Vietnam
How about the Vietnam War, another war our Congress never declared that we lost? We didn’t surrender, but we quit the war in 1973. Why didn’t we ever use them there?
That war had been caused, like the war in Korea, for us, anyway, because of an insurgency by communists, this time in South Vietnam. The situation was different from Korea though. The North Vietnamese had themselves driven out their French colonizers in 1954. Afterwards an election had been scheduled for the purpose of uniting communist North and non-communist South Vietnam. When it looked to South Vietnam as if the communists were going to win the election, South Vietnam said they wouldn’t recognize it. That’s when the insurgency in the south really got going. The insurgents in South Vietnam called themselves the Viet Cong. They were supported, everybody knew, by North Vietnam.
North Vietnam itself was supported, we assumed, by the communist governments in the Soviet Union and China. They were all communists, right? That meant they would all always be on the same side of everything, right?
Before long it looked like the insurgent Viet Cong in South Vietnam would likely win the war in spite of the fact that we had been giving the South Vietnamese government military advice and weapons, conventional weapons so far.
In March 1965, we came into the war with our forces, landing some Marines at Da Nang, on Vietnam’s east coast. Soon more troops were sent over. Hundreds of thousands, eventually.
Were North Vietnamese forces already in South Vietnam in 1965? You had to think so. Later in 1965, in August, there could no doubt about that because our forces got into big battle with North Vietnamese forces in the Ia Drang Valley. The battle lasted five days. Lots of killing on both sides. We killed more of them than they did of us was what we heard. After five days, we both pulled back and we both claimed victory.
Before long it was pretty clear that we weren’t doing as well in South Vietnam as we had thought we would even though we had B-52 bombers and jet fighter airplanes and helicopters and they didn’t. We weren’t losing but we weren’t winning either. Viet Cong and North Vietnamese soldiers were dying in big numbers but they showed no signs of quitting. Some American soldiers kept getting killed. And South Vietnamese soldiers, more of them. Vietnamese civilians too, even more of them. And civilians in the countries around Vietnam too, Laos and Cambodia especially.
Without us, it seemed clear, South Vietnam wouldn’t stand a chance.
Our military leaders began to think about using nuclear weapons, our smaller “tactical” ones. Using our big “strategic” nuclear weapons wasn’t really an option in such a skinny country. Plus we couldn’t be sure how the Soviet Union would respond to that. In contrast to the Korean War, the Soviets had plenty of nuclear weapons now and were much closer to the action than we were.
In this country, there was a group of civilian scientists called the JASONS that sometimes consulted for the military on top secret matters. In 1967, the JASONS heard that some of our military leaders were thinking about using nuclear weapons in Vietnam. Without being asked, the JASONS prepared a report called “Tactical Nuclear Weapons in Southwest Asia.” The bottom line in the report was that if the North Vietnamese got hold of some of the Soviet Union’s tactical weapons, our forces would be damaged much more than would the North Vietnamese forces. Just one 10 kiloton bomb over one of our helicopter bases would destroy it, they said. The Viet Cong and North Vietnamese didn’t have helicopters or helicopter bases.
It’s not clear that the military paid any attention to the report. But our Secretary of Defense at this time, Robert McNamara, was known to be opposed to the use of nuclear weapons in the conflict, I’m not entirely sure why. If the Secretary of Defense was opposed to their use, we wouldn’t be using them.
In the end, President Nixon decided to “vietnamize” the Vietnam War. That is, by 1973, after we had bombed Vietnam and surrounding countries with tons and tons of conventional bombs, more than we had used in all of World War II, President Nixon finished taking our troops out of the country and left matters to the two of them, which is what the North Vietnamese had said should always have been the case.
We did not, in the end, use nuclear weapons in Vietnam, not even to prevent the kind of “ultimate fallback” that happened in 1975 when the North Vietnamese forces invaded the South. In short order, they took South Vietnam’s capital Saigon and renamed it Ho Chi Minh city.
In 1975 Robert McNamara was no longer Secretary of Defense. He hadn’t been since 1968. We still didn’t use nuclear weapons.
That’s a quick and dirty account of the matter, but it’s about right. In any case it’s clear that, as in Korea, we hadn’t been able to find a use for our nuclear weapons in this conflict, even when it was a war we were losing. Losing in Vietnam, that is. It might have been different if it was a war we were losing in our own country.
Israel
Now let’s look at Israel, another country that might think it could find a use for nuclear weapons.
Israel doesn’t admit to having nuclear weapons but I don’t know anyone who thinks they don’t have some. Ten or twenty is a common estimate. Some say eighty or a hundred.
The Israelis have declared that they won’t be first to “introduce” nuclear weapons into the Middle East. Maybe by “introduce” they mean something like “use.”
Since the founding of Israel in May 1948, that country has been attacked more than once by its neighbors. In one of the wars, the one in 1967, when it looked like Israel might be overrun, movements were detected in Israel that suggested the Israelis were preparing to use the nuclear weapons they didn’t admit to having. But then Israel’s conventional forces turned the tide and we never learned whether they had nuclear weapons, or whether they would have used them, or how, or where, or what would have been the effect, short-term and long-term, of their having been used.
Israel has declared that they will not be the first to “introduce” nuclear weapons into the Middle East. They have also made it clear that they will not permit any other nation there to “introduce” nuclear weapons, meaning in this case, to possess any or develop the means of producing them. To keep this from happening, they have over the years conducted a number of “preventive” attacks inside Iraq, Syria, and Iran—conventional bombing raids, assassinations of nuclear scientists, and cyber attacks. Clearly the Israelis have been willing, in their situation, to conduct preventive attacks--with non-nuclear weapons, anyway--to prevent their neighbors from developing nuclear weapons.
If Israel used nuclear weapons in these preventive attacks, it might defeat the purpose, mightn’t it? How could the Israelis object to the introduction of nuclear weapons in the Middle East after they had obviously “introduced” them?
Next: Are They Useless: Iraq? Afghanistan?