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Never Any Doubt. Goldwater insists that the President should delegate such authority. Johnson lets on that he can't and won't. The fact is that he already does, as did Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy before him. In 1957, the congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy received written notification that plans were being developed to give NATO's supreme commander in Europe the right to use nuclear weapons in certain contingencies—such as the incapacity of the President or the breakdown of communications between Europe and the U.S.
Those plans are now in operation. All are classified top secret, but they apply not only to NATO's commander, but to the commander of the North American Air Defense. Some are written, but word-of-mouth communication between the President and the NATO commander is also important. Former NATO Commander Lauris Norstad, for example, never had any doubt about his authority to act in the event of an attack on Western Europe during the Cuba missile crisis of 1962: he could use his tactical atomic weaponry.
Said Norstad in a recent conversation with a friend: "In every crisis that arose under President Eisenhower and President Kennedy, there never was a time when I felt that there was any possibility of lack of complete meeting of the minds between the President and the Supreme Commander as to what should be done in an emergency."
"Dangerously Misleading." Goldwater shows appalling ignorance when he intimates that there are atomic weapons so small and well-packaged that they can be carried around by an infantryman, and that these weapons do not really have much more explosive power than some of the gunpowder arms of World War II. The fact is that the U.S.'s smallest operational nuclear weapon, the Davy Crockett, carries a minimum power package equivalent to 40 tons of TNT—as opposed to World War IIs powerful "blockbuster" bomb, which packed an explosive load of about H tons.
The Davy Crockett, a recoilless rifle, comes in two sizes, one weighing 116 Ibs., the other 371 Ibs., and can be fired from a tripod by a crew of three men. With a range of up to 2½ miles, the Davy Crockett can annihilate a dug-in infantry battalion, wipe out a massed formation of 45 to 50 tanks, or destroy a huge bridge. Two versions of the 155-mm. howitzer—one a towed weapon weighing 12,700 Ibs., and the other a self-propelled weapon weighing 54,200 Ibs.—fire an explosive load of 40 to 100 tons up to 11.2 miles. Beyond that, the punch of the Army's tactical nuclear weaponry scales rapidly upward. The 12.7-mile-range Little John rocket carries a power package of over 20 kilotons; the 24.2-mile Honest John 100 to 150 kilotons; the 135-mile Sergeant over 100 kilotons; and the 400-mile Pershing, largest of the Army's "tactical" nuclear weapons, over 200 kilotons. Thus the Johnson Administration's Deputy Defense Secretary, Cyrus R. Vance, has a real point when he says of some of Goldwater's statements: " 'Small' and 'conventional' are dangerously misleading and totally inappropriate when applied to any nuclear weapon."