Nikita Khrushchev, who had helped pave the way for this monumental change, was not around to see it; he had died of heart failure the previous September. Living in a log cabin, he had become a critic of the Soviet government and its heavy-handed suppression of dissent. He infuriated Soviet leaders by smuggling his memoirs out of the country. Published in the West under the title Khrushchev Remembers, it became a best seller. In it, he mused sadly about the peaceful world he and Kennedy had wanted to achieve. The Soviet Central Committee decided to downplay his funeral, burying him in a corner of a Moscow cemetery. No monument was erected for four years.
On June 17, 1971, the United States and Japan signed a treaty that allowed Okinawa to revert to Japan in May 1972. The Japanese had recoiled at the United States’ use of Okinawa as a base for operations in Vietnam and a storage site for nuclear weapons. Okinawans concurred. According to the new treaty, the United States would sell Okinawa back to Japan but would retain its bases on the island and use them for combat in the region. Japan not only paid the United States an exorbitant sum to “buy back” the island, it agreed to make large annual payments toward the costs of retaining the bases. Elsewhere, the United States paid host countries for the privilege of putting bases on their land or at least shared the cost. To make matters worse, Prime Minister Eisaku Sato subverted the agreement by secretly allowing the United States to reintroduce nuclear weapons into Okinawa.
The conflict over Okinawa went back more than a decade. In 1960, the United States and Japan had concluded the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security, widely known by the Japanese abbreviation AMPO, which sanctioned continued U.S. occupation of Okinawa and retention of U.S. military bases elsewhere in Japan. Opposition had been so widespread and protests so massive that the government of Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi, Sato’s older brother, had been forced to resign. Kishi had also blundered by telling the Diet that the Japanese Constitution did not ban the development of nuclear weapons, a view that was anathema to most Japanese. U.S. Ambassador Douglas MacArthur had complained that “latent neutralism is fed on anti-militarist sentiments, pacifism, fuzzy-mindedness, nuclear neuroses and Marxist bent of intellectuals and educators.” The previous year, MacArthur had pressured the chief justice of the Japanese Supreme Court to overturn a Tokyo District Court ruling that U.S. forces in Japan represented “war potential” and therefore infringed upon the antimilitarist Article 9 of the Japanese Peace Constitution that General Douglas MacArthur, the ambassador’s uncle, had helped fashion during the occupation. Article 9 states, “the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation” and that “land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained.” During that time the Japanese government had also concluded the first of a series of “secret agreements” with the United States in which the government supported U.S. nuclear strategy and military preparations. The most egregious offense had come in the “tacit agreement” that “no prior consultation is required for US military vessels carrying nuclear weapons to enter Japanese ports or sail in Japanese territorial waters.”91
But the smoldering tension between the United States and Japan flared under Nixon. Japan’s consternation and surprise over the United States’ opening to China only exacerbated the two countries’ long-standing military and economic differences. U.S. leaders had continuously pressured Japan to revoke Article 9 and play a greater role in regional defense. The United States also threatened to impose import quotas against Japanese textiles, forcing Japan to cut its textile exports, allow in more U.S. imports, and open its markets to U.S. investors. Nixon privately complained about the “Jap betrayal” and expressed his eagerness to “stick it to Japan.”92
Sato had been a willing partner in the United States’ push for the remilitarization of Japan—perhaps too willing. He had taken office in November 1964, just one month after the Chinese atomic bomb test. He had met with President Johnson in January 1965 and declared that “if Chicoms [Chinese Communists] had nuclear weapons, the Japanese also should have them.” He had added that “Japanese public opinion will not permit this at present, but I believe that the public, especially the younger generation, can be ‘educated.’” Such a view had widespread support among Japanese leaders in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. Yasuhiro Nakasone, the director of the Japanese Defense Agency and a future prime minister, commissioned a report by the agency that concluded, “it would be possible in a legal sense to possess small-yield, tactical, purely defensive nuclear weapons without violating the Constitution.” But the agency recommended against doing so at that point, a stance that Johnson welcomed.93
It was Sato who tried to hoodwink the Japanese people into believing the sincerity of his antinuclear statements when he articulated the “Three Non-Nuclear Principles” before the Diet in December 1967. According to those principles, Japan would not manufacture, possess, or permit the introduction of nuclear weapons into Japan, a commitment that Sato was regularly breaking and that he described to U.S. Ambassador U. Alexis Johnson as “nonsense.” When Japan had signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1970, it had extracted a promise from the United States that it would not “interfere with Tokyo’s pursuit of independent reprocessing capabilities in its civilian nuclear power program.”94 Given Japan’s technological capability and stockpile of spent fuel, it would always remain one “screwdriver twist” away from having nuclear bombs.
Not everyone applauded Nixon’s rapprochement with China and the Soviet Union. The North Vietnamese feared that they were being hung out to dry. As a New York Times editorial noted, “Chairman Mao received President Nixon shortly after heavy bombing of North Vietnam had resumed; Secretary General Brezhnev received the President shortly after North Vietnam’s harbors were mined. No words are needed for Hanoi to understand that the Chinese and Soviet leaders put their own interests first.”95
Though most Americans applauded his bold initiatives, Nixon braced for a “revolt” by former allies on the right who thought he had betrayed them by visiting China, concluding arms control treaties that allowed the Soviet Union to gain nuclear parity, pulling most U.S. troops out of Vietnam, taking the United States off the gold standard, imposing wage and price controls, and embracing Keynesian economics. They were also upset that he had established the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), endorsed a guaranteed annual income for all families, supported the Equal Rights Amendment and Endangered Species Act, and strengthened the Voting Rights Act.
Opponents of détente and arms control struck back, spurred by former RAND nuclear expert Albert Wohlstetter. Applying game theory and systems analysis to defense policy, Wohlstetter based his projections not on what the Soviets were likely to do but on what they were capable of doing—no matter how irrational or self-destructive. He worried that SAC bombers and ICBMs might be vulnerable to a surprise Soviet nuclear attack and supported the deployment of an anti-ballistic missile (ABM) system to defend them. McNamara had dropped plans to build a large-scale ABM system when he learned that defensive weapons cost five times as much as the missiles they protected against and could be easily overwhelmed by sending more ICBMs. Scientists throughout the country mobilized in opposition to ABM, which they believed expensive, unnecessary, unworkable, and likely to further propel the arms race. McNamara knew that the U.S. deterrent was more than adequate. When he declared in 1964 that a 400-megaton nuclear force would be enough to destroy the Soviet Union, the U.S. stockpile was already 42.5 times that size and growing rapidly.