INTERVIEW WITH MARCUS RASKIN. MR. RASKIN WAS ON THE NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL STAFF IN 1961 AND 1962. YOU READY? DURING THE BERLIN CRISIS IN '61, WHAT CONTINGENCY PLANS WERE YOU AWARE OF? IN PARTICULAR, HOW DID THE FIRST-STRIKE OPTION GET DEVELOPED?

Well, at the time of the Berlin Crisis, the President, President Kennedy had asked for the preparation of a first-strike document, uh, which could then be the basis upon which the United States could have a first strike, uh, of the Soviet Union. In the event that, uh, the Soviets either moved on Berlin directly, militarily, or the Soviets undertook activities that the United States felt, uh, uh, would be against its interests. The first-strike arrangement... the idea of the first strike, uh, of course had, uh, its, uh, uh, uh, origins in the idea of counter-force: that is, the capacity of the United States to be able to destroy the military targets of the Soviet Union, uh, first, and that the Soviets would not be able to retaliate against the urban-industrial land-space of the United States, uh, in such a way as to make a first strike impossible to attain. A paper was, indeed, prepared, uh, uh, by the Department of Defense, and with one of the assistants, uh, at the White House, Carl Kaysen. That paper, uh, suggested a way of undertaking such an attack.

WHAT WAS THE PARTICULAR PLAN?

Well, the plan basically, as I recall, was the use of SAC to go under, uh, 1,500 feet, uh, in a bombing run, uh, over Soviet territory and over Soviet military targets, and that the, uh, the way that it would be done by SAC would allow for the American, uh, planes to, uh, escape, uh, Soviet detection; and the result of that would be that the Soviets would be able to take out, or destroy, as the... the case, the phrase may be, ah, ah, only a few American cities. Uh, the problem with this particular, uh, proposal, uh, was that, uh, first of all it probably, uh, wouldn't work, and second of all and far more important was that it was im-, immoral, that it had as its basis the destruction of tens of millions of people, for, uh, ideas... of interests that really had nothing to do with the national interest — that is, the idea of national interest for the American people.

SO THIS WAS A NUCLEAR STRIKE WITH BOMBERS?

This was a nuclear strike with bombers, that's correct.

AND DID WE ASSUME THAT THE SOVIETS MIGHT BE ABLE TO STRIKE BACK?

The assumption was that the Soviet would be able to strike back, but probably, uh, not destroy more than five million American lives. There was no reason to suggest that the strike would be so limited. Uh, in any case, uh, President Kennedy and other advisers of, uh, uh, other Kennedy advisers, were horrified at this notion of, uh... that we would undertake a first strike of this kind. And, uh, my understanding is that the President rejected it directly. But the problem with all of this is, of course, that, that the Department of Defense was generating this kind of study, undertook to have the kinds of defenses, that is, the kinds of uh, armaments and missiles and so forth, which would allow the President the option of having that kind of an attack on an adversary. And the result of that sort of attack on an adversary would be, to a very great extent, genocide of, uh, the United States, because it would mean that another k... another, uh, uh, an adversary would be able, uh, to destroy the urban-industrial land-space of the United States. Our studies suggested at that time that it wouldn't be five million people who would be killed, but it would be well over 25 million people who would be killed.

YOU SAY "OUR STUDIES."

Studies that were done at the White House by different people at that time. But beyond that, and most important, was the notion that this was an illegal, immoral act, fundamentally illegal and immoral and that it was no different than the kinds of planning that were held to be war crimes under the Nuremburg, uh, judgments.

HOW DID YOU FIRST LEARN ABOUT THIS PLAN?

Well, I learned from a, ah, ah, member of the White House staff who had been part of the preparation of the, of the plan, and after, ah, I became apprised of it, we had a very...

LET'S GIVE HIM A NAME. CARL KAYSEN?

No, I don't mind calling him Carl Kaysen. But, uh, uh... Carl Kaysen's position was that this was a, a technical plan which had to be looked at. My view was that this, uh, did not separate us from those people who, uh, uh, worked on those, engineers and technocrats who worked on, uh, figuring out how large boxcars should be for sending people to concentration camps, to Dachau and Auschwitz, and indeed measuring or figuring out how large the gas ovens would be, because indeed, ah, nuclear weapons had become, in my mind, then, and certainly I, there's no cause to change my view on this, that each nuclear weapon of a large size was no different than a, er, a congealed, uh, concentration camp, a congealed Auschwitz.

TELL ME WHAT HAPPENED WHEN YOU LEARNED ABOUT THIS FROM KAYSEN. WHAT WAS YOUR REACTION?

My reaction was one of horror... Uh, we had had a close relationship over the course of the time that, uh, he and I served in the White House, and, and it had uh, it came to, I think, a, a, an abrupt estrangement at that point, because of a, uh, a long fight, argument that we had at that time, uh, which lasted for several hours. And I had made the argument that, uh, that I could not see the difference between us and those engineers and technocrats who tried to figure out what the size of boxcars would be to send people to Auschwitz and Dachau, and that furthermore I couldn't see the distinction between ourselves and those engineers who worked on the, uh, uh, the gas ovens of Auschwitz and Dachau, and so, needless to say, this... heightened emotional sense caused a very strong reaction on both of our sides about, uh, what we were arguing about. Uh, as I recall, Carl's position was that this was a technical question, a technocratic question, and we had to take a look at this as an option. And I felt that these were not technical questions, that these were moral and political ones, and that it meant that certain questions were beyond the pale. And I viewed that that boundary could not be crossed without, indeed, men becoming beasts. There's been nothing to change my mind about that.

WE'VE ALWAYS HAD A NUCLEAR SHIELD OF WESTERN EUROPE EVER SINCE NATO WAS CREATED. DO YOU DISAGREE WITH THAT?

I view the nuclear shield as, ah, at best something, uh, that, uh, is a way station. The fact of the matter is, however, that if nuclear weapons are used, and they destroy tens of millions of people, hundreds of millions of people, this is a form of genocide, it is the destruction of humanity and the destruction of nature. I do not view this as a weapon of war, which is supposed to be a weapon at a — weapons of war are to be proportional. There is nothing proportional or proportionate about nuclear weapons, in terms of... serving particular interests, or helping — uh, even, indeed, ending a war — a, uh, in terms, ah, that would make any sense for either party. So I do not view them as weapons of utility. I furthermore think that the preparation, that is, the use of weapons, uh, nuclear missiles, for the purpose of a first strike, also is a war crime. So I see ourselves caught in a terrible, terrible dilemma: on the one hand, we have put so much energy into nuclear weapons, ah, as if they are protective of our interests; but the reality is, on the other, that they, uh, do open us to the charge of destruction of civilization and war crimes. So in that sense, I have spent the last generation attempting — I mean, in this area — attempting to find a means, an alternative, to the war system, and to the idea of a nuclear shield: an idea — that is, the/ the nuclear shield notion — is one which, uh, in fact, immediately breaks down, if nuclear weapons end up having to be used.

LET'S GO BACK TO '61. WHAT WOULD HAVE HAPPENED IF THE SOVIETS HAD CUT OFF ACCESS?

At that time — let me suggest, uh, uh... and, and later I, I wrote a book to this effect, called After 20 Years, uh, with Richard Barnet — we did outline, in rather excruciating detail, what an alternative to the direction we were moving in Europe would have been, in terms of both the protection of west Europe and the increase of freedom in east Europe. It did relate to the ideas that were put forward by George Kennan in the late '50s, and Adam Rapacki, who at that time was the, uh, foreign minister of Poland. And they had to do with, uh, a nuclear disengagement and then a disengagement of troops in west and east Europe. Had that course been followed, at that time, in my view, we would have been in a far stronger position in east Europe, and the people of east Europe would be breathing much freer air today than they presently are.

OKAY, BUT YOU'RE THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES AND YOU TURN TO YOUR NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER AND ASK, "WHAT DO I DO IF KHRUSHCHEV CUTS OFF ACCESS?"

Well, there are a number of things that you can do. One thing that you could do is break off relations with the Soviet Union. You could send the ambassador home. You could develop an embargo, uh, of different kinds; you can go to the, uh, United Nations, as one example; ah, you could do a whole series of different sorts of things that could have been done, uh, and in fact later on were done. We... as, as, as, as it turned out we ended up recognizing East Germany, in fact, which was exactly what Khrushchev wanted. He wanted us to recognize East Germany, and then to deal with the access problem th, uh, through East Germany. Basically that was the decision, that was the position that was cut a few years later by, uh, Secretary of State Kissinger. So it was not necessary to heat up the atmosphere, to think that you had to use nuclear weapons, uh, to deal, uh, in a diplomatic way with the particular problem at hand. And we've had the habit of using sledgehammers, uh, to kill flies. And it doesn't make sense, just as we have not understood that a war system itself will be the end of civilization; it is the excrescence of civilization. War is the excrescence of civilization, not its protection.

WHAT WAS MAC BUNDY'S REACTION TO CARL KAYSEN'S PLAN?

I don't know directly what Mac's position was with regard to the plan put forward by the, uh, the... some people in the Defense Department, with Carl. Uh, the important point to note is that in fact it was rejected. It was rejected by, ah, Ted Sorensen; uh, and I assume that it was rejected by, uh, Mac. And I assume, as well, that in his heart Carl thought it was absurd. I know that, uh, Wiesner thought the whole thing was absurd. And I thought it... as, as I did, I mean, it was both absurd and immoral, you know, it was foolish. Now the problem, as I said before, the problem with all of this is that you have military bureaucracies, and think tanks, paid for by the Defense Department, whose task is to generate the use of these weapons, and so they become the rationalizers for the development of these weapons, that is, the think tanks, and the military, ah, ah, the Department of Defense. Ultimately, if we're not to destroy ourselves, if we're not to degrade our own lives, we're going to have to understand that there are other ways to go.

WERE YOU SORT OF THE GADFLY IN THE NSC OFFICE AT THAT POINT?

Well, I would say that that would be kind!

I MEAN, WERE YOU ALWAYS CRITICAL OF...

No, I'm saying that that, that that's a kind way of describing how I was known, that that... you know, I mean, the, the answer is yes, that, that I was known as, uh, having my own views on the use of American military power and the position that the United States should take vis-a-vis what later came to be known as the Third World, and so forth. That, uh, that my view was that so much of what could be done, uh, with the rest of the world could have been done diplomatically, that it was not necessary to have a, uh, a military buildup, from $39 1/2 billion to $51 1/2 billion in the course of a year and a quarter; that that would get us nothing, that it was a mistake to enter into a continuous war situation in Indochina, that we didn't know what we were doing, that the people, uh, thought that because they saw points on maps they really understood what those cultures were — we never did, we never understood that. And so I was a one-man band for a particular period, ah, against hubris, against the arrogance of power. But the fact of the matter is that other people also agreed with different positions that I took. And I agreed with them.

AFTER YOU HAD THIS FIGHT, HOW LONG DID YOU STICK AROUND?

Well, that fight really I, I stayed until, uh, the.... actually for another year, until, this was, the fight occurred in the summer of 1961, and I stayed as an adviser on national security af-, affairs until the following summer. Ah... the reason that, uh, I, uh, uh, left was, uh, related to two books which had come out at that time. That is, in March of 1962. Books that I had edited and co-authored. One was called The Limits of Defense and the other was called, uh, The Liberal Papers. They were done, uh, basically under other people's names, ah, but those, uh — The Limits of Defense made clear that there were very grave limits to deterrence, and to counterforce, and that ultimately we would have to find a way outside of that policy in order to protect the security of the United States. The Liberal Papers dealt with an alternative foreign policy, such as the recognition of China and other, you know, other matters, which were viewed at that time as very hot. And so the Demo-, the, uh, Republicans, were very, uh, strong in calling for my resignation, and, uh, indeed what happened then, in the late spring of, uh, 1962, is that I was, uh... reassigned, to work on education matters in the Bureau of the Budget.

THE MCNAMARA YEARS, THE EARLY 60S, WERE THE TIME WHEN THE NUMBER OF U. S. MISSILES WAS UPPED, AND IT HAS REMAINED THAT WAY EVER SINCE. WERE YOU INVOLVED IN THESE DISCUSSIONS?

Well, you'll recall, during that period, we, uh, had a large number of nuclear weapons, uh, on airplanes, and one of the theories, uh, of the time, was that somehow, uh, airplanes were vulnerable, and missiles were more or less invulnerable, whether they were Minutemen or, uh, missiles on submarines. So the, uh, conventional learning at the time was that it would be better to move to missiles, which would be more stable...The conventional learning of that time was that missiles and, uh, submarines were more stable than the, uh, bombs, nuclear weapons dropped from airplanes, and, uh, the reasoning behind that was that, uh, they were more invulnerable, uh, less open, uh, to attack from the, uh, from the adversary, and it would allow the United States not to have to shoot off immediately. So, at that time, the notion was, uh, that we should move from, uh, nuclear weapons on airplanes to the missile system, to the missile and, uh, submarine system. The idea also, uh, was that somehow, uh, we would be able to limit the number of weapons that we would have, and that it would be possible, also, to develop a stable mutual deterrent between both sides. My view at that time was that I did not believe that it would be possible to develop a so-called "stable deterrent," that there would always be an upping of the ante, in terms of the numbers of weapons that each side needed. Again, I think that, uh, the... past history has shown that particular point of view correct; those who took that view, I think, were right. Ah...

DID YOU WANT ANY NUCLEAR WEAPONS?

I wanted... No. The fact is, I have always seen nuclear weapons not as an opportunity but as a problem. That is one of the most fundamental questions that we in this nuclear age have to deal with. Are nuclear weapons an opportunity for defense, or for anything, or are they a problem. My view is that they're a problem, a terrible and terrifying problem that we live with and have to learn to live through, to get to the other side. But that those who believe that somehow... these weapons are useful for defense and that somehow which are able to do with them, is, uh, uh, have them in a war-fighting situation, use them in a war-fighting situation, are indeed doing an extraordinary disservice to humankind and certainly to this country.

CAN YOU RECALL ANY DISCUSSIONS YOU HAD WITH BUNDY OR KAYSEN OR MCNAMARA OR THE PRESIDENT, OR ANYBODY IN THE WHITE HOUSE, WHEN YOU SAID THESE THINGS?

Well, I said those things constantly to Bundy and to Kaysen... and to Wiesner and to other members of the White House staff. Uh, not directly to the President or to McNamara, and the reasoning being, uh, was that I, uh, did not have direct access to President Kennedy. Ah... ah... Mac had a wonderful saying that he, uh, felt that he couldn't take me to Cabinet meetings because he feared that I would pee on the floor. Meaning that what would happen is that I would make these arguments and, as you know, there is a bureaucratic language, and to move outside of that bureaucratic language, uh, whether it's more emotional or more moral, or more philosophic, is viewed as a very big mistake, and, uh, so therefore, the lines of definition, and the, the sorts of language that are used are very narrow indeed, which do not brook the sort of conversation that one might have privately, uh, with, with people; that is, you would not, uh, undertake those discussions publicly. But I view that as an extraordinary mistake. Uh... I myself have felt, over the years, that, um, the Kennedy period was, uh, for all of President Kennedy's greatness, in terms of national security, was a very, very bad time for this country. It laid the basis upon which the development of, uh, the kind of, uh, direction we now have in our defense posture was taken, So I view the McNamara period as a very great error.

MISSILES WERE JUST GETTING UNDER WAY AT THIS TIME. WE LAUNCHED THE FIRST POLARIS SUBMARINE, I THINK, IN 1960. WHAT IF WE HAD GONE YOUR ROUTE? KHRUSHCHEV WAS SAYING HE WAS GOING TO "GRIND MISSILES OUT LIKE SAUSAGES."

Well... Khrushchev didn't say that.

YEAH, HE DID, AT THE UN

Well, but he threatened- Again, there's ... the capability. They did, they did. And what he, as you'll recall, had suggested was that there should be a general complete disarmament program, and had outlined the idea of a four-year program for general and complete disarmament. The United States itself, through John McCloy, negotiated a framework for general and complete disarmament with Zorin, who was a chief ambassador of Khrushchev at the time. And the notion of that framework was to see whether or not it would be possible to lay out a... a negotiating position on both sides to see whether we could, in fact, get agreement on a joint treaty for general disarmament. That was a correct direction to move. At that time one of the, uh, leading ambassadors of the United States was Arthur Dean, and Dean had said to President Kennedy that it was important for Kennedy to go along with general and complete disarmament, and to make that position clear, because that was, would be a position which was imp, as important as Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation was in 1860. So that there was a sense, a sentiment, that we were at the, at a turning point in American history, and we could either go one way or the other. My feeling is that we chose the wrong direction at that time. And the real question is whether we now are able to get back on the right road.

WHAT DID MAC BUNDY — LET'S CALL HIM BUNDY...

Well, there was another Bundy at the time, too, who was very active, Bill Bundy, who was the, as I recall, the... in the Department of Defense, who was assistant secretary for international security affairs, but Mac Bundy was the person who had the action, obviously.

WHAT DID MAC BUNDY THINK OF YOUR THOUGHTS ABOUT DISARMAMENT?

Well, I think that Mac was uh, uh, attracted to the idea of general disarmament. He certainly was attracted to the idea of trying to find a way of controlling the arms race. And, ah, but the problem with a number of the people who came down from Harvard was that they wanted it both ways: that is to say, they wanted to use, they wanted to, uh, use nuclear weapons as a, uh, an instrument for, uh, threat, and by the same token, they wanted to manage the arms race, and to see the, uh, nuclear weapons as a problem. So, in a sense they were walking a very, very fine line of both arming and controlling armaments at the same time. The assumption was, of that group of people, that a, uh, that very smart people would be able to manage the arms race. Smart people on both sides, in both the Soviet Union and the United States, and that it would be possible to arm on both sides, ah, as if they were playing, both sides were playing poker with their cards showing, so that in effect there would be a joint management activity. But the fact of the matter is that while the groups, the elites, talked with one another, the arms race kept getting worse and worse, uh, during this whole period of time.

AT THE END OF THIS PERIOD MCNAMARA FORESAW THE SITUATION WHERE THE SOVIETS WOULD HAVE A SECURE RETALIATORY CAPABILITY, WHAT HAS COME TO BE KNOWN AS "MAD." DO YOU THINK WE ARE SECURE IN THIS POSITION?

Well, first of all, the Soviets since, in my view, since the late 1950s, had the capacity to destroy the urban-industrial land-space of the United States. And that their addition of weapons is a problem that they've got, that they've got to come to gr, grips with as well, so that for a generation they have been reflecting our own buildups, but they could still, before the buildup, be... had they just stopped in 1961, they would have been able to destroy our urban-industrial land-space. So that one of the things that has occurred in, uh, uh, in the arms race, is that we've forgotten about reality, and taken up a nuclear reality, which is the reality of perception: They've got 25,000; we should have 25,001. If we have 9,000 and they have 8,000, we have to build 1,000 more, and so forth and so on. But that has nothing to do with the actual power of both sides to destroy each other, which was reached over a generation ago. It's just become worse, in the sense that people now think that you're able to use these weapons for, uh, political purposes and for making a point with one side against the other. MAD itself, mutual assured destruction, is not a strategy, it's a condition, as, as some have put it. That condition is one which says that if you do X, we will do Y, which will result in the destruction of the human race, or some, uh, some variant of that, tens of millions of people who will get killed. I do not view that as a, uh, as... either a moral or political system of, uh, of defense for a nation, neither for the world, in terms of international security, or in terms of national security, so that in that sense, ah, what we have to do is get to the other side. Now one of the questions here is that, uh, the Reagan administration has also seen the, uh, narrowing, uh, validity to MAD as a doctrine.

WE CAN'T JUMP INTO THE PRESENT TIME, BECAUSE THIS PROGRAM'S ON THE 60S. SO, LET'S TALK IN GENERAL TERMS. YOU CAN EITHER ESCAPE THROUGH DEFENSES OR YOU CAN ESCAPE THROUGH DISARMAMENT.

Right. Okay. So, in that sense, ah, the, uh, that... the American position at that time was not... was indeed how nuclear weapons, that is, nuclear weapons as missiles, could be used in either what was called, uh, uh, uh, a, uh... counterforce strategy, or a strategic counter-force strategy; that is to say, the strategy, uh, which would include war-fighting: that is, the trading of weapons, uh, at, uh, at a strategic level. Now, in all of that, it meant that nuclear weapons were to be used; they were not to be seen as a problem but they, in fact, were to be used for political purposes. And as others said at that time, and as certainly I said, there was no political utility toward those weapons, that a whole different sense of diplomacy could indeed exist in the world, and could be developed at that time. Our problem of that time was that the Democratic Party had come to power with the idea that the United States somehow was second in terms of nuclear, uh, strategic, uh, capability. And the reality was quite the reverse, and the, uh, certainly by March of 1961, uh, Secretary of Defense McNamara knew that, and other leaders of the administration knew that; nevertheless, they went ahead and built up, continued to build up, a counterforce capacity. So it was the wrong direction to move. Indeed, the correct direction to move, in my view, was the general disarmament direction.

CAN'T YOU ESCAPE FROM MAD BY BUILDING UP DEFENSES?

No. I mean, there are, th, th... there are no known, so far as I know, there were no known defenses at that time. One position that was taken was that civil defense was a possibility, and, ah, there were various notions of civil defense: one was a fallout shelter program, which really could have only been, uh, modestly effective in the event that the United States undertook a first strike? It was never effective if the other side undertook a first strike. So it was in fact not a real program; uh, secondly, I mean, a, a real defensive program. The second position that was taken was that there had to be active defenses, with NIKE and so forth and so on. But that was seen during that period as not to be able to work well, that it was too complex and very, very expensive. Ah, the other position that was taken was that we should start with fallout shelters and then move from fallout shelters to blast shelters and then fire shelters, where indeed we would end up having a good part of, uh, the American populace underground for part of the time. Well, this, in fact, was seen as a horrendous condition for the American people, and one which, indeed, was objected when, uh, objected to and rejected by President, uh, Kennedy when he spoke with, uh, Teller, who put forward such an idea.

I ASKED TELLER IF HE DID THAT.

Teller came to the White House one day and spoke to PSAC, the President's Science Advisory Committee, where... so, as I recollect, and this is hearsay, as I recollect, he laid out the importance of a fallout-shelter program, and that it was important to move to the next step, which was also a blast shelter, et cetera, program. Ah... Wiesner then took him to see Kennedy, where he laid out the same idea. Now, Wiesner will know directly whether or not he said that.

OKAY, WHAT CAN WE TALK ABOUT IN 3 MINUTES? YOU HAD LEFT BEFORE THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS.

I'd left, uh, the, um, the staff... I was reassigned to, uh, the, uh...

YOU WERE NOT INVOLVED IN THE DECISION-MAKING.

I was not involved in the decision-making.

WE WANT TO STICK TO THINGS THAT PEOPLE HEARD AND WHAT THEY DID...

Right.

HOW DID YOU FEEL ABOUT THE CONVENTIONAL BUILDUP DURING THIS PERIOD? THE ADMINISTRATION, TO ITS CREDIT, WANTED TO RAISE THE NUCLEAR THRESHOLD. DID YOU AGREE WITH THAT?

I did not think that was a wise policy.

WHAT? THE MASSIVE RETALIATION?

No. The giving to the President options for the use of nuclear weapons. It is always a mistake, in statecraft, to give leaders options that they really don't have, and to say that you have the option of using only several nuclear weapons, and so forth and so on, when, in fact, the war gaming of the time suggested that you would end up involved in a large nuclear conflict in any case. There was a series of studies done by the British, uh, which suggested that all of Europe would be destroyed in a situation of, uh, limited nuclear war, of first only introducing a few nuclear weapons, and it would very quickly spread to a large number. There were other people — as I recall, Tom Schelling, who put forward the idea of the diffident use of nuclear weapons to make your point, in some sort of symbolic way; that itself was a mistaken view, in my view, because what we may view as symbolic, others would view as something other than symbol... as symbolic, and would then see the importance from their point of view of responding quickly with some sort of massive retaliation. That's always a problem when you give two leaders the notion that they have a lot of different options. So I was not in favor of the notion of options. Of course, I did not favor massive retaliation, but the notion that somehow you could move from massive retaliation to a series of graduated uses of nuclear weapons was in itself a mistake, because what it meant was that you were rationalizing the use of nuclear weapons and giving the President of the United States the notion that somehow he would be able to use those weapons.

YOU WERE AGAINST ALL NUCLEAR OPTIONS, SO CLEARLY YOU MUST HAVE FAVORED RAISING THE NUCLEAR THRESHOLD BY A CONVENTIONAL BUILDUP.

No, I did not favor a conventional buildup. Uh, one of the problems of that time was that the Kennedy administration came to power thinking that they were able to have all sorts of options and choices at every level of violence, so there was a buildup in terms of the CIA, there was a buildup in terms of conventional forces, uh, for the purposes of sublimated "brush fire" and limited wars. And what happened was, which is invariably what happens in situations like this is that leaders think that they do have options in the real world, because they have all of this military hardware, and all of, uh, and, and, and large forces. This is a mistake, and indeed what happened as a result of the mistake, in terms of buildup of conventional forces, was that we believed that we could enter into Vietnam and win the conflict in Vietnam. Now that did tie to the Cuban missile crisis. The appearance is that the United States won the Cuban missile crisis. One could ask the question whether or not it really, uh, we really did win, because one of the results of the Cuban missile crisis was that we, uh, learned from it that the Soviets would stay in east Europe in their own sphere of influence, and we would be able to go in other areas of the world without being bothered by the Soviet Union. So therefore, we felt free, or thought we were free, to enter into Southeast Asia, directly with military force, believing that the Soviets would not respond. The fact is the Soviets really did not respond particularly, but the people there didn't want us to be there, that is, the North Vietnamese didn't want us to be there, so we entered into this terrible quagmire as a result of the buildup of conventional forces, without, prior to that time, making the choices of what sorts of defense we really need to defend the land, the people, and the institutions of the United States. We have never started since 1945 with that kind of defense system, which is the place that we must start with first. Once we start there, then we can talk about alliances and so forth and so on, but we must first start with the idea of what is a defense system for the land, people, uh, and institutions of this country. In that context, we can then also move to the notion of saying, what is a general disarmament program that we should enter into with the Soviets and other nations? something which, in my view, is long overdue. If we don't do that, if we don't undertake that, what we will see more and more is the decay of American democracy, as we find ourselves spread all over the world in small conflicts, always threatening the possibility that those small military conflicts should, should escalate to large military conflicts, including nuclear ones, if it appears that we are losing at a lower level. That is a very, very grievous error. And ultimately what this will mean is that, uh, the notion that people in the United States receive protection from the sovereign, from the government, in exchange for obeisance to the government, uh, we will find that that social contract will, uh, indeed not exist.

WERE YOU CONCERNED AT ALL ABOUT THE SOVIET UNION OR THE WARSAW PACT AND THEIR DESIGNS ON WESTERN EUROPE IN THE EARLY '60S?

I was concerned about what was going on in east Europe, and I felt strongly that what we should do is undertake a security program and a diplomatic program that would result in the Russians getting out of east Europe, that would include a pullback for the United States from west Europe as well. My view was, and remains, that west European culture is much more attractive and stronger than we, than east European culture, and the result of that would be, in fact, ah, a, a coming, ah, a, a, a coming together between both west and east Europe, in a very good and profound way.

IS THAT WISHFUL THINKING? HOW WOULD YOU HAVE GOTTEN THE SOVIETS TO...

Well, the fact is that the, the Soviets at that time, in the 1950s, had agreed to the Rapacki plan, which specifically, ah, moved toward... ah... indeed... its position was nuclear disarmament, moving toward a conventional withdrawal. Now, whether or not they would do it today, I don't know. Ah, under Brezhnev, I think the answer is no, they, ah, they wouldn't. Under, uh, uh, Gorbachev the answer may be yes. But whatever their position is, that should be our position.

SO IF THEY DON'T AGREE TO MOVE BACK, WE SHOULDN'T.

No, if they don't agree to move back, we should indeed, ah, see how many troops we want to continue in west Europe, ah, in terms of our own defenses and defenses of the, uh, west Europeans, and, uh, pull back accordingly, if that makes sense to us. I'm for a negotiated disengagement, ah, between western and east Europe. I also happen to think that the number of troops, and number of weapons we have in west Europe, is far beyond anything that we need.

I THINK THAT DOES IT. ARE YOU HAPPY?

Fine.