ABSTRACT
Allegations of neglect in defence preparedness had been one of the major battlegrounds of the 1960 presidential election campaign, with the Democratic Party's candidate, Senator John F. Kennedy, critical of the incumbent Republican administration for its parsimony when it came to levels of spending. During the early summer of 1961 President Kennedy continued to resist calls from within the Department of Defense and from the JCS that nuclear testing by the United States should be resumed, while the newly formed Arms Control and Disarmament Agency attempted to formulate proposals which might help to break the logjam of negotiations at Geneva in the Eighteen Nation Disarmament Committee, where efforts to arrive at an agreement to ban all testing were still ongoing. The debates over whether to resume atmosphere nuclear testing had served to bring to the fore sharp variations in assessments of the prospects for ABM defence.
