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Nuclear Weapons, Coercive Diplomacy, and the Vietnam War Perspectives on Nixon’S Nuclear Spector

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Nuclear Weapons, Coercive Diplomacy, and the Vietnam War Perspectives on Nixon’S Nuclear Spector FORUM Nuclear Weapons, Coercive Diplomacy, and the Vietnam War Perspectives on Nixon’s Nuclear Spector ✣ Commentaries by Robert Jervis and Mark Atwood Lawrence Reply by William Burr and Jeffrey P. Kimball William Burr and Jeffrey P. Kimball, Nixon’s Nuclear Specter: The Secret Alert of 1969, Madman Diplomacy, and the Vietnam War. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2015. 448 pp. Editor’s Note: The publication of Nixon’s Nuclear Spector, by William Burr and Jeffrey P. Kimball, in 2015 generated a good deal of discussion about the nuclear dimension of coercive diplomacy. Drawing extensively on U.S. archival evidence, Burr and Kimball explore the Nixon administration’s at- tempts to force a settlement of the Vietnam War by relying on nuclear threats. We asked two distinguished scholars—Robert Jervis and Mark At- wood Lawrence—to offer their assessments of the book. Their commentaries are presented here along with a reply by Burr and Kimball. Commentary by Robert Jervis When I was asked to contribute to this symposium, my initial instinct was to decline because I had read the book already. But then I thought I might get even more out of it a second time, and indeed I was right. The book is so rich in detail and so thought-provoking that it cannot be fully absorbed in one reading. William Burr and Jeffrey Kimball have written well-regarded articles on Richard Nixon in Vietnam, but this book goes much further. Two initial chapters examine nuclear weapons and what Alexander George calls “coer- cive diplomacy” in the first two decades of the Cold War, and a final chapter covers U.S. policy in Vietnam for the last five years of the war, but the bulk of the narrative scrutinizes Nixon’s attempt to extricate the United States from Journal of Cold War Studies Vol. 19, No. 4, Fall 2017, pp. 192–210, doi:10.1162/JCWS_c_00770 © 2017 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 192 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws_c_00770 by guest on 27 September 2021 Forum the war in his first year in office. In doing so, the authors draw on a mar- velous array of sources and skillfully triangulate among the H. R. Haldeman diaries, official papers, and later memoirs. The evidence accumulated here un- derscores how much has been declassified and how many gaps remain because of classification barriers (mainly blocking information on nuclear weapons and intelligence sources) as well as meetings and conversations that were never documented—in addition to the obvious incentives the major players had to deceive one another (and perhaps themselves) and not to lay out their funda- mental assumptions and reasons. Although many aspects of Nixon’s foreign policy succeeded very well— the opening to China, the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, and the agree- ments that essentially settled the vexing issue of Berlin—Vietnam was Nixon’s highest priority when he took office, and on this issue he and National Secu- rity Adviser Henry Kissinger failed. Their failure was not for lack of a plan, as Burr and Kimball show. The basic idea was to ratify Lyndon Johnson’s view that a military solution was impossible, while gaining a victory at the nego- tiating table by coercing the USSR into putting sufficient pressure on North Vietnam to withdraw its troops from the South. This was to be done through a combination of telling Soviet leaders that the United States would not pro- ceed in areas that Moscow cared deeply about (arms control, the Middle East, East-West trade) unless the USSR was helpful in Vietnam (the “linkage” strat- egy), combined with the stick of dangerous escalation unless the war could be brought to a quick end. Nixon and Kissinger got nowhere with this, as most experts on the Soviet Union would have predicted had they been consulted. In an irony that Kissinger occasionally appreciated, linkage often worked in reverse. Partly because of the pressures of domestic politics, Nixon was at least as invested in lowering tensions and reaching arms control agreements as were his Soviet counterparts. Why did people as knowledgeable as Nixon and Kissinger think their strategy might work? Although Burr and Kimball do not discuss this in detail, they present the elements that form an explanation. First, Nixon was under great pressure. The Vietnam War had destroyed Johnson, and even if Nixon believed that the foreign policy advantages of prevailing in Vietnam militarily were worth the blood and treasure, he was well aware that the U.S. public would not agree. “The real question is how long we can hold public opinion,” he said (p. 261), one of many such statements that litter the record. He usually counted public opinion in months rather than years. He also knew that Viet- nam was corroding relations with neutrals and allies, which was ironic given that the main ostensible reason for fighting the war was to convince those countries that the United States would protect them. When no other viable 193 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws_c_00770 by guest on 27 September 2021 Forum path seems to exist, people may not realize that the one they are on leads to a dead end. The linkage story is well known, and so Burr and Kimball concentrate on the use of sticks. In the end, only twigs were used, but the story is fasci- nating and important. Soon after taking office, Nixon and Kissinger explored ways to escalate the war. The purpose would not be to win militarily but to coerce the USSR and North Vietnam by reducing the latter’s military and economic capability, inflicting punishment, and, most importantly, convinc- ing them that the situation was very dangerous because the president might behave irrationally (Nixon’s “Madman Theory”). In the spring and summer of 1969 great effort went into developing plans for mining the harbors in North Vietnam and establishing a naval blockade (“Duck Hook”) and bomb- ing North Vietnam and the supply routes in Laos and Cambodia (perhaps with nuclear weapons), in what was given the code name “Pruning Knife.” In the end, the combination of the fear of domestic and international reac- tion, the opposition of Secretary of State William P. Rogers and Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird (neither of whom was fully apprised of the plans), the doubts that escalation would succeed, and perhaps a failure of nerve induced Nixon to back away. As a substitute, he ordered a multifaceted military alert for three weeks in October 1969. The instructions to the military conveyed by Alexander Haig, Kissinger’s top assistant, were that the president wanted measures that met several criteria: “be discernable to the Soviets and be both unusual and significant; not threatening to the Soviets; not require substantial funding or resources; not require agreement with allies; not degrade essen- tial missions; and have minimum chance of public exposure” (p. 267). The military did its best to make something out of these contradictory require- ments, but it is hard to believe that this Goldilocks approach could ever have worked. The noise in the system of military deployments during a tense pe- riod of U.S.-Soviet (and Sino-Soviet) relations greatly complicated the efforts of Soviet intelligence to figure out what was happening, let alone why it was happening. However, even if Soviet officials had read the signals correctly they would have had little reason to be alarmed. They might have believed that Nixon was trying to coerce them, but the alert hardly gave them a reason to be coerced. Desperation and the felt need to do something explain much of why this maneuver was undertaken. Another part, Burr and Kimball explain, was Nixon’s misreading of the past. He not only envied John F. Kennedy’s pro- claimed success in the Cuban missile crisis, but he mistakenly believed that President Dwight Eisenhower’s nuclear threats had helped end the Korean War. He also admired Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’s “brinkmanship” 194 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws_c_00770 by guest on 27 September 2021 Forum and Eisenhower’s thinly veiled threats in the two crises in the Taiwan Straits and the latter’s handling of the 1959 Berlin crisis. He may have read history in this way because he wanted to believe that nuclear threats could work, but in any event he was fortified by what he constructed of the past. Burr and Kimball show that a major problem with both the abortive Duck Hook/Pruning Knife plans and the nuclear alert was the gap between the White House goals and the military outlook. Not only did the former refrain from explaining to the latter exactly what was wanted, but the military always resisted the idea of threatening or using force to coerce rather than defeat the adversary. The Duck Hook and Pruning Knife plans never fully fit with the White House strategy being too big, aimed at the wrong targets, and were unamenable to civilian control. Here as with many other of Nixon’s policies, his obsession with secrecy and central control kept getting in the way of effective policy. The powerful and often dysfunctional interaction between Nixon and Kissinger is also on full display, with each alternately egging on the other and applying restraint, especially when the possibility of using nuclear weapons was raised. A central theme of the book is the importance of Nixon’s “Madman Theory”—the hope that the USSR and perhaps North Vietnam could be co- erced by being brought to see that Nixon was not only tough but also unpre- dictable.
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