When I was asked to write a piece for the Moscow celebration honoring President Eisenhower I quickly said "yes" because I had so many pleasant memories of the times when I worked for him during his presidency. Now that I am faced with the task of writing something I realize that a host of good writers have written all about his term in office and I am hesitant to add to that collection. So I have decided to write a little bit about what I think he thought about nuclear weapons, the arms race, the Soviet Union, and disarmament. The early years were gleaned mostly from speeches and what I heard from friends who knew him. What I have to say from 1953 on came increasingly from my own observations. In 1957 I was chairman of a group of the Gaither Panel that President Eisenhower initiated and, starting in 1958, I was a member of the President's Science Advisory Committee and chairman of its disarmament panel. In those roles I had an opportunity to observe his hopes, fears and frustrations, as well as see how his views and priorities changed through time. In 1957, while working in the White House, I received a letter from Lord Bertrand Russell inviting me to the second Pugwash meeting in Nova Scotia with a delegation of scientists from the Soviet Union. I showed the letter to Dr. James Killian, Eisenhower's science advisor, and he showed it to the President, who said I should go because it might be interesting. He added, as an afterthought, that if I got into trouble they could always disown me! The meeting was indeed very interesting because the Soviet group wanted to talk about disarmanent measures. While there I met Academician Alexandr Toptchiev, the foreign secretary of the Soviet Academy of Science, who later invited me to the Soviet Union. Again, I had to ask the President's permission and again I was encouraged to go, with the same understanding. Dwight Eisenhower became the President of the United States after a long career as the military leader of the Western forces in World War II and later as the first Supreme Commander of NATO. Between these two military commands he served for a time as the President of Columbia University where he befriended many members of the faculty, including I.I. Rabi, a Nobel Prize winning physicist who had a major role in helping Eisenhower, the President, rally the support of the scientific community. At the end of the war, the western countries, including the United States, had demobilized their armies while Stalin had kept a large land force in place, possibly to counter the atomic bomb possessed by the United States and Britain. NATO was created as an answer to Stalin's behavior in zones he controlled in Eastern Europe, the many threats to countries in the West, and to the Berlin blockade in which Stalin attempted to shut off supplies to Berlin. His experience as Supreme Commander of NATO led Eisenhower to believe that the only language that Stalin understood was force, and his speeches and writings reflected that view when he became President. This feeling was reinforced by the belief that Stalin was helping the Chinese in the Korean conflict. My experiences, starting in 1942, qualified me very well to help the President with the confusing technical policy issues that were vexing him. During World War II I had been a staff member of the MIT Radiation Laboratory where I had worked on microwave radar components and large airborne early warning radars,the ancestors of the AWACS. At the end of the war, I went to the Los Alamos bomb Laboratory, where I helped set up an engineering division and was in charge of instrumentation for the Bikini test in the Pacific Ocean. After that I became a member of the faculty of MIT and an associate director of the Research Laboratory of Electronics, where I worked with the famed Norbert Wiener on information theory. My attitude, like that of most Americans, was to forget world problems and get on with my life. Even so, from time to time I would join a group studying a military/technical problem as President Truman and his staff worried about the threat that Stalin posed to Europe. Many of my colleagues from Los Alamos and the Radiation Laboratory joined in this effort. For example when the U.S. Department of Defense became fearful of the long-range Soviet bombers, I helped conceive of the Distant Early Warning Line and the Continental Defense System. Even while I was willing to help defend the country from Soviet bombers, I had a visceral belief that the threat was exaggerated. In 1954 I was invited to be a member of a group called the Von Neuman Panel whose mission was to examine the state of ballistic missile development in the United States. This group formed because of persistent reports from the RAND Corporation of a major missile development in the Soviet Union. Andrei Sakharov discusses the origins of this program in his recent memoir. The Von Neuman Panel recommended a new design of missile, the Minuteman, propelled by a huge solid-fuelled rocket. This experience was the most complete engagement in military technology I had had since the war and led to my becoming a part-time advisertothe White House. When Eisenhower became President in 1952, his first goal was to end the Korean War, which he did promptly. At the same time he undertook a continuing review of the American strategic position, a review, that now seems was obviously based on a Soviet threat that was in fact a reflection of the U.S. bomber force buildup rather than on any real facts about the Russian long-range attack capability. The first of this series of reviews was made by the Defense Department. Even using an optimistic performance by the U.S. air defense system, the study predicted that more than eighty million casualties would result from a full-scale Soviet attack. After Stalin died in 1953, there was hope that the cold war could be moderated, so Eisenhower followed two policies simultaneously: the strengthening of U.S. and NATO forces and beginning attempts to work out arms-control agreements with the Soviet Union. The first course was a response to the vastly superior Soviet land army and resulted in Secretary of State Dulles' policy of "massive retaliation". The second effort was undertaken by a team led by Governor Harold Stassen, the President's personal assistant for disarmament. He and his Soviet counterpart, ----, seemed to be making real progress when he encountered serious opposition at home both from the hawkish Democrats in Congress and the Secretary of State, who apparently regarded Stassen as a threat to his dominance in foreign affairs. Later, when I became involved in arms-control negotiations with the Warsaw Pact nations, I learned how difficult it was to achieve a reasonable negotiating position because of various vested interests in our own government. We used to joke that negotiating with the Soviet delegates was easy compared to what we went through at home. From the team representing the Warsaw Pact, I developed the impression that they felt the same relief when they finally could begin to look for common ground between us. Both of us were required to request new instructions before we could make any significant change in our positions. This made it virtually impossible to make any progress toward an understanding. Even before we got together, it was possible to guess what the two sides would ask for; the Russians always wanted elimination of weapons to be followed by inspection while the United States wanted the opposite, inspection followed by reduction of weapons. Each side wanted what was best for it and until recently this remained their respective postions. Each of the three branches of the military was vying for a place in the new missile era so that a major task for President Eisenhower was to fight the duplication of the very costly facilities and missile Research and Development programs. His judgment was that the Soviet threat was greatly exaggerated while at the same time he was worried about a threatening budget deficit. But two of the most powerful members of the Senate, Symington and Jackson, believed that he was wrong and that the country was completely exposed to a Russian first strike. History proved Eisenhower right on his assessment of both dangers. To resolve the continuing uncertainty Eisenhower engaged a study group, the Technological Capabilities Panel, chaired by Dr. James Killian of M.I.T. which, among other things, concluded that the intelligence information which underlay all of the attempts to understand what would happen to the country in the event af a nuclear war, was not to be believed. To cope with this problem, the group designed and had built a special aircraft, the U-2, that flew so high that it was invulnerable to Russian anti-aircraft defenses - for a while. This aircraft played a decisive role in the course of the cold war in the years that it was operational, sometimes in unexpected ways. Its use gave Eisenhower some assurance that his estimate of Soviet strength, not that of the cold warriers, was closer to right. When one of the U-2s was intercepted in 1959 the incident derailed an Eisenhower-Khrushchev summit meeting which the President hoped would ease the superpower confrontation. Even after the Soviet Union launched its Sputnik in 1957, thus showing an intercontinental missile capability, Eisenhower was not alarmed. But the country was. It was in a panic. The "missile gap" became the main issue in the next presidental election. When the dust settled facts proved the President right. In 1959 Chairman Khrushchev proposed that the two super-powers agree to a moratorium in nuclear testing, and for a little while both countries agreed to it. I know from personal experience that President Eisenhower was pleased to join in it but at the same time it worried him. Many people in the government and the press accused him of being naive for trusting the Russians and thus putting the country in danger. He was especially troubled when the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, Lewis Straus, and Dr. Edward Teller told him that a testing moratorium made it impossible to develop peaceful uses of nuclear explosions, essential for digging a sea-level canal to replace the Panama canal and the development of the neutron or clean bomb, neccesary to the defense of Europe. At the same time they also told him that it would be easy for the Soviets to delevop new nuclear weapons clandestinely by hiding explosions in large holes. These claims were the basis of the incessant charges that eventually caused him to announce in the winter of 1960 that the United States government was no longer bound by the moratorium and was free to resume testing when it was in its interest to do so. Though Eisenhower felt compelled to make this move because of the many pressures he was exposed to, he obviously was troubled enough by it to warn the nation about dangers of the Military-Industrial-Educational Complex, as he said in his valedictory speech at the end of his presidency. I regarded President Eisenhower as a great leader, a willing learner, and a wonderful person to work for and with. When he realized that it was impossible to protect the American people from devastation by any military means, he had the courage to take a very unpopular position in favor of a nuclear test ban and arms limitations. Although he was not able to realize these goals, he was able to make them into serious and respectable aims for world leaders who would follow him. Though it was a long time coming, the present end to the cold war began with his efforts.