Sleepwalking With the Bomb by John C. Wohlstetter Read Free Book Online

well not be believed, flexible response enabled the U.S. to decide what level of force would be needed on a case-by-case basis.
    The Western powers had agreed never to launch a nuclear “first strike” but retained the option of “first use” of nuclear weapons given a conflict already under way. That was essential to prevent the Soviets from overrunning Western Europe by sheer weight of numbers. As Winston Churchill put it in 1948:
Nothing stands between Europe today and complete subjugation to Communist tyranny but the atomic bomb in American possession.… What do you suppose would be the position this afternoon if it had been Communist Russia instead of free enterprise America which had created the atomic weapon? Instead of being a somber guarantee of peace and freedom it would have become an irresistible method of human enslavement.
     
    Proof of this was provided in 1948, at the outset of the Berlin Airlift. President Truman let word leak that U.S. bombers capable of carrying A-bombs were deployed to Britain. Duly warned, Stalin dared not shoot down Allied planes dropping supplies to Berliners.
    The first test of the Kennedy administration’s resolve came right away. In April of 1961 the infamous “Bay of Pigs” invasion of Cuba was easily crushed by the forces of the charismatic revolutionary Fidel Castro. At a crucial moment during the operation, Kennedy lost his nerve and abandoned the Cuban exiles that had landed on the beach. They were slaughtered or imprisoned by Castro’s forces.
    Only six weeks after this embarrassing failure in Cuba came another test, a summit in Vienna with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev to discuss divided Berlin. U.S. intelligence described the Soviet premier as a “chronic, optimistic opportunist” with “resourcefulness, audacity, a good sense of political timing and showmanship, and a touch of the gambler’s instinct.” Khrushchev had survived Stalin’s purges in the late 1930s and the power struggle after Stalin died; he denounced Stalin in his landmark 1956 “Secret Speech” and consolidated his grip on power. The summit was to have fateful consequences.
    Author Frederick Kempe, in his magisterial
Berlin 1961
, recounts how nuclear risks played a crucial role in the Berlin Crisis, from run-up to conclusion and thereafter.
    At 2 a.m. on the first day of 1960, late into a Kremlin New Year’s Eve party, Khrushchev had cut loose with a drunken tirade in which he threatened to start World War III if he did not get his way on Berlin, scaring the wits out of U.S. ambassador Llewellyn Thompson. Khrushchev boasted that he had 30 nuclear weapons aimed at France, and 50 each aimed at West Germany and Britain, plus a “secret” number targeting the United States. Six hydrogen bombs could destroy Britain, Khrushchev told the British ambassador six months later, and nine could destroy France. “Berlin,” said the notoriously earthy Khrushchev on an equally diplomatic visit to West Germany, “is the testicles of the West. Each time I give them a yank, they holler.”
    At that point, East Germans were crossing the border into West Berlin—and on into West Germany—by the thousands daily, and the Soviets wanted to seal off this access. West Berlin, 200 miles inside East Germany and connected to the rest of West Germany by only a single highway, would be easy to blockade. That the Potsdam Treaty guaranteed the four occupying powers—the U.S., Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union—full right of access to the whole city mattered little to Khrushchev or to the East German dictator, Walter Ulbricht, who was seeing his country’s population shrinking daily.
    West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer and French president Charles de Gaulle wanted Kennedy to guarantee that if necessary to stop a Russian takeover of Berlin, the U.S. would escalate to nuclear war. But Kennedy told de Gaulle he understood why France sought an independent nuclear force—the French leader had earlier