Nixon White House Considered Nuclear Options Against North Vietnam

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Washington, DC - July 31, 2006 - During the past year, indications that the Bush White House was seriously considering a "nuclear option" against Iranian nuclear sites understandably alarmed many in the press and public as well as the U.S. high command. Some treated such alleged planning as saber-rattling bluff, while others saw it as an example of a related madman strategy. These scenarios are not without historical precedent. From time to time during the Cold War and after, American officials tried to find ways of making nuclear weapons usable, not only for deterrence against Soviet attack but as "tactical" weapons in local conflicts or as a key element in a coercive strategy of threat-making by means of "atomic diplomacy."

Recently declassified documents reveal that during Richard M. Nixon's first year as president, advisers on his White House staff were willing to revisit the question of whether to employ nuclear weapons in Vietnam. Senior officials and policy advisers in the administrations of Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson had previously considered the possibility of using nuclear weapons to deal with military crises, influence negotiations, or terminate conflicts, but their deliberations had come to naught because of a deeply ingrained "nuclear taboo." The taboo comprised several moral and practical considerations: decision-makers' understanding that the destructive effects of nuclear weapons were disproportionate to the limited ends they sought in regional conflicts such as Vietnam; their appreciation of the danger of causing a localized conflict to escalate into a global war with the Soviet Union; their need to weigh world, allied, congressional, and bureaucratic opinion; and their assessments of the strategic utility and logistic feasibility of nuclear weapons in conditions other than those having to do with retaliation to an enemy nuclear attack. (Note 1) The same considerations shaped the Nixon White House's thinking on nuclear weapons regarding Vietnam and, it seems, the Bush White House's thinking about the "nuclear option" vis-à-vis Iran. (Note 2)

When Nixon assumed the presidency in January 1969, one of his top priorities was to end the Vietnam War as quickly as possible on terms favorable to his administration. By mid-1969, Nixon and his national security adviser Henry Kissinger had come to favor a strategy that combined international diplomacy with threats and acts of force to induce the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) to bend to their will. In several venues during July and August, they and their surrogates issued dire warnings intended for leaders in Moscow and Hanoi that if by November 1 the North Vietnamese did not agree to compromise on American terms, Nixon would "take measures of great consequence and force."

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