The Other Missiles of October

Eisenhower, Kennedy, and the Jupiters, 1957-1963

Philip Nash

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2000
• Print ISBN: 9780807846476, 9780807823392
• eBook ISBN: 9780807863565
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Shedding important new light on the history of the Cold War, Philip Nash tells the story of what the United States gave up to help end the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. By drawing on documents only recently declassified, he shows that one of President Kennedy's compromises with the Soviets involved the removal of Jupiter missiles from Italy and Turkey, an arrangement concealed from both the American public and the rest of the NATO allies. Nash traces the entire history of the Jupiters and explores why the United States offered these nuclear missiles, which were capable of reaching targets in the Soviet Union, to its European allies after the launch of Sputnik. He argues that, despite their growing doubts, both Eisenhower and Kennedy proceeded with the deployment of the missiles because they felt that cancellation would seriously damage America's credibility with its allies and the Soviet Union. The Jupiters subsequently played a far more significant role in Khrushchev's 1962 decision to deploy his missiles in Cuba, in U.S. deliberations during the ensuing missile crisis, and in the resolution of events in Cuba than most existing histories have supposed.

1 WE CANNOT DENY THEM TO OUR ALLIES

EISENHOWER’S IRBM OFFER TO NATO 1957

The Joint Chiefs of Staff have observed that the interdepartmental activity in connection with preparation of subject papers [for the upcoming NATO summit] is somewhat precipitous, if not slightly frantic. They are convinced that, in the current atmosphere, commitments may be made which will provide cause for regret at a later date.

JCS chair Twining to Defense Secretary McElroy, 21 November 1957

The Sputniks are the bows and arrows of tomorrow. You Americans will find something to top them.

Senior official, Turkish Foreign Office, December 1957

The governing body of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the North Atlantic Council (NAC), held another of its semiannual ministerial-level meetings on 16–19 December 1957, but this time it was something special. For the first time since the alliance was founded in 1949, the heads of the member governments—save Portugal’s dictator, Antonio Salazar—would themselves represent their countries. It was the greatest gathering of leaders in Paris since the Versailles Conference of 1919. President Dwight D. Eisenhower and other alliance leaders felt this grand occasion necessary as a response to the October launch of the Soviet space satellite, Sputnik. Although the Eisenhower administration at first dismissed it—one official calling it “a silly bauble”— Sputnik had quickly cast a pall over the alliance because of its grave implications for Western security.¹ Here in Paris, two months after the Soviet breakthrough, was a widely publicized event that Eisenhower and others hoped would restore the West’s sagging morale.

Adding to the drama was the mild stroke Eisenhower had suffered on 25 November. For several days, as his subordinates anxiously discussed the murky issues of disability and succession, it looked as if Ike would not go to Paris. The frustrated president, for his part, established his ability to attend the conference as a test of whether he would remain in office or resign. “I’m going to take this trip if it kills me,” Eisenhower declared. “This is my job. I am going to run this damn show.” Luckily, he made a speedy recovery, and just six days before the meeting was to start, doctors declared him fit to attend. Still, he flew across the Atlantic at low altitude to minimize the strain on his heart. In his condition, he seemed to embody the frailty of the alliance itself as Sputnik continued to orbit overhead.²

On the first day of the summit, Eisenhower and Dulles joined the other heads of government in the Palais de Chaillot, around a large table with the four-pointed NATO emblem at its center. After the ailing Eisenhower delivered brief words of encouragement, his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, tabled the U.S. proposals. Chief among them was the U.S. offer, as Dulles put it, “to make available to other NATO countries intermediate-range ballistic missiles, for deployment in accordance with the plans of SACEUR,” NATO’s military commander.³

A precedent for NATO conferences had produced a first for NATO policy: for the first time, NATO would have the opportunity to deploy ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear warheads deep inside Soviet territory. This chapter traces the history of the Eisenhower administration’s decision to make the IRBM offer and the allies’ agreement, in principle, to accept. It then attempts to assess both the decision itself and the process by which U.S. officials arrived at it.

ORIGINS OF THE FIRST OFFER

“The decisions which we make today in the fields of science and technology,” the late Solly Zuckerman once wrote, “determine the tactics, then the strategy, and finally the politics of tomorrow.”⁴ He might have written these words about U.S. intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) in the 1950s, for the Eisenhower administration’s decision to offer them to NATO Europe was influenced by its decision to build the systems in the first place. With a range of seventeen hundred miles the missiles could not, with some exceptions, reach targets in the Soviet Union from U.S. or U.S.-controlled territory. The missiles embodied a “technological imperative”: their very specifications meant they almost certainly required bases in friendly countries relatively near the USSR—as well as the agreement of those countries and whatever that might entail.

No real program to produce an IRBM existed until 1955. Early that year, the Technological Capabilities Panel (or “Killian Committee”) of Eisenhower’s Science Advisory Committee concluded that a ballistic missile with a seventeen-hundred-mile range could be developed with greater ease, speed, and certainty than could its intercontinental counterpart (ICBM). The panel recognized that the envisioned proximity of IRBM sites to the Soviet Union would increase their military vulnerability and that “political considerations” might place “certain limitations” on their establishment abroad. But for the purpose of countering the Soviets’ own prospective IRBM, increasing the United States’ chances of achieving a ballistic missile capability, and “further strengthening [its] striking power,” the panel recommended that the United States develop an IRBM.⁵

President Eisenhower responded by approving an IRBM program, but at this stage his administration considered its international political implications only in limited terms. In August 1955, Eisenhower and U.S. Air Force chief of staff Nathan Twining questioned whether overseas bases for IRBMs would be available in the long term, while Secretary Dulles cited the bases’ “doubtful” nature as a reason to pursue the ICBM concurrently. The following month, Dulles’s undersecretary, Herbert Hoover Jr., wondered whether allies would host IRBM bases at all. But despite such doubts, the National Security Council (NSC) omitted the deployment problem in directing the State Department to study the IRBM program; policymakers seem to have been concerned only with what impact a Soviet ICBM or IRBM would have if the United States had no equivalent capabilities.⁶

The resulting study endorsed the IRBM program, and Dulles’s concern about the deployment issue did not prevent him from staunchly supporting the missile’s prompt development. Eisenhower, too, focused on obtaining the missile and not on the implications of its deployment. By December 1955, he was “absolutely determined not to tolerate any fooling” with the two missile programs. The United States simply had “to achieve such missiles as promptly as possible,” he said, “if only because of [their] enormous psychological and political significance.” The “United States had to have a reliable missile system quickly,” he reportedly insisted, “even if he had to run the project himself.” Therefore, the president directed “that the IRBM and ICBM programs should both be research and development programs of the highest priority above all others.” Thus the development of an IRBM—in reality two nearly identical IRBMs, the air force “Thor” and the army “Jupiter,” soon objects of a controversial rivalry—proceeded with a renewed sense of urgency.⁷

Officials at lower levels, particularly in the U.S. military, did devote some attention to deployment at a fairly early stage. The air force, ultimately given control of both IRBM types, formulated plans by early 1956 calling for placement of eight fifteen-missile squadrons in Great Britain. It no doubt selected this host for several reasons. It was well suited geographically, a safe distance from NATO’s front line, and yet well within IRBM range of the western USSR. It was the only U.S. ally that had already joined the nuclear club, a fact that minimized fears of proliferation, and the two countries even before 1955 had begun discussing joint production of an IRBM. The possibility of distributing IRBMs more widely among other NATO allies and sharing control over nuclear weapons with them occurred to military and State Department officials, as did the possibility of protests by such allies over a U.S.-U.K. IRBM deal that excluded them. Despite this, the infant IRBM deployment program remained a bilateral Anglo-American endeavor.⁸

Through 1956, however, no explicit, sustained effort to negotiate IRBM deployments in Britain materialized. In July, air force secretary Donald Quarles raised the issue “very informally” with top British defense officials, whose “initial reaction was rather favorable.” And yet, while low- and mid-level discussions continued through the end of the year, by October the Eisenhower administration had decided not to pursue an agreement for the time being, apparently because of bureaucratic squabbling and the significant financial burden involved in deployment. Defense Department difficulties in formulating a deployment plan further hampered progress.⁹

The Suez crisis of October-November 1956 propelled the IRBM issue to the highest level of decision making. Suez caused the greatest rift in the Anglo-American “special relationship” since the end of World War II and shook the whole Atlantic alliance to its foundations. Both Washington and London eagerly desired to patch things up, especially after Prime Minister Anthony Eden, who had presided over the Suez disaster, resigned in January 1957. His replacement, Harold Macmillan, was an old friend of Eisenhower’s, having served as his British political adviser in North Africa during World War II. Thus a solid personal relationship now cleared the way for reconciliation, as well as cooperation on the deployment of IRBMs.¹⁰

THE FIRST OFFER: BERMUDA, MARCH 1957

Eisenhower and Macmillan quickly agreed to meet in March in Bermuda. The meeting’s most important objective, the State Department argued in a paper approved by Dulles, was “to restore confidence in the Anglo-American relationship without detracting from the achievement of U.S. policy goals in other areas.” For public purposes, this required “reaching the optimum number of agreements with the British on specific U.S.-U.K. problems of a type which [could] be made public.” The British were of like mind.¹¹

The particular IRBM deployment plan that would help meet these mutual goals emerged first from high-level military discussions in December of the previous year and then from talks between the countries’ defense ministers at the end of January. The United States would hand over to the British four fifteen-missile squadrons, with Thor tentatively the chosen system, by the end of 1960; the warheads, in accordance with legal requirements imposed by the McMahon Act, would remain in U.S. custody. A joint decision would be required for launch, effectively giving each partner a veto.¹²

Eisenhower and Macmillan met in Bermuda on 21–24 March 1957. As agreed beforehand, numerous other issues, such as Cyprus, nuclear testing, and the Suez Canal, occupied the agenda. When the IRBM issue arose, the president made it clear that the deployment was dependent on successful development of the missile, an achievement then still only in prospect. He also understood that the IRBM might be superseded in the future by improved missiles of some type. For these reasons, Eisenhower wanted to avoid a detailed, binding agreement for the time being. Rather, in what the president later called “a commitment of signal importance,” the two leaders agreed in principle to deploy four IRBM squadrons in Britain. “Certain guided missiles,” the conference communiqué inconspicuously stated, “will be made available by the United States for use by British forces.” Immediately after the conference, pending successful development, Eisenhower approved corresponding production of four squadrons of IRBMs.¹³

The British had several incentives to accept IRBMs, apart from sharing the desire to restore amicable relations. First, the U.S. IRBMs would appear at least five years before their own IRBM, the “Blue Streak,” promised to and would thus satisfy the need for missiles in the meantime. Indeed, the deployment of U.S. systems might yield design information useful in Blue Streak development or, conversely, permit cancellation of Blue Streak altogether at a significant savings. Second, the missiles also fit in nicely with the Macmillan government’s new defense strategy, taking shape at this same moment in the form of the “Defence White Paper.” The British equivalent of Eisenhower’s “New Look,” this strategy called for conventional force reductions and an offsetting reliance on nuclear weapons, and the Thors would facilitate it. Third and most important from their standpoint, the British saw an IRBM deal as a wedge with which they could finally reestablish the formal nuclear partnership with the Americans that the latter had dissolved in 1946.¹⁴

As for the United States, it too had multiple reasons for making the Thor offer, apart from the pressing needs of alliance politics. First, the Eisenhower administration remained interested in deploying a strategic nuclear missile—that is, one capable of hitting, and thus deterring, the Soviet Union—as soon as possible. The IRBMs still promised to be the first such systems available, so the question remained not whether but where to deploy them. Second, more specifically, IRBMs might deter the Soviets from repeating the sort of nuclear missile rattling in which they had engaged during the Suez crisis. Third, defense officials continued to believe that Britain would be the best country in which to deploy them. And fourth, the Thors might convince the British to abandon Blue Streak. This would indirectly strengthen Western defense by preventing wasteful duplication and preserving British funds for conventional forces, while it would also head off what might become a fully independent British missile capability.¹⁵

The United States had, in short, a variety of political and military reasons for making the IRBM offer. For the man who mattered most, however, the political reasons carried much greater weight. Eisenhower had summarized his view of the IRBMs during the conference, explaining, according to official minutes, that the weapon was “one of tremendous psychological importance, although he was inclined still to discount its military significance.” It appears from the context that Eisenhower was also speaking of missiles in general, as he did on other occasions, and that he meant more the psychological benefit of producing and having missiles than of deploying them abroad. Nevertheless, the key fact remains: Eisenhower still supported the deployment of IRBMs for political reasons—first, to develop a ballistic missile to facilitate the deterrence of Soviet threats as soon as possible, and second, to help repair the Anglo-American relationship.¹⁶

Senator William Knowland (R-Calif.) raised the issue of reaction in the rest of the NATO alliance in a meeting held upon Eisenhower’s return from Bermuda. Dulles “thought there would be some but not great difficulty,” because the United States already had nuclear weapons in Europe and because Britain was the best site for IRBMs. The president added that the United States should rely on indigenous crews for nuclear weapons whenever possible, by which he may have implied that additional IRBMs should be more widely deployed in western Europe. But Dulles’s response was a little weak, for he neglected three points. First was the important difference between IRBMs and existing nuclear systems in NATO, namely, that the IRBMs could reach the Soviet Union proper. Second was the issue of joint control, which the British could now expect and which others might envy. And third, the other allies might not agree that Britain was the best site. One wonders how much serious thought Dulles, or any other senior official for that matter, devoted to this interaction of relations with Britain and relations with other NATO countries on the IRBM issue. Dulles’s deputy undersecretary Robert Murphy had raised the question in January. He opposed making the IRBM offer until they “had more time to consider the best way to proceed with IRBM deployments in general, not only in the United Kingdom but elsewhere in the world.” Such considerations thus did occur before Bermuda, but as in 1955, they had no effect. The United States offered IRBMs to Great Britain only—and Great Britain accepted.¹⁷

ORIGINS OF THE SECOND OFFER

Ike thought Bermuda had gone well. It “was by far the most successful international conference that [he] had attended since the close of World War II,” he later recalled, one that did “much to restore Anglo-American understanding.” Prime Minister Macmillan agreed. Yet one of the summit’s main substantive accomplishments, the tentative IRBM agreement, made little headway toward finalization for some time thereafter.¹⁸

Although the United States had a draft IRBM agreement ready by mid-April, several issues combined to delay fulfillment of the Bermuda agreement into the fall of 1957. These included the costs, estimates of which soared during this period, and how they would be distributed; the manner in which the United States would provide the Thors, whether by sale or lend-lease; British interest in extending their range and ultimately perhaps equipping them with British warheads; physical control of the missiles; the conditions under which they would be used, including their relationship to NATO and its plans; target selection; and the timing of the agreement. The Thor was still in its development stage, and at least the U.S. side felt there was time to resolve these issues. But neither the U.S. nor the British governm...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• THE OTHER MISSILES OF OCTOBER
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• MAPS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 WE CANNOT DENY THEM TO OUR ALLIES
• 2 TRYING TO DUMP THEM ON OUR ALLIES
• 3 FARCE & STATECRAFT
• 4 THE OLD FRONTIER
• 5 GODDAMN DANGEROUS
• 6 A VERY TIDY JOB
• CONCLUSIONS
• NOTES
• WORK CITED
• INDEX