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

said that he did not believe the U.S. would sacrifice New York for Paris or Berlin. Former secretary of state Dean Acheson, a close adviser of Kennedy’s, was convinced that a U.S. threat to use nuclear weapons against the Soviets over the status of Berlin might not suffice to deter Khrushchev. Famed columnist Walter Lippmann interviewed Khrushchev before the Vienna summit. “[T]here are no such stupid statesmen in the West to unleash a war in which hundreds of millions would perish” over the status of Berlin, the Soviet premier told the columnist. “Such idiots have not yet been born.”
    On June 1, two days before the meeting in Vienna, Kennedy had told his aides it was “silly for us to be facing an atomic war over a treaty preserving Berlin as the future capital of a reunified Germany when all of us know that Germany will probably never be reunified. But we’re committed to that agreement, and so are the Russians, so we can’t let them back out of it.” During the summit, Kennedy raised the prospect of miscalculation leading to nuclear war, but the Soviet dictator brushed it aside contemptuously: “All I ever hear … is that damned word ‘miscalculation!’… [W]e will not start a war by mistake.… You ought to take that word ‘miscalculation’ and bury it in cold storage and never use it again.”
    Khrushchev threatened war if he did not get his way, and convincingly suggested his indifference to the devastating toll a nuclear exchange would take. Kennedy yielded, allowing Khrushchev to treat East Berlin as if it were Soviet territory. The result, beginning on the night of August 13, 1961, was the sudden, swift erection of the Berlin Wall, which virtually shut down cross-border traffic. The Soviets’ plan, at least as understood by Bobby Kennedy, the president’s brother and attorney general, was to “break our will in Berlin [so] that we will never be good for anything else and they will have won the battle in 1961.… Their plan is … to terrorize the world into submission.”
    Kennedy’s advisers put to him a graduated plan for the August 1961 Berlin showdown. If the Soviets were not stopped by allied conventional forces, the U.S. would consider three nuclear options: a demonstration shot to establish will to use such weapons, a limited use on the battlefield, and all-out general war. A top Kennedy defense official, Roswell Gilpatric, warned in a speech that the U.S. would not allow itself to be defeated over Berlin. At least one senior American official, arms negotiator Paul Nitze, believed Berlin more dangerous than Cuba.
    Kennedy had designated U.S. General Lucius Clay to command the Berlin crisis with White House supervision. Clay unilaterally sent forces up the Berlin access road, daring the Soviets to prevent their entry into Berlin. Exceeding his orders, Clay also sent tanks to the Berlin Wall, where they confronted Soviet tanks a few hundred yards away across the dividing line. No shots were fired.
    The confrontation at the “Checkpoint Charlie” crossing point took place with Soviet forces under a first-ever nuclear alert. In the end, Khrushchev succeeded, and the status of Berlin was changed, with access to the eastern sector cut off despite the postwar treaty. Kennedy told a senior aide, Kenny O’Donnell, that only if the freedom of all Western Europe were at stake would he risk nuclear Armageddon. The Wall stayed, undercutting stern U.S. warnings over Berlin. The day the Wall went up Kennedy stated: “It’s not a very nice solution, but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.”
    Khrushchev took what proved to be the wrong lesson from Berlin. He told Soviet officials: “I know for certain, that Kennedy doesn’t have … the courage to stand up to a serious challenge.” In September 1962 the earthy Soviet dictator told interior secretary Stewart Udall, “It’s been a long time since you could spank us like a little boy. Now we can swat your ass.” He told his son Sergei