Langer. You two, or you two with a large group?

Wiesner. With a larger group.

Kistiakowsky. All the former science advisors.

Wiesner. All the science advisors and all the previous directors of DDR&E, including (Harold) York and Harold Brown, who was head of DDR&E at that time. To a man we were opposed to both the big system and, as far as I recall, the smaller system too, some of us more vigorously than others. And he not only made the decision to deploy the small system, but McNamara then sort of misused, I'd say, our position there in support of the small system. I think that we may have had many reasons to feel ill-used, but I didn't think the President ever owed me anything. I wasn't supporting him for his own sake or because of any personal trust. I did it for what I thought was the best interest of the country. You can question whether it was, of course, as things turned out. I think it was probably still better to have had Johnson than Goldwater, but that's a poor choice.

Kistiakowsky. And of course the issue of the use of nuclear weapons in Vietnam was very much in our minds. I might mention another episode. It was about the period of the Tet offensive, when one of our senior generals from Vietnam made a public statement saying that there was no need to worry about the fate of Khe Sanh, because if conventional weapons didn't work, we would use tactical nuclear weapons. When I read that I became very much exercised and I telephoned the two gentlemen, who were science advisors before I was, and chairmen of PSAC under Eisenhower, namely (James) Killian (chairman, MIT Corporation) and (I.I.) Rabi (professor of Physics, Columbia University). They agreed with me that this was a very dangerous thing even to talk about. And we constructed a telegram to ex-President Eisenhower (who was then in Palm Springs) quoting the general and saying that this would be disastrous in its own right and also raised a danger of expanding the war. We sent that telegram to Eisenhower, and as luck would have it, President Johnson was visiting Eisenhower a day or so after he got the telegram. Apparently Eisenhower was very much concerned and talked very vigorously to Johnson about it. I judge that that was the case because within less than 48 hours, each of us, Killian, Rabi, and myself, had a personal phone call from Secretary McNamara saying that he had been instructed by the President to state firmly that there was no planning, even contingency planning, to use nuclear weapons.

The "summer study" discussed below was a seminar of 47 scientists which was held under the auspices of the Jason Division of the Institute for Defense Analyses in the summer of 1966. Further discussion of it can be found in the Bantam edition of the Pentagon Papers (pp. 483-485) and in Document No. 117 (p. 502). The New York Times citing the original Pentagon study, emphasizes that the scientists' work was a major influence in persuading then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara that the bombing of North Vietnam was ineffective in curtailing North Vietnam's military activities in the south.

Langer. What was the kind of thinking that led up eventually to the 1966 summer study which, at least according to the Times, turns out to have been so important?

Kistiakowsky. I'll try to summarize that briefly. Jerry and I probably were responsible for its start. We had prepared several letters to President Johnson in the winter of '65-'66. We got what amounted very much to a brush-off.

Wiesner. A pointed brush-off.

Langer. Did the study require some kind of presidential assent to set it up?

Wiesner. No, the study came about in another way. We had a small, self-initiated discussion group in Boston whose purpose was to see whether we couldn't find an acceptable way of stopping the war. We looked at a large variety of different ideas, and every time we thought we had one that looked acceptable to all sides, we would try to get the President to listen to it.

Kistiakowsky. There was no substantive consideration of our proposals. They were all just dismissed.

Wiesner. What actually happened on the study referred to in the Times was that we began to examine General (James) Gavin's enclave proposal seriously and we decided we didn't have enough facts about where the troops were, where the civilian population was, and a great number of other important questions. We called somebody, I believe it was John McNaughton (Assistant Secretary of Defense for international security affairs) and asked him for a briefing and he said he would send up (Adam) Yarmolinsky (Special Assistant to the Secretary of Defense) to give us the data we wanted. And Yarmolinsky came up with a lot of facts and data and...

Kistiakowsky. Then he went back and there were some discussions in which I didn't take part. The result of them, however, was an offer to finance, out of the funds available to the Office of International Security Affairs, a study in the summer of '66 in which a considerable group, largely of physical scientists but also some social scientists, would be involved. I don't know that I'm at liberty to mention who they were, though Jerry and I were in the steering group. Out of that study came a number of recommendations to the Secretary.

Wiemer. And a number of observations, some of which have been in the Pentagon Papers. I think, as the paper said, the study probably played a very decisive role in convincing Secretary McNamara that, in certain respects, the intelligence information he was getting was wrong, that the estimates he was getting of where they were going were not very useful.

(The concluding part of this interview will appear in tomorrow's Crimson)

Copyright 1971 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science