1967: The Second Treaty--The Outer Space Treaty, Part 1
Another Place To Keep Them Out Of
Since February 2021, I have been posting weekly entries on nuclear weapon matters—history, technology, and “secrets,” all from a somewhat different angle—in You Might Want to Know on Substack. To see other entries, go to the You Might Want to Know Archive.
You can kill ten of my men for every one I kill of yours. But even at those odds, you will lose and I will win.
Viet Minh leader Ho Chi Minh in a warning to French colonialists in 1946I am not going to lose Vietnam. I am not going to be the president who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went.
Newly inaugurated President Lyndon Johnson at a White House meeting on November 24, 1963 responding to U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. telling him that Vietnam “would go under any day if we don’t do something.”The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.
Albert Einstein 1946
On June 10, 1963, just after I graduated from college, five months before President Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas, Texas, Kennedy gave a wonderful speech at commencement ceremonies at American University in Washington, D.C. that addressed our future in a world with nuclear weapons in it. I thought it was wonderful. It seemed wise and smart and hopeful. I’d like to listen to it again. Maybe every now and then.
But five months later, in November 1963, two months after he signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty in Moscow, the first treaty to limit in a significant way what we could do with nuclear weapons, President Kennedy was shot and killed. When I learned about it, I was in my first year at Oxford, standing in a “queue” to go to a play. A person in the queue, who must have made me for an American, told me what had happened. I left the queue and started walking—where to I didn’t know.
Kennedy’s Vice-President Lyndon Johnson had become President.
President Johnson was not especially focused on nuclear weapons. We soon learned that he had much he wanted to do domestically about civil rights and poverty to help create a “Great Society” in America.
President Kennedy had said good things about civil rights, but I don’t think he had accomplished much in that area. Even from England, it looked like that pot was about to boil back home.
President Johnson was also going to have to deal with what was going on now in South Vietnam where President Kennedy had sent those ten thousand military advisors.
In England, the news reports about what was going on in Vietnam were very different from anything I’d seen back home. More graphic and disturbing. Not as upbeat. Not nearly.
Two years after President Kennedy was shot and killed, in 1965, as I was coming to the end of my time in Oxford, President Johnson had gotten Congress to approve sending American troops into Vietnam. Here’s some of what I’ve learned about how it had come to this.
For over sixty years, France had been in control a big colony in the area where Vietnam was that was called French Indochina. During World War II, the Japanese had driven the French out of French Indochina. After World War II, France tried to reestablish the colony. The people living in French Indochina resisted, especially a group in Vietnam called the Viet Minh, who came to be led by someone called Ho Chi Minh who had, incidentally, been educated in France.
In 1954, an agreement called the Geneva Accords had created the countries of Laos, Cambodia, and North and South Vietnam out of what had been French Indochina. Laos and Cambodia were monarchies. North Vietnam’s government was Communist. South Vietnam was neither of those things. Hard to tell what South Vietnam was, other than anti-communist. It had had a leader named Diem who, a couple of weeks before Kennedy was killed in 1963, had himself been murdered in a military coup.
Had we had anything to do with Diem’s murder? Or allowed it to happen? The news in England suggested we had. I didn’t know.
Several military governments ensued in South Vietnam. In pretty quick succession, it seemed like.
In the Geneva Accords that ended the French occupation in French Indochina in 1954, elections had been scheduled to decide under whose auspices South and North Vietnam should be unified. It had started to look like the Communists would win the elections and South Vietnam had kept the elections from taking place.
An insurgency had begun in South Vietnam with many of the insurgents being Viet Minh soldiers who had remained in South Vietnam when the French left.
Viet Minh was short for “League for the Independence of Viet Nam.” The South Vietnamese called the insurgents “Viet Cong,” which was short for Vietnamese Communist. That’s what we called them too. The Viet Cong called themselves the “National Liberation Front” (NLF).
In 1955, as I was starting high school, President Eisenhower had sent several hundred military advisors to South Vietnam to help the Army of the Republic of South Vietnam —the ARVN—deal with the Viet Cong/NLF insurgents. President Kennedy, in his time in office, had sent over ten thousand more advisors.
The NLF/Viet Cong were being supported by North Vietnam, that was pretty clear, but North Vietnam itself, the Communist country, hadn’t openly sent its soldiers into South Vietnam the way the North Koreans had into South Korea in 1950, which had started the Korean War.
Even with the help of our ten thousand military advisors and the armaments we were providing to South Vietnam, things had not gone well during Kennedy’s administration either. In 1965, President Johnson had decided we needed to send our own soldiers openly into the war, as we had in Korea. In something called The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, our Congress had approved his doing this. We were supposedly responding to an attack on one of our ships by the other side while it was in international waters. I didn’t personally know anyone who believed that was why.
Conscription hadn’t really ended after World War II, so some of the soldiers sent to Viet Nam had been “drafted.” That is, “called up” into armed forces by the government and compelled to become soldiers.
In 1965, I was 25, the right age to be drafted, but I was about to start law school so it seemed I wouldn’t be. If I had been drafted, I’m not sure what I would have done. I didn’t think we had an automatic obligation—a moral obligation, I guess it would be—to fight in a war your leaders had gotten your country involved in, even if you loved your country.
A lot of us had deep doubts about the morality, and just the good sense, of this war. Not all of us, of course. But more and more, it seemed, as time went by.
President Johnson’s sending our soldiers into the war in 1965 hadn’t decided the matter, unfortunately. The insurgency kept dragging on. Our soldiers kept being killed. Our military leaders said we were killing a lot more of the “VC” than they were of us and they’d soon have to give up. But that kept not happening.
After our soldiers were ordered into the war, North Vietnam no doubt felt free to send its soldiers openly into South Vietnam. Everybody knew they’d been doing it before, just not openly.
At home, protests against the war were being mounted. Also protests about the slow progress with civil rights. The two issues sometimes got tangled up. It did look like a large number of the guys being drafted were black guys and poor white guys.
Guys who wouldn’t be exempted from the draft the way I was being exempted because I was studying in Oxford.
So why not just use some of our nuclear weapons in Vietnam? Wouldn’t that get the job done toute de suite?
It wouldn’t be the first time we’d considered using our nuclear weapons in French Indochina. In 1954, a year after President Eisenhower had agreed to the armistice in Korea, he had considered letting the French use some of our nuclear weapons in their fight after World War II to reestablish their colony in French Indochina—”tactical” nuclear weapons like the ones we had by then begun to send over to certain western European countries. “Tactical” nuclear weapons were the smaller ones—very powerful, of course, they were nuclear weapons, just probably no bigger than the bomb that had destroyed Hiroshima. Intended for use in battles, not simply to destroy cities.
The French had been having a terrible time fighting off the insurgency of the Viet Minh. In 1954, in a battle going on at a place called Dien Bien Phu, the French had been surrounded. This battle looked like it might be decisive.
President Eisenhower had decided, finally, not to let the French use our tactical nuclear weapons. He might have worried that using the nuclear weapons would bring the Chinese into this war as they had come into the war in Korea when General MacArthur took our troops up too close to the border between China and North Korea where the Chinese thought he might not stop. Maybe bring the Soviets into the war too. The Chinese didn’t have nuclear weapons just yet, but by now the Soviets did. And early in 1950, Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong had signed a mutual defense pact.
The battle at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 had indeed proved decisive.
Later in 1954, the French had agreed, in the Geneva Accords, to leave French Indochina. Now, in the 1960s, we Americans were in what had been French Indochina, not to establish a colony but fighting Communism, we believed. And, like the French, not doing particularly well.
In 1968, fourteen years after the French left and three years after President Johnson sent our soldiers into the war in South Vietnam, our military leaders again considered using some of our tactical nuclear weapons in our war there. We were in a big battle with the North Vietnamese just then at a base we had established near the border with North Vietnam, at a village called Khe Sanh. The battle at Khe Sanh wasn’t just against the Viet Cong. The North Vietnamese were heavily involved. Thousands of their troops had put Khe Sanh under siege. They were making it very hard to get supplies into Khe Sanh, even with the helicopters we had and they didn’t.
Things it looked like they could end up going the way they had at Dien Bien Phu.
Once again, it was decided—I’m not sure by whom—that our tactical nuclear weapons wouldn’t be used. Part of the reasoning was, I think, as it had been at Dien Bien Phu, that the opposing sides were so close to each other, nuclear weapons could not be used against their troops without also killing and injuring our own troops. Another part of the problem was, as it had been at Dien Bien Phu, we weren’t sure what China and the Soviet Union would do if we used nuclear weapons. Again. There, this time.
By then, 1968, China had nuclear weapons. They’d conducted their first successful test in 1964. In 1967, they’d successfully tested a thermonuclear bomb.
In the end, our troops broke the siege at Khe Sanh and we were able to get supplies and reinforcements in there. Not long afterward, though, we abandoned Khe Sanh.
Both sides claimed victory.
The killing continued in Vietnam, just not in big battles.
A lot more of their side were being killed than of us, it seemed. Also lots of civilians, who may or may not have a side. We weren’t killing civilians on purpose, I don’t think. With indifference, maybe, sometimes.
None of it seemed seemed to make much difference in how the war was going.
It was hard to tell sometimes who was a civilian and who was a member of the Viet Cong/ National Liberation Forces. Civilians don’t wear uniforms. Insurgents aren’t required to though frequently they wore what we referred to as “black pajamas.”
Next: 1967, The Outer Space Treaty, Part 2