Tapes reveal JFK considered nukes to defend India in 1963 Anand Giridharadas, New York Times August 26, 2005 INDIA0826
MUMBAI, INDIA -- 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 recordings released Thursday by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston.
Over the crackle of the decades-old tapes, 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.
Robert S. McNamara, 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. ... this is to be preferred over the introduction of large numbers of U.S. soldiers."
McNamara said Thursday that he didn't remember the conversation, "but it is probably correct."
Minutes later, after hearing from McNamara and two other advisers, Kennedy says, "We should defend India, and therefore we will defend India" if attacked. It is not clear whether he was speaking of using nuclear weapons or of defending India in more conventional terms.
Indian analysts said they were stunned by the disclosure.
"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 runs a research organization in New Delhi financed by the Indian Defense Ministry. "I'm sure it will have antennae up in China."
Said Stephen Cohen, a senior fellow in foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.: "The context is that Kennedy was very, very pro-India."
"He saw India as a natural balance to China," said Cohen, an expert on South Asian security. "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."
In one section of the tapes, Gen. Maxwell D. Taylor, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is heard telling 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, Secretary of State Dean Rusk counsels that the use of nuclear weapons would have to have support from U.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," Rusk says. "We need to have those other flags flying on these joint enterprises."