Nixon's Nuclear Specter

The Secret Alert of 1969, Madman Diplomacy, and the Vietnam War

Jeffrey P. Kimball, William Burr

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780700620821, 9780700620821
• eBook ISBN: 9780700620838
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Honorable Mention, Captain Richard Lukaszewicz Memorial Book Award

In their initial effort to end the Vietnam War, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger attempted to lever concessions from Hanoi at the negotiating table with military force and coercive diplomacy. They were not seeking military victory, which they did not believe was feasible. Instead, they backed up their diplomacy toward North Vietnam and the Soviet Union with the Madman Theory of threatening excessive force, which included the specter of nuclear force. They began with verbal threats then bombed North Vietnamese and Viet Cong base areas in Cambodia, signaling that there was more to come. As the bombing expanded, they launched a previously unknown mining ruse against Haiphong, stepped-up their warnings to Hanoi and Moscow, and initiated planning for a massive shock-and-awe military operation referred to within the White House inner circle as DUCK HOOK.

Beyond the mining of North Vietnamese ports and selective bombing in and around Hanoi, the initial DUCK HOOK concept included proposals for “tactical” nuclear strikes against logistics targets and U.S. and South Vietnamese ground incursions into the North. In early October 1969, however, Nixon aborted planning for the long-contemplated operation. He had been influenced by Hanoi’s defiance in the face of his dire threats and concerned about U.S. public reaction, antiwar protests, and internal administration dissent.

In place of DUCK HOOK, Nixon and Kissinger launched a secret global nuclear alert in hopes that it would lend credibility to their prior warnings and perhaps even persuade Moscow to put pressure on Hanoi. It was to be a “special reminder” of how far President Nixon might go. The risky gambit failed to move the Soviets, but it marked a turning point in the administration’s strategy for exiting Vietnam. Nixon and Kissinger became increasingly resigned to a “long-route” policy of providing Saigon with a “decent chance” of survival for a “decent interval” after a negotiated settlement and U.S. forces left Indochina.

Burr and Kimball draw upon extensive research in participant interviews and declassified documents to unravel this intricate story of the October 1969 nuclear alert. They place it in the context of nuclear threat making and coercive diplomacy since 1945, the culture of the Bomb, intra-governmental dissent, domestic political pressures, the international “nuclear taboo,” and Vietnamese and Soviet actions and policies. It is a history that holds important lessons for the present and future about the risks and uncertainties of nuclear threat making.

chapter one

Prelude: Nuclear Diplomacy and Notions
about Nuclear Use from Truman to Johnson

August 1945–January 1969

Of course we were brought to the verge of war.… If you try to run away from it, if you are scared to go to the brink, you are lost.… We walked to the brink and we looked it in the face.

John Foster Dulles¹

The strategic assumptions underpinning President Nixon’s secret nuclear alert of 1969 were rooted in the “atomic diplomacy” of the recent past.² Even before the first nuclear test explosion at the Trinity Site near Alamagordo, New Mexico, on 16 July 1945, top government officials had become convinced that the prospective American monopoly on nuclear weapons, coupled with its ability to strike overseas targets from the air, would give the United States an enormous military and diplomatic advantage over adversaries. In May 1945, Secretary of War Henry Stimson noted in his diary that the atomic bomb would provide the United States with a “master card” in its dealings with the Soviet Union. In July, when President Harry S. Truman presided over the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, his purpose was not only to force the Japanese government into an earlier surrender but also to achieve the bonus effect of intimidating the Soviets and making them, in the words of Secretary of State James Byrnes, “more manageable” in negotiations concerning the shape of the post–World War II peace.³

Despite great risks and mixed results, US presidential administrations from Truman on fostered the development, enlargement, or “improvement” of nuclear arsenals and delivery systems, ostensibly for the purpose of maintaining a strategic advantage in the event of war. They also practiced nuclear threat diplomacy. Especially during the Cold War era, they deployed nuclear weapons, threatened their use, and staged nuclear alerts and shows of force in order to coerce adversaries into taking more compliant diplomatic positions or dissuade them from embarking or continuing upon a course of action considered hostile or contrary to US policy.⁴ Their belief in the importance of demonstrating credibility, determination, toughness, and persistence in order to deter or defend against aggression was central to their strategic worldview and public rhetoric. In practice, nuclear diplomacy was not only a deterrent strategy designed to prevent nuclear war but also a “compellence”⁵ strategy designed to coerce or intimidate. Policymakers assumed that the establishment of their credibility in this regard was critical. Eventually, the Soviets, too, turned to nuclear diplomacy, as in the Suez crisis of 1956, but far less frequently than the United States. Both sides called the other’s deterrence and compellence policies blackmail.⁶

Confrontations, crises, attempts at coercion, and massive buildups of tactical and strategic weapons notwithstanding, nuclear weapons were never again used after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even before the Soviet Union achieved strategic parity with the United States in the 1960s, the actual use of nuclear weapons raised terrifying prospects. Ethical, bureaucratic, military, practical, diplomatic, and political prohibitions against “first use” were powerful deterrents on both sides. US policymakers sought to raise the threshold for nuclear weapons employment, even in conventional wars such as those in Korea and Vietnam, which had produced massive civilian casualties and significant losses of troops. The United States and the Soviet Union as well found that nuclear weapons were militarily useless except as instruments of deterrence.

The Truman Administration and the Emergence of Atomic Diplomacy

The principle of threatening or signaling the possible use of extreme or excessive force in order to coerce or deter appears in the earliest annals of international diplomacy and military strategy.⁷ But the atomic diplomacy of the Cold War era was also the product of particular and more immediate historical lessons that American presidents and their advisers had gleaned from their experiences with the Great Depression and fascist aggression leading up to World War II. The disorder and danger of the years from 1929 to 1945 had convinced them that the future survival of representative government and capitalist political economy in the United States required a congenial, stable, and predictable global environment. In particular, they believed that these requisite international conditions depended on preventing any unfriendly power or combination of powers from dominating the Eurasian continent. Should this circumstance come about, they were convinced the United States would face both military threats from adversaries and restricted access to overseas markets, investment opportunities, and raw materials.⁸ Basing their strategies on this worst-case scenario, national security planners strove to build a global network of overseas bases that would reduce the exposure of US territory to attack while at the same time enabling Washington to project its air and naval power abroad in the service of America’s aims.⁹ For a host of reasons—not least of which were fundamental disagreements with Moscow over the future status of Germany and Washington’s concerns about Moscow’s growing political influence in Western Europe—President Truman and his advisers came to view the Soviet Union as a serious political and military threat to the world order they envisioned.

On the cusp of the Cold War and the nuclear age, the armed services fiercely competed for defense dollars. The US Army, US Navy, Marine Corps, and Army Air Force (AAF) each touted the unique and indispensable contribution they could make to the nation’s global needs and goals. Within and without the AAF, airpower advocates assertively promoted the doctrinal lesson they took from World War II; namely, that their ability to carry out strategic bombing could play a decisive role in preventing future wars or in determining their outcome.¹⁰ The erosion of pre–World War II strictures against the bombing of noncombatants facilitated this claim. The Japanese bombing of Shanghai and other Chinese cities, the German attacks on Barcelona, Guernica, Madrid, Rotterdam, and London, the Allied fire bombings of scores of German and Japanese cities, and the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki suggested that a “moral revolution” had taken place among many military commanders, civilian leaders, and broad swaths of the public regarding the acceptability of bombing noncombatants in urban population centers.¹¹

The moral revolution coexisted uneasily with the conscience of President Truman, who, after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, abhorred the further use of nuclear weapons, precisely because they were weapons of indiscriminate mass destruction.¹² Nonetheless, between 1945 and 1947, the president, his civilian advisers, Army Chief of Staff Dwight D. Eisenhower, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff accepted the premise that a robust US capability to wage an atomic offensive would constitute a powerful lever in the management of world affairs, a war-fighting advantage over the Soviet Union, and the best deterrent against a possible future atomic attack by the Soviets. This belief trumped whatever concerns they had about noncombatant casualties—or thoughts about choosing alternative security measures such as nuclear arms control.¹³ It was a well-established way of thinking about airpower. “In the nuclear age as in the 1930s,” historian Michael S. Sherry observed, “one of the oldest temptations of air power was … to regard it as serving less the needs of battle than the opportunity to avoid it.” Strategic bombing, whether conventional or nuclear, promised “to provide … a threat to an enemy’s resolve and psychic stability, and a trump card in diplomatic crises.”¹⁴

Only days after AAF B-29s dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, senior Manhattan Project scientists and air force leaders were pondering the “establishment of an atomic bomb wing capable of delivering atomic bombs to any place in the world.” Six months later, in March 1946, the AAF created the Strategic Air Command to “conduct long-range offensive operations.” During the same year, the AAF also secretly began making arrangements with the Royal Air Force to prepare nuclear storage sites at two air bases in the United Kingdom to develop a capacity for deploying nuclear-capable bombers across the Atlantic.¹⁵

SAC would become a key element in the US nuclear force structure in the decades to come, but at the outset its capabilities were modest, reflecting its organizational infancy and the limited number of available nuclear bombs. By the end of 1947, there were only 20 SAC flight crews cleared for nuclear missions, 18 B-29s that were nuclear-capable, and 13 weapons in the nuclear stockpile of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). By September 1948, SAC’s capabilities had increased, with 30 B-29s designed for nuclear weapons missions and 39 specially trained crews. But a significant gap still remained between plans and capabilities. Only 56 weapons were in the AEC stockpile, yet war plans drafted between 1947 and 1948 stipulated a minimum of 200 weapons to destroy Soviet industrial targets. An early intermediate proposal, DARK HORSE, brought plans and capabilities into closer balance by requiring 53 weapons and a force of 83 bombers (some of them diversionary) to destroy the twenty “most vital” targets in the USSR.¹⁶

With or without the capability of destroying the Soviet Union according to the standards established by nuclear war planners, US decision makers came to believe that atomic threats could be carried out through bluff. A show of force was one way of bluffing. The first such operation against the Soviet Union by SAC B-29 bombers took place in November 1946, three months after Yugoslav aircraft had shot down a US C-97 air transport aircraft flying over their country.¹⁷ In response to the incident and against the backdrop of growing tension with the Soviet Union, air force leadership wanted to make a “demonstration of American power” by means of an around-the-world flight of B-29s. The State Department denied the request and instead approved a flight of six B-29s to the US occupation zone in Germany, which took place on 13 November, with the bombers returning to the United States on 4 December. According to SAC’s brief account of this episode, “the flight … could not have been interpreted as a direct threat to Russia, but the implications were obvious” because the B-29s were “widely recognized as the aircraft capable of dropping atomic weapons.” Although the flight’s main purposes were “diplomatic,” the exercise also gave the air force the opportunity to test the practicability of deploying SAC aircraft to Western Europe.¹⁸

A more significant demonstration of US strategic power began during the Berlin crisis of 1948, when the Soviets blocked allied access to West Berlin in reaction to allied steps to combine the western occupation zones of Germany. Worried that the blockade might foreshadow even more hostile moves, US Air Force Headquarters instructed SAC to prepare to build up its forces in Europe. On 24 June, shortly after the blockade began, and following consultations with the British, SAC deployed three bomber groups, one to West Germany and two to the United Kingdom, where they remained for the rest of the year. The objective was to raise the morale of the allies and to dissuade the Soviets from taking escalatory steps, but it was a ruse to the extent that none of the bombers deployed had been modified to carry nuclear weapons. Nonetheless, they were loaded with conventional ordnance and were combat ready. At the same time and even though they were not part of the demonstration, SAC’s nuclear-capable bombardment groups went on high alert. By June 1949, the crisis had been resolved, but SAC began to deploy nuclear-capable B-29s in specially prepared bases in the United Kingdom, although the weapons themselves remained in US storage facilities.¹⁹

One of the lessons US civilian and military leaders drew from the Berlin blockade grew out of their anxiety that war with the Soviet Union could come about through Moscow’s miscalculations. If Soviet leaders should underestimate the deadly seriousness of Washington’s commitment to the defense of Western Europe, they might risk other dangerous confrontations in future policy disputes with the United States. The administration’s ironic solution to this possibility was to raise the stakes in the Cold War by placing its reliance on the deterrent power of nuclear weapons. It was a step driven by the Republican-controlled Congress’s funding of a larger air force than the White House had sought and its rejection of Truman’s proposal for universal military training, which would have provided a conventional force for intervening in European conflicts. Previously reluctant to authorize military planning for the use of nuclear weapons, by September 1948—in the midst of the Berlin crisis—Truman relented. Planning for nuclear weapons use became institutionalized at the Pentagon, with the Soviet Union as the chief target.²⁰

Even though nuclear forces had little or no relevance for more likely contingencies in Europe, such as civil wars or Communist electoral victories, the Truman administration and its successors found themselves increasingly reliant on nuclear forces and military alliances. A few months after the United States and its Western allies had formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in April 1949, NATO ministers approved an alliance military concept that defined strategic atomic bombing as largely a US responsibility and one that was integral to the defense of the “North Atlantic area.”²¹

Atomic Diplomacy and the Korean War

The Korean War was the first Cold War confrontation in which Washington considered the military use of nuclear weapons. Believing incorrectly that the North Korean invasion on 25 June 1950 was simply the action of a Soviet puppet, Truman and his advisers worried that the Soviet Union itself would enter the war, and if that occurred, they wanted strategic forces to be prepared to act. With North Korea driving the US-led United Nations (UN) forces down the Korean Peninsula, military and civilian officials reviewed but rejected nuclear options. It was unlikely that those options would be effective, and beyond that, their use would raise an outcry around the world, especially from Asian allies and neutrals. According to an army intelligence staff report, the “use of atom bombs in this stage of the conflict would probably be interpreted as an indication of the ruthlessness of US policy and a disregard for the lives of Asiatic people, or as a ‘desperation measure’; which would signify US weakness.”²² President Truman did, however, approve the deployment of nuclear weapons overseas as a demonstration of US resolve to see the conflict through. Between July and August, the administration sent weapons components and additional nuclear-configured B-29s to bases in the United Kingdom and Guam, although the fissile cores of the weapons remained in the United Sta...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Prelude: Nuclear Diplomacy and Notions about Nuclear Use from Truman to Johnson, August 1945–January 1969
• 2 The Madman Theory: Mr. Nixon, Dr. Kissinger, and Dr. Strangelove, 1945–1969
• 3 The “Big Game” and the Bombing of Cambodia, December 1968–March 1969
• 4 The Vance Ploy and the Mining Ruse, March–April 1969
• 5 The Mining Ruse, Threat Diplomacy, Peace Plans, and Withdrawals, April–July 1969
• 6 The First DUCK HOOK Plan, the “Nixon Doctrine,” and a Deadline, July–August 1969
• 7 Toward the November Option: DUCK HOOK and PRUNING KNIFE, July–September 1969
• 8 To Escalate or Not to Escalate? September–October 1969
• 9 The Secret Nuclear Alert, October 1969
• Epilogue: Aftermaths and Assessments
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• Photo Gallery
• Back Cover