ON an unseasonably warm December afternoon in Bermuda John F. Kennedy and Harold Macmillan sipped gin and tonics at Government House and contemplated the calculus of thermo-nuclear extinction.It was first day of the December 21-23 Kennedy/Macmillan Bermuda summit. American President and British Prime Minister were discussing the escalating nuclear arms race, engaging in the calculus of Armageddon. The Soviets had just resumed atmospheric hydrogen bomb tests in the wake of the June Berlin Wall crisis. At the end of October they had detonated the Tsar Bomba (Emperor Bomb), which remains to this day the largest thermonuclear weapon ever exploded - carrying a yield equivalent to 50,000 tons of TNT (or the destructive force of 3,333 Hiroshima-sized bombs).

Both the President and the Prime Minister were accompanied by their own teams of nuclear technocrats, small armies of Dr. Strangelove-type prototypes brandishing slide-rules and firing off actuarial-type statistics of the death tolls that could be expected in various nuclear scenarios with machine gun rapidity.

They were all were gathered for drinks before lunch in the Government House dining room. Among them was Macmillan’s chief science adviser, Sir William Penney. A Cambridge-educated physicist and mathematician who had worked on the World War Two Manhattan Project, Penney had gone on to design and build the UK’s first atomic bomb in 1952 and then its first thermonuclear weapon in 1957.

Asked by someone how many hydrogen bombs the Soviet Union would need to deliver a knock-out punch to the UK in a theoretical first-strike scenario, Penney said: “It would take five or six, but to be on the safe side, let us say seven or eight, and” - just at that moment a mess-jacketed Government House steward passed by - “I’ll have another gin and tonic, if you would be so kind.” This statement, JFK confidante and biographer Arthur Schlesinger Jr. recorded in his Kennedy Administration memoir A Thousand Day>, “uttered in one rush of breath, summed up for the Prime Minister and the President the absurdity of mankind setting about to destroy itself.”

For the rest of the summit, Kennedy and Macmillan used “I’ll have another gin and tonic, if you would be so kind” as an all-purpose punch line in their discussions, which focussed primarily on the renewed threat of nuclear profileration and Soviet Premier Nikita Kruschev’s increasingly bellicose stance towards the West and an American President he regarded as a lightweight.

“Although the negotiations were tough, the tone was lightened somewhat by Kennedy’s and Macmillan’s mutual ability to mix the mundane with the momentous ...,” said British diplomatic historian Nigel<\p>Ashton.

“The seamless shift from the unthinkable to the drinkable (as encapsulated by Penney) became the refrain of the conference.”

The Bermuda summit was the fourth between the American President and the British Prime Minister since Kennedy took office in January, 1961. The flurry of top-level Anglo-American meetings had been prompted by the deteriorating Cold War situation.

Despite the major US/British diplomatic breach prompted by the 1956 Suez crisis, when Anglo-French forces joined with the Israelis in a misconceived military adventure to seize control of the Suez Canal back from Egyptian leader Gamel Abdul Nasser, relations had been quickly resorted. Macmillan, who succeeded Suez architect Sir Antony Eden as Prime Minister in January, 1957 had made the swift restoration of US/UK relations a top priority.

Within days of taking office he had embarked on a long-distance campaign of personal diplomacy with World War Two colleague and friend President Dwight D. Eisenhower, bombarding him with letters and telephone calls that culminated in the March, 1957 Bermuda summit meeting.

“The urgent need for repair was evident all along to both the US and Britain; as soon as Harold Macmillan succeeded broken Anthony Eden as Prime Minister, a Big Two meeting was inevitable,” reported Ti$> magazine. “Ike himself suggested Bermuda as the place, feeling that it might help soothe the British hurt feelings to hold the conference in British territory. From the start, the tone of the meeting was cordial. Macmillan was waiting at dockside with outstretched hand as the President, arriving in Hamilton harbor aboard the missile cruiser Canbe<$>, stepped ashore from a US Navy launch. ‘Harold, how are you?’ Ike said warmly. That evening, the Big Two’s big four-President, Prime Minister, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd-gathered for a roast-beef dinner in the private dining room of Macmillan’s suite. Despite white dinner jackets, it was a friendly and informal meeting. Before ranging off into the problems of 1957, Ike and Mac exchanged reminiscences of the wartime days when Diplomat Macmillan served as British Minister Resident at General Eisenhower’s Algiers headquarters. In the round-table discussions that started the next morning, frankness was the rule, brushing away misunderstandings and bolstering mutual confidence (was) more vital than agreement or disagreement on particular issues.” Unlike Eden, Macmillan had long recognised the diminished post-World War Two role his country would play in the Anglo-American “Special Relationship” and sought to redefine British participation in the Atlantic partnership to maximise advantages for a UK that had emerged exhausted from<\p>World War Two. He viewed himself as a master transatlantic bridge builder, with no little reason.Despite his superficial Edwardian demeanour and British Establishment credentials as a product of both Eton and Oxford, Macmillan was more than a little detached from the upper echelon conceit that Britannia was somehow divinely ordained to always rule the waves: he had been born into a middle-class family and his mother, Helen (Nellie) Macmillan, was American who encouraged her son to avoid the ruling class’ John Bull-ish views on British inviolability. During World War Two his diplomatic work forging relations with US North African forces led by then General Eisenhower made him aware earlier than most of his contemporaries that a post-war Britain would never be more than an attendant lord to the US Hamlet in the Anglo-American alliance, a figure from a T.S. Eliott poem there to “advise the prince ... deferential, glad to be of use, politic, cautious, meticulous.”

“We, my dear Crossman, are Greeks in this American empire,” Macmillan told future Labour Cabinet Minister Richard Crossman during a World War Two meeting at Eisenhower’s headquarters. “You will find the Americans much as the Greeks found the Romans - great big, vulgar, bustling people, more vigorous than we are and also more idle, with more unspoiled virtues but also more corrupt. We must (influence them) as the Greek slaves ran the operations of Emperor Claudius.”

This analogy remained the keystone in the arch of Macmillan’s views on the Anglo-American relationship throughout his time as became Prime Minister. He recognised cultural, linguistic and economic ties between the US and UK would always guarantee a unique partnership between the two countries. And the military alliance between them - ratified by the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty - was predicated on both countries checking the expansionist ambitions of the Soviet Union in Western Europe as well as bilateral cooperation against Moscow’s influence elsewhere (with Britain using former colonial ties in its spheres of influence “East of Suez” to combat Communist aggression in, for instance, Malaya between 1948 and 1960).

Macmillan was concerned when his old personal friend Eisenhower left the Oval Office office in January, 1961 to be succeeded by 43-year-old John F. Kennedy, the youngest man ever to be elected President - and the first to be born in the 20th century. The Prime Minister, who was 67 in 1961, was worried the dynamic young Kennedy would view him as a living fossil - he was “apprehensive as to whether the President would think he was a funny old man who belonged to the distant past and couldn’t understand the problems of the day,” noted David Ormsby Gore, a mutual friend of Kennedy and Macmillan (as well as a relative by marriage to both men) who, with JFK’s nudging, was appointed as British Ambassador to Washington in 1961.The only Englishman among the “best and the brightest” who populated the court of John Kennedy’s Camelot (and the only foreign diplomat in the US who had been assured a place in the underground bunker JFK would be whisked to in event of a nuclear confrontation with the Soviets), Ormsby Gore helped to facilitate and smooth what grew into a particularly warm relationship between Kennedy and Macmillan.1961 was an awful year for the new Kennedy Administration. Upon taking office, Kennedy and his New Frontiersmen were immediately confronted by a slew of Cold War crises that made his Inaugural address reference to “the balance of terror” between the West and the East Bloc - his warning about “dark powers of destruction unleashed by science (engulfing) all humanity in planned or accidental self-destruction” - seem particularly prophetic.

In the early part of the year hawks in the Central Intelligence Agency were attempting to persuade JFK to commit US ground forces to a civil war in<\p>Laos. In April the President backed Cuban rebel forces who launched the catastrophic Bay of Pigs invasion, leading Kruschev to blame JFK for a “crime that revolted the entire world” and pointedly remarking that by arming the invaders Kennedy had embarked on “a slippery and dangerous road which could lead the world to a new global war”. In June Kennedy held face-to-face talks with Kruschev at a disastrous summit in Vienna, a meeting that tended to confirm the Soviet Premier’s already low opinion of the young American. The following month the Soviet leader ordered the construction of the Berlin Wall, cutting off the continuous haemorraging of refugees from East Germany. As a consequence, Soviet and American tanks went “eyeball to eyeball” in the days that followed as NATO rushed to bolster the Western military presence in that divided city. Soviet atmospheric tests of increasingly more powerful nuclear weapons began again in September following a two-year respite.

In the summer of 1961 Kennedy feared the chances of war with the Soviet Union were increasing; his brother and Attorney General Bobby Kennedy later said he calculated the odds of war at one-in-five.

It was in this charged Cold War atmosphere that President Kennedy on<\p>December 4 asked Macmillan for a Bermuda meeting to be held between December 21-23.

The two men had first met in January when Kennedy was being pressured by the CIA to intervene in the Laotian civil war, a grim foreshadowing of the President’s decision to send advisors and troops to Vietnam later in the year. The British were steadfastly opposed to such a move and this reluctance to back US involvement in South East Asia, combined with Macmillan’s nervousness about meeting JFK, led to strained initial encounter in Key West, Florida. Ironically, Kennedy was also apprehensive about how the British statesmen would view him, doubting he would “measure up” to his predecessor in the Prime Minister’s eyes, according to<\p>David Ormsby Gore.

In the event, Macmillan was delivered from the need to support US military action in Laos - and perhaps commit British troops - when Kennedy rejected the interventionist advice he was receiving from the CIA<\p>and the Pentagon following the Bay of Pigs fiasco.

Kennedy and Macmillan met again in Washington in April. And by the time the President stopped off in London to brief the Prime Minister on the failed Vienna summit with Kruschev in June, the two men were well on the way to establishing a deep rapport.“The President’s brief stop-over in London on the way back from his diastrous encounter with Kruschev ... laid the foundations for a personal relationship which was genuinely warm,” says Nigel Ashton. “Macmillan’s pose as the worldy-wise elder statesman, willing, when called upon, to offer reassurance and advice, while at the same time mocking the absurdities of international politics, seems to have struck a chord with Kennedy. Certainly it was this role Macmillan would reprise time and again during both their face-to-face encounters and their frequent telephone convesations.”

But just days before the two leaders were scheduled to meet in Bermuda, a Kennedy family emergency almost led to the summit being cancel.<$>Continued next week