Abstract
As the missile crisis drew to a close Kennedy and Khrushchev looked forward to a less tense relationship. The Soviet leader now had to accept that for the moment he had no obvious means of pushing forward on Berlin. Arms control had more promise. Nuclear proliferation was very much to the fore of Kennedy’s thinking as a result of the continuing argument with France, worries about Germany and knowledge of China’s nuclear ambitions. Higher on the agenda was the question of a nuclear test ban, which had been under discussion for many years but without much progress.
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- 1.
On the test ban debate see Arthur T. Hadley, The Nation’s Safety and Arms Control (New York: Viking press, 1961), pp. 50–60; Robert A. Divine, Blowing on the Wind: The Nuclear Test Ban Debate, 1954–1960 (New York: OUP, 1978). On the negotiation see Glenn Seaborg, Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Test Ban (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars.
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Schlesinger. Thousand Days, p. 896.
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Hugh Gusterson, Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 141.
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Text Sorensen, ed. “Let the Word go Forth”, pp. 282–90.
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Georgi Arbatov. The System: An Insider’s Life in Soviet Politics (New York: Random House, 1992), p. 95; Remarks of President John F. Kennedy at the Rudolph Wilde Platz, Berlin, June 26, 1963. Text available at: https://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/JFK-Speeches/Berlin-W-Germany-Rudolph-Wilde-Platz_19630626.aspx.
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Theodore Sorensen, ed. “Let the Word go Forth”: The Speeches, Statements and Writings of John F Kennedy (New York: Dell Publishing, 1988), pp. 291–8. Seaborg, Kennedy, Khrushchev and Test Ban.
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See interviews with those involved on https://nautilus.org/essentially-annihilated/.
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Graham A. Cosmos, MACV: The Joint Command in the Years of Withdrawal, 1968–1973 (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, United States Army, 2006) p. 41. The episode is also discussed in Michael Beschloss, Presidents of War (New York: Crown, 2018).
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Memorandum from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (Wheeler) to President Johnson, February 3, 1968, FRUS, 1964–1968, Vol. VI, Vietnam, January–August 1968.
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General William C. Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports (New York: Da Capo Press, Inc., 1989), p. 338.
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Freedman, L., Michaels, J. (2019). The Unthinkable Weapon. In: The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57350-6_25
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