected the leaders of the Soviet Union to intolerable temptation and that our weakness was one of the reasons why the Soviet Union did not join wholeheartedly in the spirit of the United Nations. We almost had it made in 1945, and I feel that the United Nations could well have handled all of the issues which arose except those in which the Soviet Union played the role of rogue animal.

We have to think hard about what we mean by disarmament: under what circumstances we move for disarmament, how military posture relates to our total position in the world, and how we move step by step as rapidly as we can toward a tolerable world order. The path of disarmament negotiations almost certainly is going to be long, tortuous and complicated. It could be dangerous. My guess is that it is important for us not to rely upon esoteric gimmicks but to relate our disarmament programs to the total effort of our foreign policy and try to keep policy and strength, or policy and reduction of arms, closely in line with each other. There are going to be many technical and organizational questions to be faced. Even one of the most minimum necessity, such as an effective inspection system, is going to be extremely difficult politically to achieve, technically costly to install, and will present us with a great many problems of the sort that you will be working on.

I must say it is puzzling to me to how we relate an effort in the disarmament field to the political situation in which we find ourselves at the present time. We are in a period of vast and dramatic change all over the world. Were there no communists about, we would be in a period of instability for reasons we need not go into now. But in this period of change the Sino-Soviet bloc is moving with great energy, with great skill and sophistication and with substantial resources, to pursue what they call their historically inevitable world revolution. Anyone working on disarmament should, I think, read the statement of the 81 Communist Parties of December 1960, and the Khrushchev speech of January 6, 1961. Efforts in the disarmament field have to occur against a background of continuous Sino-Soviet pressure in Laos, against the UN in the Congo, in the Western Hemisphere, specifically in Cuba at the moment, in Viet Nam and in other critical points around the world. Sharp pressures on Berlin are just over the horizon. A new pressure is not yet exposed to public view,—I don’t know whether you know it or not, I picked this up—but the Viet Cong rebels in Viet Nam, for example, are now engaged in a systematic attempt to liquidate by assassination the government officials of South Viet Nam. This is going on at the rate of 40 a week—local administrators, school principals, government officials throughout that society, meaning an annual loss rate of about 2000 officials per year. This is an attrition rate that’s very hard to sustain.

What does that mean for disarmament proposals? We in this country occupy the junior hemisphere. If we are to retain freedom for ourselves and freedom of action in our policy, there may be critical times when it will be fundamental for us to project our forces across the vast oceans into the great majority hemisphere which contains most of the earth’s people and most of the earth’s resources. We are allied with more than 40 nations in different parts of the earth, in groupings of nations whose main purpose it is to keep the peace. These are not nations caught up accidentally in a fight between Washington and Moscow. You know we have almost no bilateral issues with the Soviet Union. If we were to try to make a list of the things of which we are arguing with the Soviet Union directly about in terms of national interest it would be a very short list indeed. The gap between Washington and Moscow, the tensions between Washington and Moscow, turn upon what we and others are afraid that the Soviet Union, the Sino-Soviet bloc, is going to do to someone else. In a certain sense we are the third force, we are the great stabilizing factor of security for reasonable men in parts of the world where they are under very serious pressure and threat of attack.

Then too, we have some serious problems out in the so called non-western parts of the world. What a pity it would be if the new nations of Africa should find themselves caught up in an arms race, even a minor league arms race, of the sort which has been developing in Latin America over several decades. The diversion of their resources and military effort would be a great pity under present circumstances, at a time when they need all of their resources for maximum economic and social development, for education and for the removal of sickness, ignorance, and misery. Yet when we talk with them, about the possibility of removing conflict to stabilize the arms position among themselves, we find that they are inclined to reply; “but my neighbor is getting arms from someone else,” or we find them coming to us and saying: “well now, we want some arms from you; if we don’t get them from you, we’ll get them from the Soviet Union” or we hear them saying to us: “look, you people haven’t been doing much about disarmament, these are prestige matters, you must not deny to us what you people in the white world obviously consider to be great elements of national dignity and power; therefore, if you disarm we will, but until you do, we won’t.” These are problems I think are important, because if these continents—if Africa, if Latin America, if Southern Asia, if the Middle East—get caught up in arms races stimulated and supported by the great powers, then we face some very serious and complicated problems.

Now, there are elements of common interest on which we might be able to build. I would suppose both we and the Soviet Union could agree that the prevention of a catastrophic nuclear war undoubtedly is a mutual interest of us both. Perhaps—we could agree, I’m not sure, that progress towards sound means of settling grievances and disputes is in the general interest. But this turns upon whether we are in an irreconcilable conflict or whether through national interest or other considerations it is possible to get some of our problems settled. I must say that this morning I’m not particularly optimistic because we have problems in Laos, in Cuba, and in the Congo, and in other places which make us take very seriously indeed the communist manifesto of last December 1960 and other evidence we have of their determination to move forward. Nevertheless, we must do our best, because the stakes are extremely high. If we can find ways to move toward a reduction of arms realistically, honestly, with no disturbance of our own relative position in terms of supporting the institutions of law and order and peace and in supporting the free world, then we must of course do it. We hope we can somehow get started. Not by running up a flag of general and complete disarmament, but by getting started on some specific steps on which we can build later progress. This is one of the reasons why I incline to put the greatest importance on these nuclear test ban talks in Geneva. Because, although it is not a significant major step in disarmament per se, it would get us started on procedures of inspection and control; it would get us started in breaking down the secrecy which has made it so difficult to move ahead in this field, and this would be a very useful first start indeed. There may be other ways in which we can take some first steps, and we need to explore those in every way we can.

I suppose you might find it a little surprising for the Secretary of State to appear to be so negative on the subject of disarmament. I think what I’m trying to say is that this is not a subject which can be dealt with in front of a cheering crowd in a football stadium. One may get the impression that we feel under great pressure from world public opinion to jump aboard the bandwagon of general and complete disarmament. Let me say here that world public opinion is important, and that world public opinion at the present time appears to favor general and complete disarmament. But neither world public opinion, nor history, will forgive the United States if we act irresponsibly in this era of our history in dealing with the construction of a tolerable world of order in relation to the threats with which we are now confronted.

The United States Disarmament Administration has produced some materials which I cannot here critically examine. I can tell you, and you can see from my remarks how true it is, that we are desperately looking for constructive and good ideas on this subject. And we hope that we can put together proposals which are first class, which are creditable, and which are realistic. I think it is time for all governments to pull back a bit from the sort of rounds of talks through which we’ve been going, since at least 1920, and to see if we can’t find some proposals which we can put forward with real commitment, real conviction, and with our own determination to see them through. I hope that we can somehow get out of a position which we ourselves even consider to be false. I would also say that we should not, I think, be cynical—that is you gentlemen and ladies should not be cynical—about the attitude of your own government in this field simply because you see that we are going in for a larger military budget this year. In our discussion groups we can expose in detail a little bit more about what we have in mind. When we talk about increasing our conventional arms we look upon that as a move toward stabilizing the situation, as a move toward reducing tensions, as a move toward reducing temperature, and as a safety factor which can be very important in this disarmament field. We hope that we will not be drawn into protracted and meaningless bickering and negotiations with other governments. We are determined not to make unwise concessions. But, on the other hand, we are determined to move forward if we can move forward realistically and with real promise. Because again, to wind up where I started: there is nothing, I think, in our foreign policy effort which would be more satisfying to the American people to discover a way to reduce this burden of arms in a world which was beginning to find a way to settle its disputes by other means.

We can’t wait until that world of order has come fully into being. We must do what we can, working at it, hard, continuously, and with conviction, dedication, and honesty. But it is going to be complicated and, because it is complicated, we have called together some of the best minds in the country to help us work it out. We are grateful to you and I’ll be seeing you again before you get through with your deliberations.

Thank you very much.

1. Transmits copy of Rusk’s April 14 remarks to the disarmament consultants. No classification marking on Battle memorandum. Remarks are Confidential. 12 pp. Department of State, Central Files, 600.0012/4–2161.