Kennedy, McNamara and Rusk moved ahead with the Jupiters matter by making plans to bring it up with Italian and Turkish defense ministers at the NATO meeting in Paris in December 1962. The goal would be to persuade them of the obsolescence of the Jupiters, the dangers that they posed during the Cuban crisis and in future crises, and the need for “better arrangements,” such as “a rearrangement of Polaris deployments.”

President Kennedy continued to monitor the Jupiter missiles problem. During a meeting with Rusk a few weeks later, McNamara explained that President Kennedy, who he had seen in Palm Beach on December 27, had asked him what steps were being taken “to remove the Jupiters.” Consistent with that, McNamara favored the “earliest possible date” and asked whether a “deadline” could be set for April 1 to begin the removals.

This conversation between Rusk and Baron Guttenberg, a top official on Kiesinger’s staff and the CDU foreign policy spokesperson, demonstrated that accepting Bonn’s suggestions for the NPT draft had not made it more acceptable to the West Germans. Guttenberg emphasized the importance of a limited duration clause and the need for the Soviet Union to make a “counter-concession” in exchange for a West German signature on an NPT.

During this meeting, Brandt and Rusk discussed the French attitude toward a West German signature on the NPT, thew problem of "duration", and suggestions for mitigating the West German concerns. Brandt said that De Gaulle “expected” Bonn to sign but if that de Gaulle was asked for advice, he would recommend that Germany not sign.

In this conversation, Ambassador Knappstein expressed concern over the draft of the NPT that Washington and Moscow had agreed on. Knappstein worried that the draft articles would foreclose “all of the available options for participation in nuclear defense."

In this message, Secretary Rusk reported to President Johnson that the Soviet non-transfer principle, which ruled out MLF-type arrangements but left open other alternatives, was a “good formulation” that would be “acceptable” to the incipient West German “Grand Coalition” government.

In the U.S. Ambassador to NATO Harlen Cleveland's notes on his meeting with Secretary Rusk, Cleveland details Rusk's thoughts about Soviet interest in the NPT. According to the Secretary, the “Soviets should have no real difficulty in finding a common interest with us in signing a treaty which enshrines [the] two self-denying provisions” of no-transfer to non-nuclear weapons states and “no relinquishment of control by the US over US warheads.”

In this memorandum, McNamara, Rusk, and Adrian Fisher discuss amendments and language of the NPT treaty that was in stalemate that summer. Fisher saw the 1954 Atomic Energy Act, with its prohibition of the “transfer of atomic weapons to any other country,” as providing model language for an NPT because it was compatible with the bilateral agreements.

This wide-ranging discussion between Rusk and Polish Deputy Foreign Minister Jozef Winiewicz on European security, nuclear weapons, and the problem of German reunification illuminated U.S. and Polish concerns about the future of Germany.

In this broad discussion, one of the topics was the report on nuclear proliferation by a presidentially-appointed committee chaired by former Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric. The Gilpatric report left open a controversial issue: whether a nonproliferation policy agreement should include provisions for MLF-type arrangements or eschew them.

In this conversation, Erhard mentioned a briefing by McNamara that detailed U.S. nuclear weapons deployed in the Federal Republic. After Erhard wished that the numbers could be publicly disclosed, Ambassador George McGhee observed that it was “often overlooked that Germany was actually the third largest nuclear country in the world.”