When Nixon Threatened to Nuke Vietnam | Hacker News Reader

When Nixon Threatened to Nuke Vietnam

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19 pointsvinnyglennon17 comments

The Vietnam War could have been prevented, had the Versailles Treaty granted Vietnam its independence, as Ho Chi Minh requested when he attended the Hall of Mirrors conference.

My father was an anti-aircraft missile fire control officer aboard the USS Providence. While he never told me, it was later declassified that the talos missiles he fired, could be fitted with nuclear warheads.

I'm not real sure about the rationale but I figure nuclear antiaircraft missiles would be used if the enemy was swarming.

After many years of quiet contemplation, Dad told me one day "We should not have been in Vietnam".

65,000 americans died during the war, 250,000 vietnam vets committed suicide. At least a million vietnamese perished.

But Vietnam did get its independence, and the US and vietnam are the best of friends.

Also, if the corrupt south had carried out the suggestions (like land re-distribution to the delta farmers, etc.) that they address the terrible inequities which fostered the insurgency, the south would have had a better chance at viability.

Years earlier, South Korea and Taiwan undertook some of the US suggestions, and had a much better outcome.

SVN, was too corrupt to entertain the idea (and yes, some US advisers in that area, had lost some of the ear, they had in that regard)

I'm planning to read the Pentagon Papers sometime soon.

When I took high school American History, I thought it odd that we did not discuss vietnam in any way, despite that our textbook had good coverage of it.

I figured the reason was that most of our parents were vietnam vets - Fairfield, California is a military town.

>I'm not real sure about the rationale but I figure nuclear antiaircraft missiles would be used if the enemy was swarming.

It's really more a case of guidance systems for early anti-aircraft missiles were fairly unreliable so nuclear warheads were tried because A. you don't need to be as accurate if you destroy everything within a 1000ft radius (like with the AIR-2 Genie, which was actually unguided) and B. it was the late 50's/early 60's when atomic power was still seen as the reasonable answer to almost anything.

I believe that the 250k suicide number is urban legend.

This study, for instance, found that the number was closer to 10k.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2343923

> had the Versailles Treaty granted Vietnam its independence, as Ho Chi Minh requested when he attended the Hall of Mirrors conference.

I don't think this was likely. Those were the times when raw power roared around the globe. What did Ho Chi Minh have to put on the table with other giants to even make others notice? Unprecedented free will?

The versailles treaty was claimed to be predicated on "national self-determination". Had that really been the case, vietnam would have got its independence.

What really happened was that national self-determination resulted in the puzzling fact that Baron Von Trapp was a veteran of the austrian navy.

thanks for answering with facts

“We should try to induce them to get out of the war without having their country destroyed and to realize that if they do not get out, their country will be destroyed,” -- McNamara

Totally false premise.

The Vietnamese fought the French from '46 to '54 [0] and defeated them. In '54, six parachute battalions dropped using US aircraft, artillery, and US tanks were deployed in Dien Bien Phu, NE Vietnam. Over a month later the Vietnamese overran the entire French force, effectively ending the war. This was known by the US and I'm not sure they learned these lessons.

I didn't realise why the French might be interested in Vietnam until I found Michelin had interests in rubber plantations. [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Indochina_War

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelin_Rubber_Plantation

So your saying that socialist france went to war in the interest of a company? Why do I find that hard to believe?

Probably because your image of France as cute and socialist is overshadowing the less cute reality of France as the world's second-largest colonial power in the 19th and 20th centuries.

No socialist france went to war over lost empire.

Tangentially related:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21768668

Nixon undermined the peace process for his own ends (assuming the article is true)

Why Nixon and his aidee were involved in those talks? nor the article nor the wikipedia article about the paris peace acords mention the reason, only the effect.

and they say Hitler and Stalin were madmen.

my country won the war but it was so thoroughly broken, it hasn't recovered properly to start to do anything sensible yet.

edit: -> Hitler and Stalin were the poster-boy of madmen, according to the West.

What the article doesn't mention is that South Vietnam was bombed 3 times more heavily than North Vietnam. The bulk of the war effort was in the South.

But Iran is part of the axis of evil. Why, if they get nukes, they might do what we do!

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