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Writer's picturerichard lightner
Jan 173 min read

More on Kissinger

In a meeting with the British in 1966 it was reported that Kissinger “was decidedly gloomy about the current political situation in the south.” He did not think the government of Air Marshall Ky would last. (678)


As for warfare, “Kissinger thought that Hanoi and the VC could accept a 10-1 kill ration almost indefinitely. He thought the VC were still far from the bottom of the barrel. (685)


The Germans told Kissinger that the war was not winnable. That the important area of world affairs was Europe, not Asia. Kissinger argued that “we are defending Europe in South East Asia. Adenauer replied that if we kept up our present pace [in Vietnam] we would lose both Europe and Asia.” (712)


In 1962 Kissinger believed that “Communist China is likely to be in more of an expansionist phase than Soviet Russia. . . . [Nevertheless] both of them are a menace to world peace and partly because of Communist doctrine.” (724-725)


Thought good diplomatic relations should be had with Communist China if they renounced “the use of force in the Formosa Strait.” He denounced France’s recognition of Communist China. (725)


In A World Explored, Kissinger argued that force should only be used as a last resort. (732)


In 1965 Kissinger traveled to Vietnam three times. He decided “that the United States must extricate itself from that country by diplomatic means. It clearly could not hope to win a war against an externally supported guerrilla movement at an acceptable cost in an acceptable time frame. Worse, the very government it was seeking to defend showed little sign of being capable, much less worthy, of being preserved.” He became consumed with the U.S. avoiding humiliation.(733)


He believed that infiltration of the North Vietnamese into South Vietnam would stop following American bombing. (737)


After the assassination of Diem in 1963 and after his visit in 1965 to Vietnam Kissinger conflicted that “the situation was hopeless. [In 1968 he wrote] I then decided to work within the government  to attempt to get the war ended. . . . but it was ineffective.” (822)


Kissinger hated Richard Nixon. “That man is unfit to be president. . . . Look, I’ve hated Nixon for years, Kissinger told Brzezinski.” (826)


Nevertheless, if his patron Nelson Rockefeller “decided to campaign for Nixon, Kissinger would stand ready to assist him.” (828)


Kissinger criticized the anti-war movement for its making “heroes of leaders in repressive new countries,” such as Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, or Mao Zedong. (836)


He wrote an article “defining what he called the Vietnamese syndrome: optimism alternating with bewilderment; euphoria giving way to frustration, based on the fundamental problem that military success . . . could not be translated into permanent political advantage. . . . It would be difficult to imagine two societies less meant to understand each other than the Vietnamese and the American. But mainly it was because American strategy had all along been misconceived. From the outset of military intervention under Kennedy - as Morgenthau had seen, but he had missed - there had been a “failure . . . to analyze the geopolitical importance of Vietnam . . . implied its relative unimportance. Then there was the fundamental problem that the American military had sought to wage a conventional war against guerrillas, following the classic doctrine that victory depended on a combination of control of territory and attrition of the opponent. . . . [However], guerrillas rarely seek to hold real estate . . .  We fought a military war; our opponents fought a political one. We sought physical attrition; our opponents aimed for our psychological exhaustion. . . . the guerrilla wins if he doesn’t lose.” (839)


Kissinger claimed that American diplomatic efforts were separate from the war. Hanoi, on the other hand, viewed them as part of the same process. (840)


He believed in an honorable end to the Vietnam War. “Any other solution may unloose forces that would complicate prospects of international order.” (843)


From the time of his appointment as Nixon’s national security adviser the press idolized Kissinger. (857)


From the beginning of his tenure as National Security Adviser Kissinger planned to marginalize the incoming Secretary of State William Rogers. (860)


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Different Points of View over the future of Atomic weapons.

 

    During the Afghan War, President Donald Trump (GAG!) authorized a General to use the Mother of all Bombs, a bomb just shy of the power of an atomic bomb, on his own. Notice that this had no positive affect for the US in the outcome of the war. (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/13/world/asia/moab-mother-of-all-bombs-afghanistan.html)

 

    There is a plethora of information about the development and use of the atomic bomb during World War II. Much of the world was astounded that the US used such a bomb on civilians. Others said, drop more.

 

    The atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 9, 1945, “served as the symbolic coronation of American global power.” Nevertheless, the use of the atomic bomb in World War II brought international condemnation.    At the Tokyo War Crimes Trials of 1946-1948, Justice Pal of India cited the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as war crimes. U.S. President Harry S. Truman responded by publicly saying that the atomic bombs were dropped “in order to shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands of young Americans.” However, President Truman in correspondence with John Foster Dulles that his reasons for dropping the atomic bombs were the attack on Pearl Harbor and the murder of our prisoners of war. “The only language they seem to understand is the one we have been using to bombard them.” (Martin Sherwin. “Hiroshima and Modern Memory.” The Nation. October 10, 1981)

 

    “In the summer and fall of 1945, US atomic policy left us troubled and perplexed. Roosevelt, we thought, had been committed to a policy of international understanding and conciliation. . . . Truman’s policy, however, appeared to have the opposite aim: to keep a monopoly of the atomic bomb in U.S. and British hands, and to use it as a strong trump card in tough political bargaining with the Soviet Union.” (Sherwin, Martin. A World Destroyed: the Atomic Bomb and the Grand Alliance. 1975. xi)

 

    And, well before the bombings FDR and Churchill “rejected steps that might have led to the international control of atomic energy.” (Martin Sherwin. “Hiroshima and Modern Memory.” The Nation. October 10, 1981)

 

    According to nuclear physicist Hans Bethe who worked on the Manhattan Project, “Many of us had been influenced directly or indirectly by Niels Bohr, the great Danish physicist. He argued that only international control of nuclear weapons could save the world from a nuclear arms race, and that such a race would imperil, not enhance the security of the United States and Great Britain. Many other scientists, especially at the University of Chicago Metallurgic Laboratory, at the initiative of Leo Szilard, had come independently to the same conclusion. 

 

    Martin Sherwin, George Mason University History professor who specialized in the history of nuclear weapons, wrote that, this interpretation by physicists and historian is wrong. Roosevelt decided, with Churchill, “that the bomb should remain and Anglo-American monopoly.” (Sherwin, Martin. A World Destroyed: the Atomic Bomb and the Grand Alliance. 1975. xii) 

    However, this is not mentioned in Hiroshima in America: fifty years of denial, by Robert Jay Lifton and Gregg Mitchell.

 

KOREA

    There are numerous arguments about whether or not the atomic bomb should have been used in Korea, Vietnam, or other existential circumstances.

    In late 1950, following their invasion of Korea, Chinese forces surrounded U.S. Marines. “Distraught himself, the chief executive (Truman), told a press conference on November 30 that nuclear bombsight be used against the enemy and seemed to indicate that the decision would be MacArthur’s.” (William Manchester. American Caesar. 608, 610; Bruce Cumings. The Korean War: a History. 2010. p. 30)

 

    The U.S. developed the ability fire an “atomic shot from a cannon.” (Bruce Cumings. The Korean War: a History. 2010. p. 34)

    

    “In mid-May Ike (President Dwight Eisenhower) told the [American] National Security Council that using nukes in Korea would be cheaper than conventional weaponry, and a few days later the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended launching nuclear attacks against China.” (Bruce Cumings. The Korean War: a History. 2010. p. 34)

    This is interesting since Eisenhower’s reaction to Hiroshima was, we didn’t have to use that awful thing on them. (Lifton, Robert Jay and Mitchell, Greg. Hiroshima in America: fifty years of denial. 1995. 213)

 

    Operation Hudson Harbor - flying lone B-29 bombers over North Korea to simulate a dropping of an atomic bomb. North Korean leaders must have had “steel nerves” as this simulation was eerily similar to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Operation Hudson Harbor concluded that the use of atomic weapons would not be “useful” as it was difficult to identify “large masses of enemy troops.” (Bruce Cumings. The Korean War: a History. 2010. p. 157-159)

 

    The United Nations/United States forces faced defeat in Korea but Truman looked strong because he “threatened to use the atom bomb against China.” However, this “made peace talks virtually impossible.” (Stone, I.F. The Hidden History of the Korean War. 213)

    Major General Emmett (“Rosy”) O’Donnell, commander of the Far East Air Force’s Bomber Command . . . [stated that] “We have never been permitted to bomb what are the real strategic targets, the enemy’s real sources of supply.” He said that the strategic bombing commanded been “designed to deliver the atomic offensive to the heart of the enemy” and indicated very clearly that he thought the bomb should have been used against the Chinese.”” (Stone, I.F. The Hidden History of the Korean War. 245)

 

RICHARD NIXON

    Richard Barnet, former State Department aide, activist and scholar, who founded the Institute for Policy Studies (Wikipedia) warned “of the danger that the United States government might resort to the use of nuclear weapons. Barnet then cites Vice President Richard Nixon speaking to the Executive Club of Chicago on March 17, 1955 as saying, 

    “The weapons which were used during the Korean War and World War II are obsolete. Our artillery and our tactical Air Force in the Pacific are now equipped with atomic explosives which can and will be used on military targets with precision and effectiveness.

    “It is foolish to talk about the possibility that the weapons which might be used in the event war breaks out in the Pacific would be limited to the conventional Korean and World War II types of explosives. Our forces could not fight an effective war in the Pacific with those types of explosives if they wanted to. Tactical atomic explosives are now conventional and will be used against the military targets of any aggressive force.”  

    Of course, we are not aggressors by threatening China or invading Vietnam.

 

VIET NAM

    1964 American Republican Presidential candidate Senator Goldwater of Arizona was a reserve Air Force General and “suggested that the United States could isolate the Vietcong in South Vietnam any bombing the supply routes connecting China and North Vietnam.” He also proposed using nuclear weapons “to clear the jungles where the Vietcong were presumably hiding. The public reaction to those notions was one of horrified alarm.” (Thomas Powers, The War at Home. 2) It turns out that the United States bombed Southeast Asia the equivalent of many atomic bombs through out the war. 

    “Although Goldwater was finally persuaded to stop talking about nuclear weapons.”

    Although Goldwater’s advocacy of atomic weapons scared people his idea to win the war did not. Johnson portrayed himself as “responsible” as opposed to Goldwater who he implied would get us all killed. (Thomas Powers, The War at Home. 9)

    Noted military writer Hanson Baldwin believed that the US should use its overwhelming technological power to counter communism even if that meant nuclear weapons. Of course, only for “defensive purposes.” “If we cannot do this, he says, we had better “call it quits.” (Noam Chomsky, At War with Asia. 52)

 

    General Curtis LeMay advocated the use of nuclear weapons to end the conflict with communism once and for all. “We ought to nuke the chinks. . . . We are swatting flies when we should be going after the manure pile.” (Thomas Powers. The War at Home. 40; Rowland Evans and Robert Novak. Lyndon B. Johnson: the Exercise of Power. 538)

 

    So, there is pretty much agreement that the use of the atom bomb was on the table. The horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki completely ignored.

 

    In 1954 the United States “assuming the Chinese Communists intervene would engage in a “highly selective atomic offensive.” (Pentagon Papers. New York Times. 1971. 46) However, if the “Chinese Communists do not intervene” then the use of atomic weapons would occur if it would aid the US in the war. (Pentagon Papers. New York Times. 1971. 47)

    McNaughton drafted a “Proposed Course of Action” to McNamara. In his long list of actions McNaughton noted risks. One was the “escalation to the use of nuclear weapons.” (Pentagon Papers. New York Times. 1971. 442-445, passim)

    Presidential assistant for national security, Walt. W. Rostow, wrote a memorandum on May 6, 1967, analyzing U.S. bombing strategy in Viet Nam. One of his conclusions was “we do not want a nuclear confrontation over Viet Nam.” (Pentagon Papers. New York Times. 1971. 585, 588)

Atomic Bomb

Viet Nam War
 

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