THE WHITE HOUSE WASH I N G T O N - 1 ' ' I ' I 1 TO S CREl' March 2 3 1964 MEMORANDUM FOR MR BUNDY MR SMITH In regard to Mr Bundy's suggestion that the conferences established in the Gold Book in the emergency nuclear program include the Secretary of State General Goodpaster responded for the Joint Chiefs of Staff after a discussion of this matter I ' ' ' ' a Fundamentally they believe that the Gold Book solution will never take place and that any other earlier conferences in regard to these procedures would automatically include the Secretary of State I o I oo 'j j ' b The Gold Book business in their minds is really a military command procedure in which they would go down the line after national decisions have been taken and consequently there is no need to list the Secretary of State because it is more or less a military chain of command procedure c In the extreme case that we were going through the Gold Book procedure when national decisions had not been previously taken the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of Defense feel that the Secretary of State would be included by instinct if there were time and if there were no time the procedures should not demand any change in these emergency steps In short they feel the Secretary of State is adequately taken care of without changing any of the text or instructions in the Gold Book The Joint Chiefs are personally willing to discuss this further if the President or Mr Bundy feels deeply about it CVC DECLASSIFIED E O 13292 Sec 3 5 NLJ II Ac 0' - 't By g NARA Date 7-1$-0 '- COpy lBJ UBRAR't This document is from the holdings of The National Security Archive Suite 701 Gelman Library The George Washington University 2130 H Street NW Washington D C 20037 Phone 202 994-7000 Fax 202 994-7005 nsarchiv@gwu edu