Dear Margo Kingston:
Amidst reactions to your article "Bring Our Troops Home" for the Sydney Morning Herald you were wrong to back down from your assertion that the united $tates used nuclear weapons in the Vietnam War. In 1954, the united $tates offered nuclear weapons to the French to fight off their final loss at Dienbienphu. After the French withdrew from Vietnam, Nixon threatened again to use nuclear weapons.(1)
Your critics have an unacceptably high threshold for the word "use." Nixon did not "detonate" any nuclear weapons, but he did "use" them and to think that such use does not matter shows how insensitive to violence and instability a large part of the public in the imperialist countries has become, especially concerning the Third World.
People have adjusted to all this--including threats of nuclear devastation--because there is no other choice under capitalism. The motivations for the nuclear roll of the dice, inviting counter-threats and pre-emptive strikes to prevent the detonation of nuclear weapons, are present, and many people are too afraid to squarely look the problem in the face. No discussion of politics should avoid looking for answers. An example of how unrealistic capitalism makes people is the continuous vacillation between war-mongering and peace. Even Nixon himself ended up making the following ridiculous predictions: "Looking to the future. . . I also do not believe the world's major powers will initiate a conventional war. In Korea in the 1950s and in Afghanistan in the 1980s, we have seen that an overt invasion unites the world against the aggressor and ultimately dooms the policy to failure."(2)
Although not everyone reads dusty history books, the use of nuclear weapons in Vietnam was also recently in the news. First of all, another declassified document just came out about Nixon's nuclear threats.(3) Other journalists in-the-know have also discussed the parallels to Vietnam in the current Iraq conflict regarding nuclear weapons.(4)
Sincerely,
International Minister
Maoist Internationalist Movement,
(based inside U.$. borders)
mim3@mim.org
Notes:
1. http://www.ieer.org/ensec/no-6/threats.html
2. Richard Nixon, In the Arena, (NY: Simon & Schuster,
1990), p. 344.
3.
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=Nixon+%22nuclear+alert%22&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&selm=sv9k0vgp9g6i4dd5liq725fo1t1mn5nmkc%404ax.com&rnum=2
4. "Documents show that in the fall of 1969, President Nixon put U.S. forces on
worldwide nuclear alert in what he aptly called a "madman" strategy aimed at
scaring the Soviets into using their influence to force Vietnamese communist
concessions at the negotiations in Paris.
"Last month, the Bush administration took a leaf out of Nixon's book when it
threatened to use nuclear weapons against Iraq if the Iraqis use chemical or
biological weapons against U.S. troops. All U.S. intelligence agencies agree
that Saddam Hussein probably will, in fact, use chemical and/or biological
weapons if we invade Iraq."
(http://www.examiner.com/opinion/default.jsp?story=op.mcgovern.0106w)