Quotes of the week:
“We are come to make a choice between the quick and the dead.” — Bernard Baruch before the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission, June 14, 1946.
“To be quick in pulling the nuclear trigger is to be dead.” — MK
Archival research by Michael Beschloss has revealed that in 1968, General William Westmoreland, the beleaguered commander of U.S. troops in South Vietnam, requested that plans be drawn up for the use of tactical nuclear weapons to relieve his besieged troops at Khe Sanh. In other words, Dien Bien Phu all over again — with the same result.
“Westy’s” request was quickly quashed by presidential advisor Walt Rostow, who alerted his boss. LBJ said, in effect, “Hell, no.” In just eight years since the end of the Eisenhower administration, the view that tactical nuclear weapons should be considered as just another ordnance to make up for shortfalls in manpower and to curtail military budgets for conventional warfare went from normative to no way.
Ike helped the norm of non battlefield use when faced with a similar request to relieve French troops at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. When push came to shove, Ike decided against bailing France out of a doomed colonial war by using tactical nuclear weapons because he didn’t want the United States to get bogged down in brushfire wars in out of the way places without allies. Ike also chose restraint because he didn’t want to spark World War III against Russia and China. Dien Bien Phu was overrun by the Viet Minh later that year. French forces left after a fig leaf of a diplomatic settlement, to be replaced by U.S. forces, which left under the fig leaf of another diplomatic settlement two decades later.
Dien Bien Phu and Khe Sanh are less important in the annals of warfare than in their significance for the calculus of first use and no first use of nuclear weapons. Both were important markers in the long, endless debate over the military utility of nuclear weapons. This debate is never settled, but postponement of first use, replicated over time, has been consequential. Day by day, month by month, and year by year, the norm of non battlefield use has taken hold. Nonetheless, it is still contested, at least indirectly, by those who seek new low-yield options. And it will be contested in deliberations over the next Khe Sanh and Dien Bien Phu. The norm of non-battlefield use could still be broken at any time in regions like the Korean Peninsula and the subcontinent where warfare could occur, whether by design or miscalculation.
Campaigns to support the adoption of No First Use doctrines help reinforce the norm of non-battlefield use, supplementing the succession of decisions like those by Ike and LBJ over a prolonged passage of time. Formal adoption of No First Use declarations will continue to face long odds in countries like the United States, Russia and Pakistan where nuclear strategists believe that deterrence depends on the threat of crossing this threshold first.
Talking or arguing anyone out of a belief system is very hard. Overriding this belief system from the top down is another option, but national leaders are usually hesitant to buck doctrinal beliefs. Changes in belief tend to be experiential, and we can’t afford the experience of taking stock after the consequences of first and subsequent use. For the time being, extending the norm of No First Use depends on prudential decision making during nuclear-tinged crises. This, in turn, rests on the hope that national leaders will be able to recognize the difference between ephemeral advantage and far more damaging, longer term consequences.