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At the same time, he is plainly not comfortable talking to a stranger, and that shows too. Occasional informalities are quickly caught up, crumpled and tossed away. He shows no signs whatever of seeking affection, as one does in a normal conversation, and rather than expanding on an idea or a story in the interests of courtesy, he will begin to fade off, and suddenly snap to attention by saying, "So much for that." There is almost no small talk. The amiability is reserved for his subject.
"Now let's talk about the Russians. Americans were surprised when the Russians got the Bomb [1949]. So now we both had the Bomb, but the Americans had more of them, and that is when the U.S. started using the Bomb as a diplomatic stick. There is a revisionist theory going around today that the Bomb did not play a significant role in our foreign diplomacy since World War II. The theory has developed because the Bomb is very unpopular. But I know it played a role. It played a role in Korea. It played a decisive role in the 1956 crisis in Suez, in calling Khrushchev's bluff and keeping him out of that area. It also played a decisive role in 1959 in Berlin, when Khrushchev was threatening to pull out of the Four-Power pact. It played a role in Cuba, of course, but a different kind of role, because that was when everything, including the presidency, changed. I'll come to that."
In an article, The Unimpressive Record of Atomic Diplomacy, McGeorge Bundy, who was John F. Kennedy's National Security Adviser, takes a somewhat different tack. Arguing that "there is very little evidence that American atomic supremacy was helpful in American diplomacy," Bundy cites Iran in 1946 and Quemoy and Matsu in 1955 and 1958. But he also suggests that atomic diplomacy did not affect the outcome of Korea either. Nixon says otherwise.
"Eisenhower had to find a way to bring that war to a conclusion. The truce talks had gone on for two years. During the talking at Panmunjom, tens of thousands of people were being killed. He had said, 'I will go to Korea,' in our campaign, and he was one of those new politicians who believed he had to keep a promise. Mark Clark was in command. Clark, knowing that Eisenhower did not want to get involved in an expanded ground war in Korea, understood that the only option for breaking the logjam was nuclear weapons.
"Eisenhower probably considered it, but he was concerned about using the Bomb in Korea because it was another Asian country. That had to be in the back of his mind. It was in the back of my mind, at least. And yet he was between a rock and a hard place. He had to end the war, he ruled out the use of ground troops, and all he had was the nuclear option.
"He decided then to give [Secretary of State John Foster] Dulles the responsibility of talking to Krishna Menon, the Indian Ambassador to the United Nations, who had very good relations with both the Russians and the Chinese, and who loved to talk to people--a great blah blah blah. And Dulles--not exactly in a threatening way--said, 'You know, we are very concerned about Korea,' and 'The President's patience is wearing thin,' and finally saying that unless the logjam is broken, it will lead to the use of nuclear weapons. It worked. The Chinese were probably tired of the war. And the Russians did not want to go to war over Korea. But it was the Bomb that did it. I'll tell you why."