Book: The U.S. Military Looked at Using Nuclear or Chemical Weapons During the Vietnam War

[TomSea]

Excerpt- National Interest:

The U.S. Military Looked at Using Nuclear or Chemical Weapons During the Vietnam War

“Should the situation in the DMZ area change dramatically, we should be prepared to introduce weapons of greater effectiveness against massed forces.” Those weapons, in Westmoreland’s own words, could include nuclear as well as chemical weapons.
by Daniel R. DePetris Follow @DanDePetris on Twitter

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According to “Presidents at War,” a new book by presidential historian Michael Beschloss, President Johnson shut down the contingency planning as soon as he was briefed on it. In LBJ’s mind, holding Khe Sanh was not worth the risk of drawing China directly into the conflict.

While Beschloss's research is enormously jarring (imagine how history would have been written if a nuke was actually dropped on Hanoi or on advancing North Vietnamese and Vietcong troops), the events of February 1968 were not the first time Washington seriously reviewed the nuclear option. General Douglas MacArthur recommended the use of atomic weapons on more than one occasion during the Korean War. In December 1950 and March 1951, MacArthur requested broad authorization to treat nuclear warheads as if they were like any other weapon in America’s arsenal. While President Harry Truman never provided that authorization, he wasn’t entirely dismissive of the nuclear option eight it could prevent a disastrous defeat on the Korean Peninsula.

John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon had their own dalliances with nuclear warfare. Kennedy never saw nukes as a particularly effective weapon, at least concerning offensive warfare: they were much too indiscriminate and caused too much collateral damage; the use of even a single device would compel the Soviets to retaliate with their own; and in the end, everyone would lose. The "better Red than Dead" motto was never far from the young president's mind. Indeed, when Joint Chiefs Chairman Lyman Lemnitzer confidently boasted that victory against communists in Asia was assured if nuclear weapons were part of the war plan, Kennedy rejected such thinking .

Continued at: https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/us-military-looked-using-nuclear-or-chemical-weapons-during-vietnam-war-33351