1 The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign ...

It is a mark of the Senate of this time of how and why Cooper became the leader of the
effort in the Senate to halt the nuclear arms race. He simply said, “It’s the survival of
mankind that is at stake,” and believed it. Senator Cooper became the focal point for the
education of the Senate on nuclear matters because his colleagues respected his open
conviction on this issue. It is important to understand that Senator Cooper, a Republican,
was given the role of leadership on this issue of controlling the nuclear danger by
decisions of the “Senate Greybeards”, namely, the Democratic majority leader, Mike
Mansfield, Phil Hart, Stuart Symington, Bill Fulbright, George Aiken and Jack Javits.
This is an example of how the Senate worked by consensus at this time – a kind of natural
selection. My job, under his direction, was to organize the education of the Senate by our
nation’s top scientists. So all these former Presidential science advisors, and this cadre of
Nobel prize winners, took enormous amounts of time away from their universities and
laboratories, came to the Hill over a period of four years – and tutored all the key senators
and their key staff on the realities and history of the arms race and the details of nuclear
weaponry. This tutoring, this teaching, gave a substantial group of senators the
confidence they needed to take on such a serious national debate. In the end, the Senators
knew more than the president and his key advisors about the issue and this fact shaped the
outcome.
Q: Did you find you were getting opposition from what you might call the “nuclear
club,” or “clique” or whatever it is in the Pentagon?
MILLER: Not completely. It’s very interesting why. A similar debate was going on inside
the government, too, in the Pentagon, and the State Department. In the State Department,
the arms control and disarmament agency had just been created. They focused on the
issues of stopping underground testing and fallout from testing. There was a debate,
certainly within the government. It was quieter than in the Senate, but even Secretary of
Defense McNamara, at that time, had his doubts. In fact, McNamara came to the view
that only a limited ABM system was required, and it was clearly a fallback. McNamara
couldn’t say no to ABM development because he didn’t have the political strength to
oppose the hawks, to oppose the military on this issue, but he wanted to. He limited the
deployment to such an extent, that the system was irrelevant, and would collapse because
of its obvious inadequacy, which is, in fact, what happened.
Key senators like Fulbright, Cooper, Mansfield, and Symington, Fulbright and Javits and
others would meet with McNamara over dinner at Senator Cooper’s Georgetown house
on 29 th and N, for example, and talk about the ABM issue and the possibilities for arms
control and would discourse often with the scientific community’s leading scientists. The
scientists were asked, frequently, to come to the Senate and give testimony, letters were
written back and forth, and there were many visits to test sites. The ABM issue was the
focus of a fundamental, very intensely intellectual, political and philosophical and
tangible set of problems. The Senators made the effort to go to the laboratories, they went
to the weapon sites, they went to the SALT talks – Gerry Smith, the head of the SALT
Delegation and the Director of ACDA, was a close friend of Cooper’s and encouraged his
visits to the SALT talks.
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