Presidential Predicaments: I. JFK--Closing the Gap
The next few postings will address particular predicaments involving nuclear weapons that were encountered by President Kennedy. Predicaments faced by other presidents will be addressed later.
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Presidential Predicaments – I. John F. Kennedy: Closing the Gap
When Harry Truman became president on Franklin Roosevelt’s death and Dwight Eisenhower became president-elect in November 1952, they were in for big surprises when it came to nuclear weapons. Truman’s surprise was learning for the first time about the Manhattan Project, our secret project to build a nuclear weapon. Ike’s surprise was learning about the first successful test of the “Super,” a hydrogen device that was 666 times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.
When John F. Kennedy was elected president in November of 1960, he got his own surprise.
During the campaign against Richard Nixon for president, JFK had believed there was an alarming “missile gap” between us and the Soviet Union. We’d all thought there was one. That’s what we were being told by our leaders and we believed it. Not just we in the public. Our intelligence services and military leaders seem to have believed it, especially our Air Force. The Air Force said the gap was huge. The Army and the Navy agreed there was a gap but didn’t think it was nearly as big as the Air Force said it was.
JFK campaigned on the need to get the missile gap fixed. This may have helped him get elected.
Early in his administration, President Eisenhower had been worried about this missile gap. Before that about a bomber gap our intelligence services had warned us about. In the last year of his presidency, he stopped worrying. About these things anyway. He’d learned from the photographs being returned by our U-2 spy plane flights over the Soviet Union and our even newer Corona photo-reconnaissance satellites that these gaps didn’t exist. Or rather, that there was a missile gap between us and the Soviet Union, all right, only in our favor. Very much in our favor. The pictures from the satellites showed that the Soviets had maybe four ICBMs ready to go. We had forty. Ten times more than they had.
The same went for the “bomber gap.” That also was very much in our favor.
Ike had kept these findings to himself, however. If he had revealed them, he would also have had to reveal how he’d gotten the information. He didn’t want to tell the Soviets, or us, I guess, about our U-2 flights and our photo-reconnaissance satellites. The Soviet intelligence services didn’t have to be told. Their people were as much in the dark as we were.
Eisenhower’s vice-president, Richard Nixon, JFK’s opponent in the election for president, had also been informed that there was no reason to worry about these gaps, but during the campaign he also hadn’t said that we knew this and how.
After JFK was elected president, he learned what Eisenhower and Nixon knew. That there was a missile gap, in our favor. That was his surprise.
JFK decided he also wouldn’t share this information with us. We still thought those gaps existed in the Soviet Union’s favor. We wouldn’t be complaining, then, about big increases in military spending, especially for the Air Force, would we? The Navy and the Army might complain, but we wouldn’t. We would be worried more about the gap.
JFK might have learned that there was no missile gap, but did that mean he had no reason to worry? What if those four ICBMs had arrived in the United States carrying the huge thermonuclear warheads we knew the Soviets had now? With these four ICBMs, a surprise attack by the Soviets was now possible, without question. We’d been thinking that we might be able to defend against bombers, but there was no defense against ICBMs, we all knew that. Wouldn’t even four thermonuclear warheads, if they struck, say, Washington D.C., New York City, San Francisco and Los Angeles, kill our nation? Or anyway change into something unrecognizably different?
If the question was whether we could retaliate after such an attack by the Soviets, JFK soon learned he didn’t have a worry there. By now we had built “forward bases” in countries around the Soviet Union and had jet bombers on those bases loaded with nuclear bombs. We also had long-range jet bombers that could take off from our country loaded with nuclear bombs and be re-fueled in flight by air-tankers stationed at those forward bases and carry those nuclear bombs all the way to Moscow.
Not only that. Very soon we’d be putting on alert in England, Italy, and Turkey close to a hundred Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles we’d just developed with megaton-range warheads on them. These IRBMs also could reach Moscow. And, of course, as of 1960 we’d had on alert inside our own country the Atlas ICBMs, of which we had ten times more than they did.
As surprises go, this surprise about there being no missile gap that wasn’t in our favor was a pretty good one.
There would be others for the new President.