Free Exceptional by Dick Cheney Page B

sealing off all access points to the West:
    As the troops arrived at scores of border points, cargo trucks were already unloading rolls of barbed wire, concrete posts, wooden horses, stone blocks, picks and shovels. When dawn came four hours later, a wall divided East Berlin from the West.
    Would Khrushchev have risked the wall if Eisenhower had still been in office? It seems unlikely. Khrushchev had issued threats toshut off Western access to Berlin in 1958 and then backed down after meeting with Eisenhower in the United States. Khrushchev’s assessment of Kennedy as weak and inexperienced clearly played into his decision making.
    It is also true that the building of the Berlin Wall was an admission of the failure of the communist system. There is nothing one can say in defense of a system of government that can keep its people within its borders only by what Time described as “bullets, bayonets, and barricades.” Those aspects of communist systems—the secret police, the persecution, the murder, the oppression, the absence of freedom—that required a wall across the heart of Berlin to imprison its people would also be the characteristics that brought about communism’s ultimate collapse thirty years later.
    ONCE THE WALL WENT up, the world wondered what the Soviets would do next. Would Khrushchev back down or would he provoke a larger crisis between the two nuclear-armed nations by carrying out his pledge to prevent Western access to the entire city?
    Kennedy decided to call Khrushchev’s bluff. Since taking office, Kennedy had learned that the missile gap on which he had campaigned did not exist. In fact, U.S. satellite images had confirmed the Soviets’ arsenal was smaller than America’s. Kennedy decided to send a clear message to Khrushchev about America’s strategic superiority, as a warning against escalation of the Berlin crisis.
    He authorized his deputy secretary of defense, Roswell Gilpatric, to give a speech detailing America’s military advantage. After listing the immediate steps America had taken in response to Soviet actions in Berlin, Gilpatric continued, “But our real strength in Berlin—and at any other point in the perimeter of the free world’s defenses that might tempt Communist probes—is much more broadly based.” America was confident in its ability to deter communist action becauseof “a sober appreciation of the relative military power of the two sides.” Despite the Soviet bluster about their superiority, Gilpatric said he suspected they actually knew the truth. He wanted to be sure they knew that we knew it, too:
    While the Soviets use rigid security as a military weapon, their Iron Curtain is not so impenetrable as to force us to accept at face value the Kremlin’s boasts. The fact is that this nation has a nuclear retaliatory force of such lethal power that an enemy move which brought it into play would be an act ofself-destruction on his part.
    Describing the land-, air-, and sea-based platforms that constituted America’s nuclear triad, Gilpatric explained, “The total number of our nuclear delivery vehicles, tactical as well as strategic, is in the tens of thousands; and, of course, we have more than one warhead for each vehicle.” Summing up, Gilpatric said, “In short, we have a second strike capability which is at least as extensive as what the Soviets can deliver by striking first. Therefore, we are confident that the Soviets will not provoke a major nuclear conflict.” In closing, Gilpatric issued one more clear warning to Khrushchev:
    Those who would impose a totalitarian world order and deny men and nations the right to pursue their own destinies should understand one point very clearly. The United States does not seek to resolve disputes by violence. But if forceful interference with our rights and obligations should lead to violent conflict—as it well might—the United States