7/7/1961 The U.S. was far ahead in the arms race. Yet the military continued to press for a rapid build-up of strategic missiles. Curtis LeMay had asked for at least 2,400 Minutemen; Gen. Thomas Power of the Strategic Air Command had asked for 10,000. All were to be unleashed in a single paroxysm of mass annihilation, known as SIOP, the Single Integrated Operational Plan. SIOP was a recipe for blowing up the world, whether in a first or a second strike. As McGeorge Bundy wrote to the President on July 7, 1961:
"...All agree that the current strategic war plan is dangerously rigid and, if continued without amendment, may leave you with very little choice as to how you face the moment of thermonuclear truth. We believe that you may want to raise this question with Bob McNamara in order to have a prompt review and new orders if necessary. In essence, the current plan calls for shooting off everything we have in one shot, and is so constructed as to make any more flexible course very difficult." (quoted in Kaplan, 297) During that summer of 1961, the Defense Secretary ordered an overhaul of SIOP carried out by RAND analysts (including Daniel Ellsberg) and quickly approved by the JCS. (Bobbitt, 48) Kennedy and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara eventually imposed a limit of 1,000 Minuteman missiles, angering the Chiefs. Kennedy also launched efforts to gain operational control of the nuclear force, then far from being securely concentrated in the President's hands.
7/19/1961 "At a Georgetown dinner party recently, the wife of a leading senator sat next to Gen. Curtis LeMay, chief of staff of the Air Force. He told her a nuclear war was inevitable. It would begin in December and be all over by the first of the year. In that interval, every major American city -- Washington, New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles -- would be reduced to rubble. Similarly, the principal cities of the Soviet Union would be destroyed. The lady, as she tells it, asked if there were any place where she could take her children and grandchildren to safety; the general would, of course, at the first alert be inside the top-secret underground hideout near Washington from which the retaliatory strike would be directed. He told her that certain unpopulated areas in the far west would be safest." --Marquis Childs, nationally syndicated columnist, Washington Post, 19 July 1961
A 1994 article (PDF) about Curtis Le May:
http://jfk.hood.edu/Collection/Weisb... 2/Item 13.pdf
Did Gen. Curtis E. Le May, chief of the Strategic Air Command in the 1950s and the model for one nuke-crazed general in the film "Dr. Strangelove," have a real-life secret agenda of trying to provoke nuclear war with the Soviet Union?
That's the question raised by the recent disclosure of unauthorized U.S. Air Force spy flights over the U.S.S.R. in 1954, 1957 and 1958. These overflights were revealed in a BBC documentary in May in which U.S. airmen talked about how Le May ordered provocative flights over the Soviet Union, apparently without the permission of President Eisenhower.
...
It was at this meeting that the question arises about Le May's motives. Hal Austin recalls what happened next: "Then Gen. Le May said, 'Well, maybe if we do this overflight right, we can get World War III started.'
...
Nonetheless, six months later, Le May authorized more flights. In December 1956, he sent three RB-47 aircraft over Vladivostock. This time, the Soviets went public. Still-classified minutes of a White House meeting shows that Eisenhower was furious and rebuked the Air Force. The Air Force, in response to Freedom of Information Act requests, says it cannot find the records of these flights.
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Another clue comes from Hal Austin. He crossed paths with Le May again in the late
'80s, at Air Force Village West, a retirement community in Riverside, California. "I brought up the subject of the mission we had flown," Austin recalled. "And he apparently remembered it like it was yesterday. We chatted about it a little bit. His comment again was 'Well; we'd have been a hell of a lot better off if we'd got World War III started in those days.' Well, who knows? We'll never know because history didn't go that way."
7/1961 This month, Sen. Fulbright, noting the activities of General Edwin Walker, called for an investigation of the Institute for American Strategy, the Richardson Foundation, the National War College, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff all for subversive activity. Fulbright compared the mentality of some US military men to that of the OAS (Secret Army Organization) in Algeria. (Webster Tarpley, Synthetic Terror)
http://www.larouchepub.com/other/200...fulbright.htmlThe Fulbright Memorandum was drafted in July 1961 as a personal communication between the Senate and the Secretary of Defense, who was Robert McNamara.[2] Entitled "Propaganda Activities of Military Personnel Directed at the Public," the memorandum began by noting that a 1958 National Security Council directive had made it the policy of the United States "to make use of military personnel and facilities to arouse the public to the menace of the Cold War." Fulbright reported that private organizations were preparing material that was then distributed by the military, material which was contrary to the President's policies. He noted that the actual programs being carried out under the 1958 directive "made use of extremely radical right-wing speakers and/or materials, with the probable net result of condemning foreign and domestic policies of the administration in the public mind."
Fulbright's allusion to a military coup, came as follows: "Perhaps it is farfetched to call forth the revolt of the French generals as an example of the ultimate danger. Nevertheless, military officers, French or American, have some common characteristics arising from their profession and there are numerous military 'fingers on the trigger' throughout the world. While this danger may appear very remote, contrary to American tradition, and even American military tradition, so also is the 'long twilight struggle' [referring to President Kennedy's characterization of the Cold War as a conflict which may not be solved 'in our lifetime'], and so also is the very existence of an American military program for educating the public."[3]
Fulbright called for a review of the mission and operation of the National War College to whether it should operate under the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) and also urged that the relationships among FPRI, IAS, the Richardson Foundation, the National War College, and the JCS, be reexamined "from the standpoint of whether these relationships do not amount to official support for a viewpoint at variance with that of the administration."
Fulbright cited 11 examples of questionable educational and propaganda activities involving military personnel; these included:
* A "Strategy for Survival" conference held at Fort Smith and Little Rock, Arkansas, dominated by George S. Benson and other speakers from Harding College in Searcy, Arkansas. (Benson, one of the leaders of the Church of God which produced "Get Clinton" operative, independent counsel Kenneth Starr, among others, was a British-linked intelligence operative and evangelist.) Harding College produced a widely circulated film, "Communism on the Map," which blamed the advance of Communism on Franklin Roosevelt (for recognizing the Soviet Union) and on Gen. George Marshall (for allowing the Communist takeover of China).
* A "Fourth Dimensional Warfare Seminar" in Pittsburgh, including a prominent speaker from the IAS who said that U.S. foreign policy since World War II had played into Soviet hands, and that some of Kennedy's advisers "have philosophies regarding foreign affairs that would chill the average American."
* Other meetings and seminars which promoted the pro-House Un-American Activities Committee film "Operation Abolition," and which featured Dr. Fred C. Schwartz of the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade, Herbert Philbrick, Frank Barnett of the Richardson Foundation and IAS" all of whom warned of Communist subversion and infiltration and attacked the policies of the Kennedy Administration.
Attached to the Fulbright Memorandum were a number of documents, including an article from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists which focused on the book American Strategy for the Nuclear Age, which was described as outlining the master curriculum for the military-related seminars. The book was written by Frank Barnett, then the research director for both the IAS and the Richardson Foundation, and it contained contributions from FPRI director Robert Strausz-Hupe (see Profile, in this section), and Col. William Kintner (then assigned to FPRI).
The article accurately described the IAS as having grown out of a 1955 symposium in Chicago called the "National Military-Industrial Conference"; the IAS was established and financed by the H. Smith Richardson Foundation to carry forward the work of the Conference. In 1959, the IAS began a series of "National Strategy Seminars," which were authorized by the JCS to take over the education of reserve officers. IAS and Strausz-Hupe worked closely with the National War College in this period. (Among the speakers at these seminars were Harvard's William Yandell Elliott and Henry Kissinger.)
The Fulbright Memorandum, as could be expected, set off a huge controversy, with articles and editorials and not a little behind-the-scenes activity as well.
For example, FPRI and its Director Strausz-Hupe went on a mobilization to deny that they were organizing a military coup. FPRI circulated a private letter to its "Associates, friends and supporters" on Oct. 18, 1961, containing an attack on Fulbright and a lengthy defense of its own actions. Among other things, it stated: "The Foreign Policy Research Institute takes a certain pride in being linked to the four organizations mentioned in the Fulbright memorandum. However, an investigation of our relationships with them will be a disappointment to our critics. There is no sinister plot underfoot at the Foreign Policy Research Institute to inspire United States military personnel to launch a coup d'etat along the lines of the abortive French affair in Algeria."
Shortly after this, Strausz-Hupe drafted a letter to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and sent a copy to William Yandell Elliott, with a "Dear Bill" cover letter. Elliott had been a speaker at some of the seminars in question, including one at the National War College in July 1960, and another in Chicago in April 1961.
7/20/1961 At a National Security Council Meeting, the Joint Chiefs of Staff's Gen. Lemnitzer and CIA director Allen Dulles present a plan for a preemptive nuclear attack on the Soviet Union "in late 1963, preceded by a period of heightened tensions." President Kennedy walks out of the meeting, saying to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, "And we call ourselves the human race." (Brothers, Talbott)
Arthur Schlesinger's Robert Kennedy and His Times gives this account:
"...Kennedy received the Net Evaluation, an annual doomsday briefing analyzing the chances of nuclear war. An Air Force General presented it, said Roswell Gilpatric, the deputy secretary of defense, "as though it were for a kindergarten class.. Finally Kennedy got up and walked right out in the middle of it, and that was the end of it. We never had another one." (p. 483)
McGeorge Bundy evidently refers to the same meeting in this passage:
"In the summer of 1961 [Kennedy] went through a formal briefing on the net assessment of a general nuclear war between the two superpowers, and he expressed his own reaction to Dean Rusk as they walked from the cabinet room to the Oval Office for a private meeting on other subjects: "And we call ourselves the human race." (p. 354)
Dean Rusk describes the meeting as an "awesome experience" in his memoirs, As I Saw It, published in 1990.
"President Kennedy clearly understood what nuclear war meant and was appalled by it. In our many talks together, he never worried about the threat of assassination, but he occasionally brooded over whether it would be his fate to push the nuclear button... If any of us had doubts, that 1961 briefing convinced us that a nuclear war must never be fought. Consequently, throughout the Kennedy and Johnson years we worked to establish a stable deterrent..." (p. 246-7)
Numerous other apparent accounts of the meeting exist, though they do not refer to it by name or date. All agree on Kennedy's reaction. But none reveal what was actually discussed. Theodore Sorenson's Kennedy, published only four years later, presents an understandably benign version:
"That briefing confirmed, however, the harsh facts [Kennedy] already knew: (1) that neither the Soviet Union nor the United States could 'win' a nuclear war in any rational sense of the word; (2) that, except to deter an all-out Soviet attack, our threat of 'massive retaliation' to every Communist move was no longer credible, now that it invited our own destruction; and (3) that a policy of 'pre-emptive first strike' or 'preventive war' was no longer open to either side, inasmuch as even a surprise missile attack would trigger, before those missiles reached their targets, a devastating retaliation that neither country could risk or accept." (p. 513)
Unfortunately, the critical third point was not yet true. As UnderSecretary of State Roger Hilsman wrote in 1967:
"As the intelligence community looked at their estimates in 1958, 1959, and 1960, and even through the first half of 1961, they saw a missile gap developing that would come to a peak about 1963." (p. 162)
What Hilsman does not say explicitly is that the estimated missile gap was in America's favor. The Soviets had virtually no operational ICBMs in 1961, a fact known to American intelligence at least by the end of 1960. And it appears the Russians did not solve their fundamental technical problem, namely building a hydrogen bomb small enough to be carried by a missile of manageable size, until years later. (Sorenson, 524; Bobbitt, 61).
The memorandum reproduced here was written for Vice President Lyndon Johnson, who did not attend the meeting, by Colonel Howard Burris, his military aide.
TOP SECRET EYES ONLY (Declassified: June, 1993)
Notes on National Security Council Meeting July 20, 1961
General Hickey, Chairman of the Net Evaluation Subcommittee, presented the annual report of his group. General Lemnitzer stated that the assumption of this year's study was a surprise attack in late 1963, preceded by a period of heightened tensions.
After the presentation by General Hickey and by the various members of the Subcommittee, the President asked if there had ever been made an assessment of damage results to the U.S.S.R which would be incurred by a preemptive attack. General Lemnitzer stated that such studies had been made and that he would bring them over and discuss them personally with the President. In recalling General Hickey's opening statement that these studies have been made since 1957, the President asked for an appraisal of the trend in the effectiveness of the attack. General Lemnitzer replied that he would also discuss this with the President.
Since the basic assumption of this year's presentation was an attack in late 1963, the President asked about probable effects in the winter of 1962. Mr. Dulles observed that the attack would be much less effective since there would be considerably fewer missiles involved. General Lemnitzer added a word of caution about accepting the precise findings of the Committee since these findings were based upon certain assumptions which themselves might not be valid.
The President posed the question as to the period of time necessary for citizens to remain in shelters following an attack. A member of the Subcommittee replied that no specific period of time could be cited due to the variables involved, but generally speaking, a period of two weeks should be expected.
The President directed that no member in attendance at the meeting disclose even the subject of the meeting.
7/21/1961 UPI story by David Burnham reported "Study Asserts Military Rightists Raise Obstacles to Kennedy Program."
7/25/1961 JFK, in a major television speech on the crisis in Berlin, calls for additional $3.5 billion for defense and additional reserve troops, increasing draft calls, and recommending the construction of fallout shelters. "We cannot and will not permit the Communists to drive us out of Berlin, either gradually or by force" Yet Kennedy also stressed the dangers: "miscommunication could rain down more devastation in several hours than has been wrought in all the wars of human history" He asked for increased military appropriations and called out 150,000 reserve personnel. But he did not engage the Soviets. The wall was allowed to remain intact when constructed in August of 1961, a symbolic column of soldiers was sent through to West Berlin, and a fallout shelter program was undertaken in the United States. With the Burris memorandum, the reasoning behind the fallout shelter program now begins to fall into place. As a civil defense measure against a Soviet nuclear attack, the flimsy cinderblock shelters Americans were told to build were absurd. But they could indeed protect those in them, for a couple of weeks, from radiation drifting thousands of miles after a U.S. pre-emptive strike on the Soviet Union. It is known that Kennedy later regretted this program.
7/26/1961 Sen. Strom Thurmond defended the anti-Communist views of the military in a speech before the Senate: "The military officers...are charged with defending our country from all enemies, foreign and domestic...the military leader must know the enemy in order to defend our country against him....There can be no truthful denial that our country and its leaders have, on many occasions in the past, accepted the most thinly-veiled Communist fronts for whatever they purported themselves to be."
7/29/1961 Sen. Barry Goldwater, in a speech to the American Legion, criticized "the repeated and growing attacks being made on our military leaders, and to the strenuous efforts being made to muzzle them and prevent them from telling their troops and the American people some of the facts which they should know...This is no pink tea we are engaged in - it is a grim battle to the death."
8/1/1961 St Petersburg Times (Florida) reported that MacDill AFB had received word that it would remain open until at least June 1963. "This is a definite extension of more than a year, since plans had been to phase out the Strategic Air Command (SAC) base in April and May of 1962. Col. Wayne Connors, MacDill base commander, said the extension means that some major repairs to air strip surfaces will be made." Wikipedia: In 1962, MacDill AFB was transferred to Tactical Air Command (TAC). Bomber aircraft would remain at MacDill until the 306th Bombardment Wing's transfer to McCoy AFB, and SAC would continue to maintain a tenant presence at MacDill through the 1980s, utilizing their Alert Facility as a dispersal location for B-52 and KC-135 aircraft. But for all practical purposes, the 1960s marked MacDill's transition to a fighter-centric TAC installation. Under TAC, MacDill remained a fighter base for almost 30 years, but other changes went on in the background.