Recently declassified documents reveal that Nixon was considering using nuclear bombs to bring an end to the Vietnam war in an operation code named “Duck Hook”:

But Nixon abandoned Duck Hook shortly after Oct. 2. Both his secretaries of Defense and State, Melvin Laird and William Rogers, opposed the plan. Nixon apparently also began to doubt whether he could sustain public support for the three- to six-month period the plan might require. He also concluded that his military threats against the North Vietnamese had no effect.

Threats are rarely useful. For instance, French threats of economic sanctions against Iran. Uh, OK, French threats of anything (except surrender — those are always taken seriously).

Indeed, the time and place to use nukes in Vietnam was in 1953 in a place called Dien Bien Phu. The French were trying for a decisive military victory out in the middle of nowhere. Instead, General Vo Nguyen Giap conducted a brilliant 56-day siege that ended with at least 2,200 dead Frenchmen (including many of the elite Foreign Legion) and a French surrender of 11,000 men (of which a little over 4,000 survived captivity).

If the French had accepted the two tactical nukes that Eisenhower offered, history would have turned out vastly different.

Just as an aside, fourteen years later General Giap tried to do the same thing to an American Marine base called Khe Sanh. 205 American soldiers were killed while ten to fifteen thousand Viet Min died before they gave up eleven weeks later and trickled back into the jungle. When the NVA shut down the airstrip, the French had resorted to high-altitude parachute drops resulting in a great many supplies, ammunition and even vital intelligence landing outside the base and falling into enemy hands. At Khe Sanh, the U.S. Army 109th Quartermaster Company used the Low Altitude Parachute Extraction System (LAPES) with great success. The seige for Khe Sanh was a great American military victory (achieved without dipping into the nuclear arsenal) that was turned into a major North Vietnamese propaganda win by our Fourth Estate.

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