wanted David Ormsby-Gore, who had just completed a term as foreign minister, to lead his delegation, but there were concerns that Ormsby-Gore would appear to be a US "stooge" (Kennedy described him as "the brightest man he ever knew"). Instead, Macmillan chose Quintin Hogg. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., a special advisor to Kennedy, believed that Hogg was "ill prepared on the technicalities of the problem and was consumed by a desire to get a treaty at almost any cost." Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs, served as Moscow's emissary. Heading into the negotiations, there was still no resolution within the Kennedy Administration of the question of whether to pursue a comprehensive or partial ban. In an effort to achieve the former, Britain proposed reducing the number of mandated inspections to allay Soviet concerns, but Harriman believed such a reduction would have to be paired with other concessions that Khrushchev would be able to show off within the Soviet Union and to China. Withdrawing PGM-19 Jupiter missiles from Italy and Turkey would have been an option, had they not already been removed in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In meetings prior to the negotiations, Kennedy informed Harriman that he would be willing to make concessions on the Berlin question. On 2 July 1963, Khrushchev proposed a partial ban on tests in the atmosphere, outer space, and underwater, which would avoid the contentious issue of detecting underground tests. Notably, Khrushchev did not link this proposal to a moratorium on underground tests (as had been proposed earlier), but said it should be followed by a non-aggression pact between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. "A test ban agreement combined with the signing of a non-aggression pact between the two groups of state will create a fresh international climate more favorable for a solution of the major problems of our time, including disarmament," Khrushchev said. As the nuclear powers pursued a test ban agreement, they also sought to contend with a rising communist China, which at the time was pursuing its own nuclear program. In 1955, Mao Zedong expressed to the Soviet Union his belief that China could withstand a first nuclear strike and more than 100 million casualties. In the 1950s, the Soviet Union assisted the Chinese nuclear program, but stopped short of providing China with an actual nuclear bomb, which was followed by increasingly tense relations in the late