Nixon was ready to go nuclear in Vietnam
WASHINGTON - President Nixon proposed dropping a nuclear
bomb on Vietnam, secret tapes released yesterday
revealed.
Discussing the war in April 1972, Mr Nixon listened to
Henry Kissinger, his National Security Adviser, discuss
options for targets, including power plants and docks.
Matter of factly, he responded: “I’d rather use the nuclear
bomb.”
The idea was immediately shot down by Dr Kissinger.
“That, I think, would just be too much,” he said. Mr Nixon
replied: “The nuclear bomb. Does that bother you? I just
want you to think big.”
The exchange, in the Executive Office Building next to
the White House, came weeks before Mr Nixon ordered
the biggest escalation in the US war effort since 1968.
Mr Nixon had previously alluded to exploring the
“nuclear option”, but said he had ruled it out because he
had been presented with civilian rather than military
targets.
However, it is the rawness of his language that
emerged yesterday from some of the secretly recorded
conversations now made public. A month after the
exchange with Dr Kissinger, Mr Nixon said of North
Vietnam: “We want to decimate that goddamned place.”
The remarks are in 500 hours of tapes released
yesterday at the National Archives at College Park,
Maryland.
By Roland Watson - The Times - March 01, 2002.
Nixon had notion to use nuclear bomb in Vietnam
COLLEGE PARK - Thinking big,
President Nixon raised the idea of using a
nuclear bomb against North Vietnam in 1972,
but Henry Kissinger quickly dismissed the
notion.
"I'd rather use the nuclear bomb," Nixon told
Kissinger, his national security adviser, a few
weeks before he ordered a major escalation of
the Vietnam War.
"That, I think, would just be too much,"
Kissinger replied softly in his baritone voice, in
a conversation uncovered among 500 hours of
Nixon tapes released Thursday.
Nixon responded matter-of-factly. "The
nuclear bomb. Does that bother you?" he
asked. Then he closed the subject by telling Kissinger: "I just want you to think
big."
He also said "I don't give a damn" about civilians killed by U.S. bombing.
That exchange in the Executive Office Building on April 25, 1972, is contained
in the largest batch of tapes ever released by the National Archives. Altogether,
roughly 1,700 of the 3,700 hours of Nixon White House tapes have now come
out.
Most of the newly released tapes were recorded between January and June
1972.
They offer insights into Nixon's historic trip to China in February of that year —
and the mating habits of two pandas he received as a gift.
"The only way they learn how is to watch other pandas mate, you see," Nixon
said in a phone conversation with a columnist for The Washington Star.
In June 1972, Nixon and chief of staff H.R. Haldeman can be heard worrying
about the erratic behavior — late-night telephone calls to reporters, for instance
— of Martha Mitchell, the outspoken wife of campaign manager John Mitchell.
She had complained about political dirty tricks.
"The woman is sick," Nixon said.
Nixon and his aides are heard talking over ways to limit the fallout if the White
House is implicated in the break-in at the Democratic National Committee at
the Watergate. The plan: Blame John Mitchell, saying he was so busy trying to
control his wife that he was not minding the campaign.
Other Watergate-related tapes include the infamous 18 1/2-minute gap, an
erased segment three days after the break-in. The gap — a series of whirs,
clicks and buzzes — was released in the 1970s. But the poor quality of the tape
makes conversations before and after the gap unintelligible, too.
Facing re-election in 1972, Nixon worries aloud on one tape that if America lost
the Vietnam War and the Soviets pulled out of a coming arms-control summit,
his political career would be history. He says he would pull out of the
presidential race and back former Texas Gov. John Connally for the GOP
nomination.
He told Kissinger, "The point is, we have to realize that if we lose Vietnam and
the summit, there's no way that the election can be saved."
The summit was not canceled and soon Nixon was escalating the war. The
president signed arms agreements with the Soviets in Moscow and tried to pin
the blame for the assassination attempt against George Wallace on liberals in an
effort to boost his own political prospects.
After hearing of the shooting, Nixon asked about Wallace's health and made
sure other presidential candidates were adequately protected. Then he turned to
using the incident for political advantage.
Within hours of the shooting, Nixon is heard on the tapes stirring up rumors that
the suspect, Arthur Bremer, was a left-winger with connections to the
Kennedys.
Nixon can be heard on one tape whispering the rumors in the background as his
adviser Chuck Colson, on the phone with the FBI's Mark Felt, passes on that
Bremer and his associates might be "Kennedy friends."
"I'll be sure and pass that along," Felt says.
The war weighed heavily on Nixon's mind.
"We can't lose 50,000 Americans and lose this war," Nixon told comedian Bob
Hope on April 15.
Nixon's thoughts about the nuclear bomb could have reflected mere frustration
with the war or been part of a strategy to make the North Vietnamese believe
he was a madman and could not be restrained — and so they should negotiate
peace.
"It was politically unacceptable," Vietnam historian Stanley Karnow said of the
prospects of using the bomb. "Just because he said it doesn't mean it was really
an option."
The tapes are replete with Nixon blurting out outlandish remarks, said Nixon
historian Stanley Kutler, who clamped on earphones to listen to the tapes at the
archives complex outside Washington.
"It's a frustrated, angry, confused president lashing out and calling on what he
had access to, to defeat an intractable enemy," Kutler said, adding that he
believed Nixon was not serious about dropping the bomb.
In May, Nixon reminds Kissinger that civilians are an unfortunate casualty of all
wars.
"The only place where you and I disagree ... is with regard to the bombing,"
Nixon said. "You're so goddamned concerned about the civilians and I don't
give a damn. I don't care."
"I'm concerned about the civilians because I don't want the world to be
mobilized against you as a butcher," Kissinger said. "We can do it without killing
civilians."
The Associated Press - February 28, 2002.
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