Whether to "Strangle the Baby in the Cradle": The United States and the Chinese Nuclear Program, 1960-64

Whether to “Strangle the Baby in the Cradle” William Burr and Jeffrey T. Richelson The United States and the Chinese Nuclear Program, 1960–64 International Security, Vol. 25, No. 3 (Winter 2000/01), pp. 54–99© 2000 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The authors are senior analysts at the National Security Archive, George Washington University. Earlier versions of this article appeared in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists as “The China Puzzle ,” Vol. 53, No. 4 (July/August 1997), and were presented at the 1999 annual meeting of the Society for the Historians of American Foreign Relations. The authors thank Barton Bernstein, William Bundy, Gordon Chang, Lynn Eden, Raymond Garthoff, Robert Johnson, Robert Norris, David Painter, John Prados, David Rosenberg, Walt Rostow, Gen. William Smith (ret'd), J. Samuel Walker, and Paul Wolman for comments, and the W. Alton Jones Foundation for ªnancial support to the National Security Archive, George Washington University. 1. Oral history interview with William C. Foster by Charles T. Morrissey, August 5, 1964, declassiªed September 1994, copy at John F. Kennedy Library (hereinafter JFKL). The multilateral force was a proposal to meet Western European, especially West German, concern about exclusive U.S. control of nuclear weapons deployed in Europe by establishing a NATO-controlled sea-based missile force. 2. Gordon Chang, “JFK, China, and the Bomb,” Journal of American History, Vol. 74, No. 4 (March 1988), pp. 1289–1310. Less than a year after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) Director William Foster told a historian that Kennedy had been willing to “consider politically dangerous moves” to coerce the People’s Republic of China (PRC) into complying with the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty. Foster, whose comments remained classiªed until 1994, asserted that Kennedy was even willing to sacriªce the proposed U.S.-European multilateral force (MLF) to secure Soviet cooperation “in taking action, if necessary physically, against China.” Foster told his interviewer that the president would “think out loud,” saying, “You know, it wouldn’t be too hard if we could somehow get kind of an anonymous airplane to go over there, take out the Chinese facilities —they’ve only got a couple—and maybe we could do it, or maybe the Soviet Union could do it, rather than face the threat of a China with nuclear weapons.”1 Whether to “Strangle the Baby in the Cradle” That Kennedy and his advisers considered using force against China’s nuclear facilities was ªrst documented publicly by historian Gordon Chang in 1988.2 In that same year, however, the man who had been Kennedy’s national security assistant, McGeorge Bundy, downplayed Chang’s revelations, claiming that White House discussions of preventive action against China had been simply “talk, not serious planning or real intent.” Nonetheless, historians have remained curious about the extent to which President Kennedy spurred the 54 national security bureaucracy to explore means of disrupting China’s nuclear efforts.3 Now, newly declassiªed documents show that Kennedy and his advisers did much more than talk. They reveal that the Kennedy administration initiated a massive intelligence effort, including U-2 ºights and satellite reconnaissance programs, to break through the secrecy that surrounded the Chinese nuclear program, which had begun in the mid-1950s. The documents show that after Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev rebuffed U.S. overtures for joint moves against the Chinese program, U.S. ofªcials explored military action without the Soviets. Newly declassiªed documents make it possible to trace, far more extensively than before, the massive U.S. intelligence effort deployed against China’s nuclear program and the interrelationship between that effort and the analysis of China’s nuclear progress. Even more signiªcant, the new documentation makes it possible to explore in greater detail than ever the policy debates , discussion, and planning within the Kennedy and Johnson administrations on how to deal with Beijing’s nuclear effort. By the onset of the Kennedy administration, if not earlier, senior U.S. ofªcials saw a Chinese nuclear capability as a serious threat to national security . Supporting this assessment were intelligence analysts, who emphasized the...