On Tue, 31 Aug 2004, Carrol Cox wrote:
> > Ike thought nuclear war was a horror,
>
> Then why did his administration offer France nuclear weapons to use to
> avoid defeat at Dien Ben Phu? (In fact, Dulles _urged_ the French to
> accept the offer.)
This story has grown in the telling. The original account is that Dulles phrased it as a question -- "What would you do if we gave you two atomic bombs to defend Dien Bien Phu? -- to which was given the obvious answer "Well, that wouldn't work because it would destroy all the French defending Dien Bien Phu as well as all the attackers." See Bernard Fall, _The Siege of Dien Bien Phu_, page 309, and also footnotes 12 and 19. (For the record, it was behind closed doors, off the record, and Dulles denies ever saying or even thinking it.)
Eisenhower's policy at Dien Bien Phu was pretty clearly not get the US involved, and to set up a containment policy modelled on NATO, namely SEATO. His supporters at the time highlighted this as his virtue: that he got us out of Korea and he kept us out of Vietnam.
Eisenhower's policy on Vietnam steadily fell apart during his the course of his presidency because it was based on Eisenhower's key wrong assumption (which became part of the foundations of the cold war framework, and whose falsity Vietnam so clearly laid bare): that the stronger party always wins a non-nuclear war. Whatever his merits as a general of conventional armies, he shared with most such generals a thorough incomprehension of the dynamics of guerrilla war.
Michael