Carter had attended the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis during the war years, from 1943 to 1946. After graduation he served aboard two obsolete battleships, the Wyoming and the Mississippi, which had been converted to training ships and operated generally within the Chesapeake Bay. After his obligatory two years in surface ships, Carter applied for and was accepted for Naval Submarine School in New London, Connecticut, where he graduated number two in his class after the six-month course. In December 1948 he was assigned to the diesel submarine Pomfret operating with the Pacific Fleet. In 1951 Lieutenant (j.g.) Carter was transferred to the USS K-1, a small, experimental training submarine (as distinguished from a “fleet boat”), where he served as XO and chief engineer. In 1952 he was selected by Rear Adm. Hyman G. Rickover for the Navy’s nuclear-power program and reported to Washington to assist in the design and development of nuclear propulsion plants for naval vessels. He had been routinely promoted to the rank of lieutenant and was setting up a training program for the enlisted men of the nuclear submarine Seawolf, when, in October 1953, he resigned from the Navy to manage the family’s farm in Plains, Georgia. So although he had served seven years as a commissioned officer in the regular Navy, his sea duty in an operational fleet assignment lasted less than a year.
Consequently, the Ford administration felt that it was important that Carter be briefed and instructed in high-level matters of national military command and control before he took over as president and would be responsible for exercising the decisions on the release of nuclear weapons in the event of a nuclear threat to the United States. At the same time, President-elect Carter had expressed a desire to have a meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff after having been briefed on the National Command and Control System and presidential responsibilities by a member of the National Security Council.
The meeting took place on a Tuesday morning in the conference room at Blair House. Accompanying Carter were his prospective secretary of defense, Harold Brown, an experienced defense public servant who had served as secretary of the air force and director of defense research and engineering under a previous Democratic administration. Also with Carter was Zbigniew Brzezinski, who would be President Carter’s national security advisor. On the other side of the table were Gen. George Brown, chairman of the JCS; the chief of staff of the Air Force, Gen. David C. Jones; the vice chief of staff of the Army, Gen. Dutch Kerwin; the CNO (myself); and the commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. Lou Wilson.
Carter lost no time in getting to the reason for our meeting. He explained that he had been very concerned when governor of Georgia over the confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States, particularly over the possibility of a nuclear exchange between the two superpowers, which potentially could destroy both nations. He believed that something had to be done to reduce the possibility of an inadvertent release of weapons by one side that would then immediately trigger a massive response by the other. He considered that the only way to improve the safety of our two nations in this regard was if the national leadership took immediate initiatives to reduce the possibilities of nuclear warfare.
To that end, President-elect Carter said he had “called up Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev on a pay phone to discuss this matter with him in a citizen-to-citizen relationship.” Brezhnev had returned the call, and a dialog between the two ensued. Both Carter and Brezhnev had agreed that the only solution was the total elimination of nuclear weapons from the inventories of the two superpowers, and they further agreed that such an action could be initiated if Carter won the presidential election. Consequently, Carter had informed Brezhnev that if elected he would take steps to eliminate all nuclear weapons in United States’ arsenal by the end of his first four-year term, if Brezhnev would undertake to do the same thing with the Russian stockpile. Apparently Brezhnev had agreed and President Carter was informing the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that this would be an early initiative of the new administration’s national security agenda. Of course, the chiefs would be involved in the reductions, but also he expected the JCS to revise their war planning to be able to conduct the necessary operations to defend the United States and carry out our military war plans without the same reliance on nuclear weapons in the deployment of forces and resources. Clearly, Jimmy Carter was not aware of the degree to which the use of nuclear weapons or, more important, the threatened use of nuclear weapons was in our national security planning contingencies with the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies.
President Carter then asked me about the status of the ballistic missile submarine force and its security, and the detectability of Soviet strategic submarines. I presented the picture in general terms, pointing out that we believed that our missile boats were usually undetected on patrol by the Soviets, whereas we had gotten to the point that we were able to covertly trail the Soviet submarines but not on a regular basis. Nor were we confident that we had detected and knew the location of all of their deployed ballistic missile subs. After some rather desultory and profoundly technical discussion of underwater sound propagation, during which Carter made extensive computations in pencil on his lined pad, none of which any of the chiefs understood, the meeting broke up at 1115. Carter had done most of the talking, mainly briefing the JCS on his plans concerning nuclear weapons. Throughout the meeting Carter was most cordial and took the advantage of several opportunities to tell the chiefs that he intended to work very closely with the JCS in all matters of national security, would like to meet with us at least monthly. Among other things, he would like to conduct drills exercising the release of nuclear weapons, something that we should practice, he said, until they had all been removed. After the session ended, George Brown asked the chiefs to meet in the “tank” when we returned to the Pentagon to discuss the president’s comments.
There was not much to say, except we believed that Jimmy Carter could not have realized how extensively our war plans were permeated with both the use of nuclear weapons and, more important, the threat of the use of nuclear weapons in our confrontations with the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies. In retrospect, I don’t believe any of the uniformed people at that session felt overly critical of Carter for his compelling desire to eliminate nuclear weapons. I am sure we all agreed that the world would be better without them. But how to get the genie back in the bottle? It was too late. Both we and the Russians were far too deeply committed to completely disarm without inviting an unthinkable catastrophe if the Soviets cheated. I must admit that at the time I considered Carter rather naive in his simplistic approach to an impossibly complex issue. The experience was simply an example of what career military officers must often face in their dealings with senior civilians, elected or appointed from civilian life to exercise “civilian control” over the military establishment. After the initial shock at some impracticality proposed by the civilian leadership, there is usually a period of education and reflection, and then more reasonable courses of action evolve, usually without any further reference to the bizarre opening postulation.
President Carter was quick to learn in the area of nuclear weapons, and he became heavily involved in the command and control of their release. He set up briefings with the JCS in the White House and attended command post exercises in the Pentagon to rehearse the procedures for the control of nuclear weapons. It is worth noting that in June 1979, President Carter sat down in Vienna with Leonid Brezhnev to sign the treaty that resulted from the second round of Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT II) between the United States and the Soviet Union. SALT II, which lasted from 1972 to 1979, sought to curtail the deployment of nuclear weapons and was a continuation of the SALT I talks initiated in Helsinki, Finland, in 1969.