'63 Tapes Reveal Kennedy and Aides Discussed Using Nuclear Arms in a China-India Clash
- From: ano457@xxxxxxxxx
- Date: 25 Aug 2005 22:06:43 -0700
August 26, 2005
'63 Tapes Reveal Kennedy and Aides Discussed Using Nuclear Arms in a
China-India Clash
By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS
MUMBAI, India, Aug. 25 - In May 1963, President John F. Kennedy and his
aides discussed the feasibility of using nuclear weapons in the event
China attacked India for a second time, according to newly declassified
audio recordings that were released Thursday by the John F. Kennedy
Presidential Library and Museum in Boston.
Over the crackle of the decades-old tapes, President Kennedy and his
advisers can be heard discussing how to prevent India from becoming, in
the popular idiom of the day, another domino to fall to Communism.
On the tapes, Robert S. McNamara, who was President Kennedy's defense
secretary, is heard to say: "Before any substantial commitment to
defend India against China is given, we should recognize that in order
to carry out that commitment against any substantial Chinese attack, we
would have to use nuclear weapons. Any large Chinese Communist attack
on any part of that area would require the use of nuclear weapons by
the U.S., and this is to be preferred over the introduction of large
numbers of U.S. soldiers."
Mr. McNamara said in a telephone interview on Thursday that he could
not remember the conversation, "but it is probably correct."
Minutes later, after hearing from Mr. McNamara and two other advisers,
President Kennedy says, "We should defend India, and therefore we will
defend India" if attacked. It is not clear from the tapes whether Mr.
Kennedy was speaking of using nuclear weapons or of defending India in
more conventional terms.
"The context is that Kennedy was very, very pro-India," said Stephen P.
Cohen, a senior fellow in foreign policy studies at the Brookings
Institution in Washington and an expert on India, Pakistan and South
Asian security.
"He saw India as a natural balance to China," Mr. Cohen said of Mr.
Kennedy. "That was not true of his advisers. My guess is that they
didn't want to see American ground troops get involved in a war."
Mr. Cohen recalled the political climate of the time and suggested that
Mr. Kennedy's aides might have had another motive for bringing up the
possible use of nuclear weapons. "We were tied up in Korea; we were
worried about the Russians," he said. "And, conceivably, they said
'nuclear' because they didn't want him to do anything for India; that
this was a way of raising the stakes so high as to make it not an
option."
Indian analysts said they were stunned by the disclosure of the tapes.
"I do not recollect in the public domain such an explicit commitment to
nuke China," said C. Uday Bhaskar, a commodore in the Indian Navy who
heads a research organization in New Delhi financed by the Indian
Defense Ministry. "I'm sure it will have antennae up in China."
Analysts of South Asian affairs said they saw parallels to questions
that confront the United States and Asia's two most populous countries,
which still maintain their own mixture of competition and cooperation.
"Obviously, there are resonances between 1963 and 2005," said Sugata
Bose, a professor of South Asian history at Harvard University. "How to
contain China is the common thread."
In 1963, the United States believed that China might have "expansionist
designs," Mr. Bose said in a telephone interview from Calcutta, while
in 2005 "the United States knows the Chinese leadership is consciously
pragmatic and is eager to avoid the perception of being expansionist."
At the same time, Mr. Bose said, "The reality is that China is a much
stronger power today, because the economic dimension has been added to
the military and strategic one."
The deliberations in May 1963 are especially striking in light of their
timing. They came just seven months after two events that shook
geopolitics: the Cuban missile crisis and an invasion of India by
China, which sought to acquire disputed border territories.
On one stretch of the tape, Gen. Maxwell D. Taylor, then chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is heard telling Mr. Kennedy: "This is just
one spectacular aspect of the overall problem of how to cope with Red
China politically and militarily in the next decade. I would hate to
think that we would fight this on the ground in a non-nuclear way."
Also on the tapes, Dean Rusk, Mr. Kennedy's secretary of state,
counsels that the use of nuclear weapons would have to have support
from America's allies.
"I think we would be hard pressed to tell our own people why we are
doing this with India when even the British won't do it or the
Australians won't do it and the Canadians won't do it," Mr. Rusk says.
"We need to have those other flags flying on these joint enterprises."
George W. Ball, then an under secretary of state, warned Mr. Kennedy
that the use of nuclear weapons against China could create a perception
of American hostility toward East Asians.
"If there is a general appearance of a shift in strategy to the
dependence on a nuclear defense against the Chinese in the Far East, we
are going to inject into this whole world opinion the old bugaboo of
being willing to use nuclear weapons against Asians," Mr. Ball says.
Analysts pointed out that the so-called nuclear option, even if it was
considered in the spring of 1963, would have been dismissed the
following year, when China first tested its own nuclear weapon.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
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