> John Thornton wrote:
>>
>>
>> My personal believe is that Nixon never intended to use nukes, only that
>> he was using the Mad Man strategy . He may however have gone through
>> with it if the bluff didn't work. No one will ever know.
>
> Well, according to one of his aides he _did_ plan to use them, and the
> November Demo changed his mind. No one can know his secret thoughts of
> course, but the evidence is fairly strong.
IMO, we need to distinguish between the mental mechanism that led Nixon to make the specific decision not to use nuclear weapons or stop the war and the objective conditions under which Nixon made the decision. Unless somebody put a gun on Nixon's head, Nixon had some wiggle room and could have -- in principle -- used nuclear weapons or continued the war. However, if Nixon had resorted to nuclear weapons or had continued the war, given the successful resistance in Vietnam and the mass mobilization at home, the cost for the U.S. ruling class and for capitalism would have increased substantially.
IMO, the struggle of the Vietnamese and the mass demonstrations against the war were *both* large contributing factors. Since this wasn't a controlled experiment with only one factor operating at once, it's hard to say how much influence each factor had on the decision. But both of them contributed largely to increase the strategic cost of the war. The specific mechanisms by which mass demonstrations influence the political decisions to continue or stop a war are not smooth and simple. But they are very effective nonetheless. Some of those effects have to do with involving more people in politics. The recent mass demonstrations against the war on Iraq, as ineffective as some people may think they were (and the mass attempt to use electoral politics to stop the war in 2004 and 2006 that followed from those demonstrations) made a big difference in changing the political landscape of the U.S. In six years or so, the political conditions in the U.S. are entirely different.
The tendency to counterpose mass mobilizations and electoral politics is misguided.