Monday. Dec. 11, 1961 University Daily Kansan
Page 9
JFK's Missile Gap-Where Is It Now
(Editor's note: What has happened to the "missile gap" that Democrats denounced so loudly last year? How strong is the United States now compared to Russia? UPI's chief military writer—who has covered the battles of the Pentagon for many years—gives a detailed appraisal in the following dispatch.)
WASHINGTON - The Kennedy administration has dropped like a burning firecracker its pre-election claims that U.S. military might was deteriorating dangerously.
By Charles Cordry United Press International
It now asserts as vehemently as the Eisenhower administration did that the United States has clear military superiority over the Soviet Union.
This could mean a battle royal when Congress returns in January, with wrathful Republicans making potent political medicine of the Democrats' turnabout. Democrats made defense a major 1960 campaign issue. They contended in their platform that "our military position today is measured in terms of gaps.
Was there a missile gap and, if so,
is there one still?
What has happened in the months since President Kennedy was inaugurated that has changed the outlook?
Was the gap politics, or was it a matter of how opposing parties interpreted secret intelligence estimates?
These will be hot questions in the 1962 congressional election year. Some points worth bearing in mind:
COULD THE new administration have redressed a bad balance in such a brief time?
—Demands on the U.S. military machine are so gargantuan there always will be deficiencies somewhere. There always will be room for debate about how much defense is enough.
—Kennedy has cut some programs that Democrats once advocated, endorsed others inherited from Eisenhower, and in the main ordered a bolstering of both nuclear and non-nuclear forces.
NEVERTHELESS, newest intelligence estimates support last year's assertions by the Eisenhower administration that there will be no gap in overall power to deter major war.
The shape of U.S. forces and military policies under Kennedy do not appear to be settled with finality as yet. Under the pull and tug of events and a variety of civilian and military advisers, the president has revised the defense budget upward three times—in March, May and chiefly in July. The latter followed his June meeting with Nikita S. Khrushchev in Vienna and the shadow of the Berlin crisis.
These measures are raising defense strength to new plateaus. Congress has appropriated about $6 billion more for defense than former President Dwight D. Eisenhower proposed for the year that started July 1. Some of it will be used in future years, but actual spending
will exceed by about $4 billion the Eisenhower recommendations. Total military spending will be about $47 billion and next year's will be higher.
But new policies and actions require time to take full effect. And Russia also has been building up—increasing its budget, suspending troop cuts and extending duty tours, testing nuclear weapons and missiles.
NOTHING ACTUALLY achieved to this moment would seem to account for the disparity between pre-election claims about U.S. defenses and those being made now. For example:
August, 1958 -- Kennedy tells Senate there is every indication America "will have lost . . . its superiority in nuclear striking power" by 1960, the year the missile gap "will begin."
January, 1960 — Kennedy says in book, "The Strategy of Peace" (Harper), that Soviet missile advance "made them the superior of the United States in the power to deliver nuclear warheads onto a target." (Ironically in this same month central intelligence director Allen W. Dulles says Russians try to make "the unsophisticated" believe their missile and space achievements mean overall military superiority. Says "such superiority, in the opinion of more qualified experts than I, does not exist."
October, 1980 — Kennedy says in text of speech that America faces the time when Russia will outproduce it in missiles by two or three to one, speaks of "dangerous deterioration" in U.S. strength, condemns "soothing syrup fed to anxious Americans" by Republicans. (A week later defense secretary Thomas S. Gates, Jr., says responsible officials have "every right to deeply resent the many implications now current that we have been dissipating . . . strength" and calls U.S. strength "greatest the world has ever known.")
FEBRUARY, 1961 — Kennedy's defense secretary, Robert S. McNamara, tells newsmen in background session less than three weeks after taking office that there is no missile gap. More important, there will be no period when balance of destructive power favors Russia. He is chastised by the White House and reporters and dispatches are denounced.
November, 1961 — Kennedy says,
"in terms of total military strength,
the United States would not trade
places with any nation on earth."
Says United States has "... many
times more nuclear power than any
other nation" and could "... devastate
any nation which initiates a
nuclear war on the United States or
its allies."
That was substantially what Eisenhower said in his final State of the Union message. He said the "missile gap" showed every sign of being a fiction like the "bomber gap" that worried Democrats and air force generals in 1950.
WITHOUT DOWNGRADING the Kennedy administration's defense moves, the inference seems plain that the superior power was there last January.
A distinguished defense analyst was discussing privately some weeks ago the Kennedy policies and actions. He baldly summarized: "They
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found that the Eisenhower administration was telling the truth about relative U.S.-Russian strength.
What McNamara said about strategic nuclear power that February night, however, is what he and Deputy Defense Secretary Roswell L. Galpatric now are saying more emphatically in public utterances on U.S. supremacy.
In the interim there were crises over Laos, Cuba, Berlin, South Viet Nam. There were some who thought America's Laotian and Cuban performances emboldened Khrushchev in his Berlin adventure. Public emphasis on conventional arms led to an inference in quarters here and abroad that American resolve to use nuclear power may have weakened. An evident will to use nuclear power, critics say, is essential, if it is to deter war.
There was evidence of this in McNamara's "background" session in February. But at that time the 1960 campaign was still fresh in mind, Kennedy had yet to see the new Pentagon studies and the administration in any event seemed bent on speaking softly about atomics and emphasizing a buildup of conventional forces.
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AMONG THOSE concerned was West German Defense Minister Franz Josef Strauss. He conferred last May 13 with Harvard professor Henry A. Kissinger, a presidential adviser who wrote one book advocating nuclear strategy and a later one shifting emphasis to conventional weapons for limited wars. The next day Strauss said theoreticians had weakened the credibility of the nuclear deterrent and it must not be shaken further.
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Sen. Margaret Chase Smith, R-Me., struck harder in a Senate speech in late September. Her explanation for Khrushchev's belligerency: America's concentration on conventional arms and presidential handling of Laos and Cuba. The United States had a decided nuclear advantage, she said. Otherwise Russian would not have resumed tests and would not have been deterred in the past.
FREE GIFT WRAPPING
Mailing Service
"But he is confident we won't use it for he sees us turning to emphasis on conventional weapons," the armed services committee member said. "We have in effect played into his hands, for the kind of warfare in which he knows he can beat us."
Not long after that the administration became increasingly assertive about American nuclear power and the will to use it if need be. A sharp turning point was signalled by Gilpatric in an October speech approved by Kennedy.
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HE COUNTED UP America's atomic weapons and disclosed that there was "tens of thousands" of tactical and strategic delivery vehicles with "of course" more than one warhead for each. He outlined the "quick-fix measures" taken in the Berlin crisis such as reserve call-ups and draft increases, but said "our real strength . . . is much more broadly based." Then he recited the elements of nuclear power — bombers, missile submarines, seaborne and land-based tactical air power, intercontinental missiles.
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The McNamara and Gilpatric testaments, except for the public counting of nuclear weapons, came from the same defense department material that their predecessors used over the past several years of defense controversy. That America has "several times" Russia's nuclear power and that an attack by Russia would be an act of self-destruction have been consistent themes.
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AT A NEWS CONFERENCE last month, Kennedy said his pre-election criticisms had represented his best information "based on public statements made by those in a position to know" in the late 1950's. He mentioned Eisenhower's onetime statement that "we are somewhat behind" in long-rang missiles, Air
Force Gen. Curtis E. Lemay's concern about continental defense.
There was irony in this, and possibly a political thrust. Instead of citing fellow critics, Kennedy named as references three architects of the former GOP administration's military policies.
Citing Gavin's arguments frequently in his August, 1958, "missile gap" speech, Kennedy predicted Russia would have "several times" as many missiles as America in the early 1960's and a "far superior" air defense to deal with the bombers on which the U.S. would largely have to rely. (At that time U2 spies planes had been penetrating Soviet air space for two years but only Eisenhower and a handful of others knew that.)
As a senator, however, Kennedy seemed to give paramount importance to the views of Lt. Gen. James M. Gavin whom he was later to make ambassador to Paris. Gavin retired abruptly from the army in 1958 and wrote a book, "War and Peace in the Space Age" (Harper), forecasting a "missile lag" that would put America in "great peril."
Daughter Wins
HOUSTON, Tex. — (UPI) — Mrs,
W. H. Masterson protested when her
daughter, Aileen, 5, asked to take
her dachshund to church. Mrs. Masterson was caught without an argument when Aileen said, "He could sing the dog's ology."
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