New from the National Security Archive at George Washington University:

Nixon White House Considered Nuclear Options Against North Vietnam, Declassified Documents Reveal: Nuclear Weapons, the Vietnam War, and the “Nuclear Taboo”*

From the report:

Recently declassified documents reveal that during Richard M. Nixon’s first year as president, advisers on his White House staff were willing to revisit the question of whether to employ nuclear weapons in Vietnam. Senior officials and policy advisers in the administrations of Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson had previously considered the possibility of using nuclear weapons to deal with military crises, influence negotiations, or terminate conflicts, but their deliberations had come to naught because of a deeply ingrained “nuclear taboo.” The taboo comprised several moral and practical considerations: decision-makers’ understanding that the destructive effects of nuclear weapons were disproportionate to the limited ends they sought in regional conflicts such as Vietnam; their appreciation of the danger of causing a localized conflict to escalate into a global war with the Soviet Union; their need to weigh world, allied, congressional, and bureaucratic opinion; and their assessments of the strategic utility and logistic feasibility of nuclear weapons in conditions other than those having to do with retaliation to an enemy nuclear attack.

Source: National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 195

This entry was posted on Monday, July 31st, 2006 at 2:51 pm and is filed under Government and politics, International Relations, Military and defense. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.