73. Letter from McNaughton to Rostow, January 31
Dear Walt:
Henry Ramsey said yesterday at the meeting in Jacob Beam’s office that you thought someone should have a paper prepared dealing with the wisdom of signing the US-UK test ban treaty. He said that you were referring in particular to the points, in that connection, that I had made in my colloquy with Bill Foster at the meeting which you attended in Bill’s office on December 27.
There are two defects in the US-UK treaty which must be distinguished.
The first relates to whether that treaty sets up a system which would provide us with knowledge that a test has taken place.
This defect has for years been boiled, fried, poached and scrambled. It is old stuff. The argument is that the inspection system envisioned is actually not adequate to detect with sufficient reliability and accuracy clandestine underground shots. That is, the Soviets might pull some off without our knowing it. Everyone admitted that, from the technical point of view, there had to be some sort of a threshold and that, below that threshold, the detection system could not be relied on. Furthermore, there were many who believed that, even above the threshold, the system was sufficiently unreliable—especially when combined with severe limitations in numbers of on-site inspections and difficulty in carrying out on-site inspections—that the deterrence against even fairly large clandestine underground shots would be too small. In other words, the hardware people do not believe that the so-called Geneva system is [Facsimile Page 2] much good. The Defense Department has gone along with the treaty, I think, partly because it was not fully aware in the beginning of the defects in the detection system and partly because it was persuaded later on that the patent deficiencies might be more than compensated for by the political (and some military) intangibles emanating from having, in “closed Russia,” a number of control posts and on-site inspections.
The second defect is that the treaty, even if it performed according to the most wildly optimistic expectations, would inform us of Soviet [Typeset Page 215] tests only after they had occurred and therefore would permit the conniving Soviets to get a substantial jump on a trusting United States. This defect received almost no attention until the Soviets, in September 1961, sprang their atmospheric series on us.
This latter point is the one I was emphasizing at the meeting in Bill Foster’s office. It is the point which is relevant to Paragraph A(5) of the “General Themes” portion of the public relations document now being prepared by the Foster Subcommittee. The implication of that paragraph and of the oral statement you made at the last meeting of the Foster group is that our objections to an atmospheric moratorium do not apply to the US-UK all-environments treaty. There is an implication that the US-UK all-environments treaty is OK because it provides for “verification” and that an atmospheric ban (which could be by treaty) is not OK because there is no provision for “verification.”
My observations were two.
The first was that our preference for the US-UK all-environments treaty over an atmospheric-only treaty cannot be based on the fact that the former also bars underground tests. If anything, the US-USSR asymmetries are such that (as compared at least with an all-environments ban and perhaps even with no ban at all) it is probably to our advantage to have an atmospheric-only ban. It is probably to our advantage vis-à-vis the Soviets to have underground testing permitted while atmospheric is prohibited.
[Facsimile Page 3]The second observation was that, if our objective is to deter atmospheric tests simply by knowing when they occur, we would be in as good a position to do that under an atmospheric moratorium or treaty as we would under the US–UK all-environments treaty (in either case, we would know almost immediately and with high reliability when atmospheric tests were conducted); and if our objective is to avoid being caught with our pants down by the Soviet Union, we would probably be in a better position under an atmospheric-only moratorium or treaty than under the US–UK all-environments treaty (it is more likely that the U.S. will be psychologically prepared to maintain a state of quick-reaction testing readiness under the obviously fragile conditions of an atmospheric-only moratorium or treaty than under the tranquilizing conditions of the US–UK all-environments treaty).
This was all I intended to convey.
I recognize that there are factors cutting in the other direction. For example, it is somewhat less likely that the Soviets would violate a treaty with the long and publicized history and with all of the implementing paraphernalia of the one we have been trying to negotiate in Geneva than it is that they would violate one (say) ginned up on 48 hours notice just prior to the scheduled commencement of our atmospheric series and involving no elaborate physical implementa [Typeset Page 216] tion. (The analogy here is the formal wedding on the one hand and the elopement on the other; the former is more likely to stick.) Another important factor is that the US–UK all-environments treaty does indeed involve a measure of opening up of the Soviet Union—an item not appearing in any atmospheric-only ban. This point, of course, is not germane to my analysis, but rather involves an apples-and-oranges judgment in which the value of such penetration must be weighed against the considerations that I have outlined.
I was not suggesting that the United States should change its present policy supporting the US–UK treaty. However, I think we should be prepared for that contingency—especially if the Soviet Union uses its head and agrees to sign on the dotted line. (For your information, the Joint Chiefs of Staff have just submitted a paper to the Secretary of Defense pointing out that in [Facsimile Page 4] their judgment it would be unwise for the United States to sign the treaty now.) Also, although I did not suggest that we should consider pursuing an atmospheric-only treaty, the wisdom and appropriate timing of such a course of action certainly should be studied.
Sincerely,
- Defects in the U.S.?U.K. test ban treaty. Confidential. 4 pp. Department of State, S/P Files: Lot 69 D 121, Atomic Energy–Armaments, 1962.↩