Date

Jan 31, 1961

Description

The State Department’s review of the JCAE report gives a sense of some of the issues obscured by the excisions, such as IRBMs in Italy and Turkey. The staffer who prepared the appraisal characterized the JCAE’s report as a “high-level forceful and continuing foraging expedition on the most sensitive and critical arrangements of foreign policy.” While he found that the JCAE did not have consistent political, strategic, or ideological views, he did find the “apparent assumption that only with the U.K. can we have reliable land-based weapons and nuclear weapons cooperation.” Thus, Holifield and his colleagues were especially critical of deployments of land-based missiles on the European continent because of their concern about political instability in Italy and elsewhere

Source

DNSA

Document published in following posting(s):

The U.S. Nuclear Presence in Western Europe, 1954-1962, Part II

Sep 16, 2020

Office of Special Assistant to the Secretary for Atomic Energy Matters, Untitled appraisal of Joint Committee on Atomic Energy report on nuclear weapons deployments in NATO Europe, n.d. [circa February 1961, with incorrect 11 September 1961 date], Top Secret