1. Actively seek an international system for the regulation and reduction of ALL armaments and armed forces, taking into account the President's proposal for an international pool of atomic materials for "peaceful use,” under an adequately safeguarded and comprehensive plan.

2. Concurrently make intensive efforts to resolve other major international

issues.

3. Meanwhile, continue the steady development of strength in the United States and the Free World coalition required for United States security.

4. Continue to press for the implementation of the President's Geneva Proposal as a first priority objective of United States disarmament policy.

5. Avoid the regulation of nuclear weapons, their means of delivery or tests, except as a part of the final phase of a comprehensive disarmament arrangement.

6. Recognize that the acceptability and character of any international plan for the regulation and reduction of armed forces and armaments depends primarily on the scope and effectiveness of the safeguards against violations and evasions, and especially the inspection system.

7. Emphasize that "The United States is ready to proceed in the study and testing of a reliable system of inspection and reporting AND WHEN THAT SYSTEM IS PROVED, THEN to reduce armaments with all others to the extent that the system will provide assured results."

8. Accelerate United States efforts to elicit favorable world opinion as regards the sincerity, soundness, and objectivity of our disarmament proposals derived from United States policy.39

The NSC considered the Stassen report, along with the two memorandums by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on 26 January. Agreement was not achieved on the points at issue, but President Eisenhower did authorize Mr. Stassen to test the acceptability of his plan through a speech by an administration spokesman and private consultations with the British. Mr. Stassen was also to refine and improve the draft letter to Bulganin with the understanding that decisions on its form and substance, and even on the desirability of sending it, would be made at a later date.40

In a move that appeared to depart considerably from these instructions, Mr. Stassen one week later submitted to the NSC members a slightly revised version of the letter to Bulganin, along with a draft speech for President Eisenhower to deliver to the American people and a draft statement for him to make to Congress explaining the letter to Bulganin.41 The Joint Chiefs of Staff commented adversely on this draft letter, and the Acting Secretary of Defense passed their views to Mr. Stassen with his endorsement on 7 February 1956. At an NSC meeting that same day, however, the President decided against using any of the drafts, thus effectively killing the Stassen proposal.42

A Compromise Policy

The disarmament question itself was far from dead, however, and President

long terms. The immediate problem was to develop a position for use in the UN Disarmament Subcommittee meetings scheduled to start on 19 March. To this

end, the President directed the preparation of proposals for advance notification of movement of armed units through international air or water or over foreign soil and for exchange of test inspection teams. Mr. Eisenhower also directed the development of two other proposals that were not specifically intended for use at the Subcommittee meeting but were ultimately introduced there. They dealt with test inspection and armaments reduction in cases where inspection was shown to be effective.43

Mr. Stassen had already initiated studies of test inspection areas to support the proposal for such areas in his draft letter to Bulganin. He had tentatively selected five areas that would meet the criteria set forth in that draft-to include some military forces and armaments, one port, one rail junction, and one air complex. On 19 January he had submitted his preliminary plan for comment to the Secretary of Defense. It was passed to the Joint Chiefs of Staff on 30 January with a request for their views-too late for them to comment on it in connection with the JCS review of the draft letter to Bulganin.44 On 7 February 1956 the Joint Chiefs of Staff advised the Secretary of Defense that they could not approve the Stassen test inspection area proposal in its current form because it was not linked to prior acceptance by the Soviet Union of Open Skies and because it was not based on mutually acceptable criteria for military establishments within the test areas.45

President Eisenhower's action on the same day authorizing Mr. Stassen to go ahead with developing the test inspection area scheme led the Secretary of Defense to ask the Joint Chiefs of Staff to define the desirable characteristics of a test area and provide specific criteria for choosing the military installations it should include.46 The Joint Chiefs of Staff replied on 21 February. In terms of geographical and meteorological requirements, the test area should be a continuous strip containing at least 20,000 square miles of land area and having yearly average flying conditions that allowed daylight aerial photography at least 25 percent of the time. Mr. Stassen's fourth area, a rectangular strip running from southwest to northeast, from Mobile, Alabama, nearly to Atlanta, Georgia, was judged by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to be acceptable from the military point of view.

As criteria for military installations to be included in the test inspection area, the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended the following: an army installation currently housing a combat unit with a minimum actual strength of at least 10,000; an army supply installation containing at least 500,000 feet of covered storage space, of which at least half was currently in use; a naval installation containing pier facilities for ships of 20,000 tons, a complement of at least 5,000 naval personnel, and a harbor free of ice at least six months a year; an air base that was the permanent station of one flying unit of 50 or more aircraft of 25,000 pounds gross weight or larger; a major air supply installation containing at least 1.5 million gross square feet of covered storage space; and a flying training facility with at least 300 students and using at least 100 modern jet training aircraft.

Aerial inspection of all parts of the test area would be permitted. On the ground, inspectors would be excluded from installations, or portions thereof, containing activities or equipment related to research and development, air defense, missiles, nuclear weapons, and biological and chemical warfare. Estab

lishment of these criteria was not, in the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sufficient to assure an acceptable exchange of information. They recommended adoption of the methods and procedures for gathering information contained in their comprehensive inspection plan of 19 October 1955.47

The Joint Chiefs of Staff were addressing the question of force reductions during the same period in which they were preparing recommendations on test inspection areas. On 31 January the Assistant Secretary of Defense (ISA) had passed to them a request by Mr. Stassen for studies of the effects on US security of reductions in forces by the United States and the Soviet Union to several levels ranging from 3,000,000 down to 1,000,000. For the purpose of these studies, the President's Special Assistant for Disarmament stated as assumptions that an effective inspection and control system would be in effect before any reductions took place, that development and manufacture of ballistic missiles would not be restricted, and that reductions would take place in stages under continuing control and would be simultaneously carried out by the United States and the communist states.48

In their reply, made to the Secretary of Defense on 24 February 1956, the Joint Chiefs of Staff cautioned that force reductions could not be appraised in isolation from broader considerations, particularly the objective of the Soviet Union to achieve world domination. Soviet disarmament proposals should be viewed as means of attaining that objective, with skillful exploitation of the effect on the free world of propaganda derived from negotiations, and agreement by the Soviets to specific force reductions must be assumed to be designed to enhance their relative power position. For example, any reduction of US forces in Asia or Europe following a disarmament agreement would result in at least partial achievement by the Soviet Union of its goal of reducing US influence in Eurasia.

Strategic interests of the United States, however, dictated the continued stationing of substantial forces overseas because no US ally or group of allies was strong enough to repulse a Soviet attack without help from the United States. The Joint Chiefs of Staff held that to expect the Soviet Union to redress this imbalance by a disarmament agreement was unrealistic. Consequently, a disarmament agreement would not lessen the need to station sizable US forces overseas.

Turning to the assumptions Mr. Stassen had suggested as a basis for the study of force reduction, the Joint Chiefs of Staff observed that the problems which must be solved prior to actual force reductions had been largely assumed away, and that fulfillment of the majority of these assumptions was basically contingent upon good faith among the parties to the agreement. In view of the total lack of demonstrated good faith on the part of the Soviet Union, it was highly unrealistic to jump ahead to the final stages of a disarmament agreement. Already, continued the Joint Chiefs of Staff, "experience has indicated that the discussion of final force figures, even for purely illustrative purposes,... has tended to precommit the United States to a definite position on relative force levels and to minimize or assume away the importance of those essential preliminary steps required to establish adequate safeguards. The futility of discussing disarmament in terms of pure numbers without first having established adequate and proved safeguards," they added, "must be equally obvious to the Soviets, and evidences of U.S. will

ingness to negotiate under such conditions could only reinforce the Soviet aim of using such negotiations to further policies inimical to the United States."

Accordingly, the Joint Chiefs of Staff concluded that only the setting of US, Soviet, and Communist Chinese force levels at 3,000,000-the highest figure Mr. Stassen had listed-would be in the interest of the United States, since US forces were currently below this level. Reduction below existing levels was not justified because those levels were considered to be the minimum required to meet current commitments. Because of the virtual impossibility of furnishing a meaningful estimate of the impact of force reductions on US national security without knowledge of the conditions existing at the time and because of the many complex problems which must be solved before such reductions could be implemented, the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended strongly that the Department of Defense insist that certain preconditions must be met before commitments on specific force reductions were even discussed.49

This submission of JCS views came at a time when a strong disposition to take some positive step toward negotiation of troop reductions was in evidence at higher levels of the US Government. Four days later, on 28 February 1956, Deputy Secretary of Defense Robertson discussed with the Secretary of State the possibility of proposing or acceding to overall force reductions by the United States, the Soviet Union, and Communist China to 2,500,000 men. Secretary Robertson, at the President's direction, then reviewed the whole question of force levels and their relationship to basic national security with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He emerged from this consultation accepting substantially the conclusions set forth in the JCS memorandum of 24 February. The Deputy Secretary advised Mr. Dulles on 1 March that "our basic national security policy is sound and cannot be supported by a lower level of armed forces than that which we now maintain in the absence of resolution of the outstanding issues between the Free World and the communist bloc.... For these reasons, the Department of Defense opposes Harold's [Stassen] proposed change for the position of the U.S. Delegate to the Subcommittee meeting of the United Nations Disarmament Commission." 50

A compromise was reached late in the day at another meeting, attended by the President, the Secretary and Under Secretary of State, the Acting Secretary of Defense, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It preserved the intention to take a positive stand but added qualifications that deferred to a considerable degree to the JCS and Defense views. The President approved the following:

If the Eisenhower aerial inspection and blueprint exchange proposal, with accompanying ground inspection, is accepted and if such a system is proven to the U.S. to be satisfactorily installed and operating, and assuming the political situation is reasonably stable, the United States, with other nations concerned, would be prepared to begin a gradual reciprocal, safeguarded reduction of armaments, armed forces, and military expenditures. For illustrative purposes, in the forthcoming session of the United Nations Subcommittee, the United States Representative is authorized to indicate that such reductions would presuppose, as a basis for measurement and in a specific manner to be mutually agreed, force levels of 2.5 million men for the U.S., USSR and China; corresponding appropriate levels for the UK and France and others to be determined after consultation with the representatives of these states.51

Arms Control Negotiations in 1956

Then the UN Disarmament Subcommittee reconvened in London in late March, the US delegate followed through on President Eisenhower's policy directives by introducing, as preliminary steps to facilitate later disarmament agreement, proposals for exchange of technical missions by the United States and the Soviet Union and for the establishment by those states of demonstration test areas. The first proposal called for a six-month exchange of technical personnel, who would not have access to sensitive information the host countries were unwilling to reveal. The second proposal embodied the plan recommended by the Joint Chiefs of Staff-opening up each country to inspection by the other of an area of 20,000 square miles containing representative military installations.52

W the US followed on Eisenhower's policy

While the United States limited its initial proposals in the UN Subcommittee to these two confidence-building measures, other member states offered comprehensive disarmament plans. On 19 March, the British and French put forward a revised version of the plan they had originally submitted in June 1954. The revision added the Eisenhower Open Skies and Bulganin fixed-post inspection plans to the first of its three stages. The revision also added, to the third stage, a prohibition of nuclear tests.53

The Soviet Union presented a less ambitious plan. Abandoning a policy linking nuclear and nonnuclear weapons, to which they had rigidly adhered for 10 years, the Soviets now proposed an agreement limited to conventional armaments. Their plan called for reductions of military manpower within three years to the following: United States, Soviet Union, and China, 1 to 1.5 million men; Great Britain and France, 650,000. Supervision over and verification of the reductions would be in the hands of an international control organ, which would maintain fixed control posts and inspectors having unimpeded access to all objects of control. As in previous Soviet plans, violations would be referred to the UN Security Council, making further action subject to the veto, but the Soviets did now agree that the control machinery should be ready to function before arms reductions began. Tied to this plan was a proposal for creation of a nuclearfree zone in Central Europe.54

The United States had not originally intended to propose anything more than the two confidence-building measures, but dissatisfaction with the Anglo-French draft because of its ban on nuclear weapons and nuclear tests in the third stage led the United States to introduce a proposal covering the first stage of a general disarmament plan. This plan called for the following measures, all to be undertaken under effective international inspection and control: reduction of conventional forces to 2,500,000 by the United States, the Soviet Union, and China and to 750,000 by Great Britain and France; cessation of the production of fissionable materials for military uses; and limitation of nuclear weapons tests.55

The Soviet and Western positions had now grown closer together than ever before. They grew closer still when the Soviets, on 12 July, announced a willingness to accept the Western figures for force levels in the first stage. Unbridgeable differences remained, however, owing particularly to Soviet insistence that corrective action by control officials must be subject to Security Council decision,