Eisenhower Library, Eisenhower papers, Whitman file
No. 452
Prime Minister Churchill
to President Eisenhower
personal and private
My Dear Friend: I am so sorry that the pressure upon me of events both large and small has been so unceasing that I have not replied other than by telegrams to your last three most kind letters, including the two about my birthday.1 I am so grateful to you for all that you wrote. Our comradeship and friendship were forged under hard conditions, and stood the test of war and aftermath. They always remain for me a possession of inestimable value. Thank you so much.
About the present and future. I think our two countries are working together even more closely than I can ever remember. They certainly need to do so. I greatly admired your speech on Thursday last about China in the teeth of the brutal maltreatment of your airmen.2 In my view China is not important enough to be a cause of major hazards. More people over here exaggerate the power and importance of China as a military factor, and talk about six hundred million Chinese who, we are told, have all become Communists.
I am old-fashioned enough to look to Steel as a rather decisive index of conventional military power, and of manufacturing and communication capacity. Crude steel output in 1953 of the non-Soviet world was 182.2 million tons, and that of the total Soviet bloc 51.7 million tons. Of this China contributed 1.7 million tons. I have had a number of other principal metals examined from this viewpoint and enclose a list, (A).
These figures seem to me to deserve taking into account when thinking about the power to conduct modern war of the six hundred million Chinese now said to exist. It may be a different picture in a decade. When I was young I used to hear much talk about “the Yellow Peril”.
I am thinking of course only on a “conventional” basis. But you have no reason to be worried about the nuclear balance. It is Soviet Rusia that ought to dominate our minds. That is one of the reasons [Page 1057] for my pleasure at your speech and the profound sense of proportion which it revealed.
I still hope we may reach a top level meeting with the new regime in Russia and that you and I may both be present. We can only contemplate this on the basis of the London Agreement and a united NATO.3 In spite of the tyrannical weakness of the French Chamber I still hope for ratification by all Powers in the first few months of the New Year. It is in the hope of helping forward such a meeting that I am remaining in harness longer than I wished or planned. I hope you will continue to look to it as a goal in seeking which we could not lose anything and might gain an easier and safer co-existence—which is a lot. When I had my last Audience with The Queen she spoke of the pleasure with which she would welcome a State visit by you to London. This might be combined in any way convenient with a top level meeting. Anyhow, please keep it high in your mind among your many cares and hopes.
With kindest regards to you and Mrs. Eisenhower,
Believe me,
Yours sincerely,
- Copies of the two birthday greetings, sent on Nov. 8 and 29, are in Presidential Correspondence, lot 66 D 204, “Eisenhower Correspondence with Churchill”; the third letter has not been identified further.↩
- For the text of President Eisenhower’s remarks about the treatment of U.S. airmen imprisoned in China, made at his press conference, Dec. 2, see Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1954, pp. 1074 ff.↩
- For documentation on the London Nine-Power Conference, Sept. 28–Oct. 3, see vol. v, Part 2, pp. 1294 ff.↩