John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY DAVID SANGER IN CHECKPOINT ASIA
“The Top American General in Vietnam Considered Using Nukes During the Siege of Khe Sanh, New Documents Reveal
“Westmoreland would have used tactical nukes before he admitted defeat. LBJ shut him down”
This is interesting but not exactly a big new discovery.
We know Nixon and Kissinger discussed the possibility of using nukes on the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
The Pentagon, at various points, generated plans for massive nuclear strikes on Russia and China.
Indeed, in the early 1960s, Kennedy attended a Pentagon briefing for their new first-strike plan against Russia. Kennedy told an associate he left the meeting feeling sick.
The men in the Pentagon included some frightening maniacs like General Curtis LeMay who had planned and run the massive fire-bombing campaign of Japanese cities, Operation Starvation, something every bit as terrible as any nuclear attack.
And don't forget America's three-year carpet bombing of North Korea. Literally one-fifth of the entire North Korean population was killed, and that figure came from a Pentagon general.
That was North Korea's chief motive for developing nuclear weapons. "Never again." But in American propaganda it is the North Koreans always portrayed as savage maniacs.
The same hideous approach would be repeated to terrify the civilians of Vietnam. The carpet bombings were indeed terrifying, survivors having told us they were the most feared events of all. They killed on the order of three million people, mostly civilians.
America has been far more brutal in its post-WWII colonial wars than I'm afraid most Americans are at all aware, and for the kind of military psychopaths who carried out some of these atrocities, nukes are just another kind of bomb.
By the way, America's ever-increasing use of bombing since WWII, often instead of their own troops, changed the face of war. Now, in every one of these wars, immensely more civilians are killed than soldiers. Indeed, America now often employs proxies on the ground, instead of its own troops, while the place is flattened by bombers.
