My mother's cousin served on a commission - with Eisenhower's son, I believe, I know they were close friends -- studying whether to use atomic weapons in Korea. They rejected the idea for the same reason as in Viet Nam, because the prevailing winds went south & would kill US troops.
On Tue, Aug 31, 2004 at 01:54:45PM -0400, Michael Pollak wrote:
>
> 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
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-- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929
Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu