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

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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 “coercive 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

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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 agreements 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 negotiating 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” strategy), 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

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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 fascinating 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 bombing 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 reaction, 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 period 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”

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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 coerced by being brought to see that Nixon was not only tough but also unpredictable. Large-scale escalation might be irrational, but Nixon was erratic and uncontrollable enough that he might do it anyway. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), this scheme did not work. Nixon told Kissinger to warn Soviet Ambassador Anatolii Dobrynin that the president might do something rash: “I am sorry Mr. Ambassador, but [Nixon is out of control. Mr. Ambassador, as you know, I am very close to the president, but you don’t know this man. He’s been through more than any of the rest of us put together. He’s made up his mind and unless there’s some movement,’ just shake your head and walk out” (pp. 292-293). Kissinger ignored the instructions, and it is not clear whether Soviet officials ever received this warning. Ambassador Dobrynin’s report of Nixon’s mood and tone is interesting; pp. 290–292). North Vietnam was even less accommodating. As one of the North Vietnamese negotiators told Kim- ball years later, Nixon “would like to show the Vietnamese that he was an unpredictable person, that he can surprise—how to say, a big stick surprise. But this backfired on Nixon, because we saw that Nixon could not have a big stick, because of the step-by-step withdrawal of American forces” (p. 227). Burr and Kimball are persuasive in arguing that Nixon did put some hope in showing irrationality, but their account needs some amendments. Without engaging in too much armchair psychiatry, I would interpret Nixon’s constant

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reiterations of how tough he was as an attempt to disguise his tendency to hesitate, vacillate, and (sensibly) back away from dangerous moves. He needed to bolster his self-image, but as in so many other aspects of his persona there was a gaping disconnect between what he said and what he would do. If we turn from his Oval Office blustering to the record of his actions, we find that Nixon was generally cautious and predictable. Burr and Kimball say that the Christmas bombing of 1972 was “Nixon’s final implementation of the Mad- man Theory in Vietnam” (pp. 321, 324), but it can instead be seen as a careful if cynical move to appease the South Vietnamese leaders and right-wing critics at home. The nuclear alert was a bit bizarre but hardly conveyed madness. I do not think anything Nixon did met this criterion. To the contrary, his major policies of reaching out to China and making arms control agreements with the USSR were built on being and seeming predictable. Would Leonid Brezhnev and Mao Zedong really have wanted to put any faith in agreements reached with a madman? Two additional points may be of more interest to political scientists than to historians. One is that Burr and Kimball put under the single heading of the Madman Theory what Thomas Schelling calls the “rationality of irrationality” and “threats that leave something to chance.” The meaning of the former is clear and refers to the bargaining leverage that can accrue to a negotiator who projects an image of being willing to do great damage to the adversary even if the negotiator’s own side will suffer terrible losses in turn because of a lack of understanding of the situation or a propensity to act on impulse. Threats that leave something to chance, on the other hand, do not require irrationality. Once military forces are put in motion (even in an alert), the nature of bureaucracies and human error is such that events could get out of control even though neither side wants this, as Kissinger noted on occasion (p. 116). You do not have to be a madman to take actions that have some chance of leading to a disaster if you believe this will compel the other side to back down. Kimball and Burr argue that Nixon came up with the Madman Theory and that Kissinger had to be persuaded of it. The former statement seems to be correct, but I doubt the latter. Many of these ideas were carefully articulated by Kissinger’s Harvard colleague Schelling and were developed by Schelling’s student Daniel Ellsberg, who lectured in Kissinger’s classes and became one of his aides on the National Security Council before becoming disillusioned and leaking the Pentagon Papers. Kissinger understood these ideas before he ever met Nixon. The unsung hero in the Burr-Kimball book is Melvin Laird. Often frozen out by Nixon and Kissinger, he displayed a greater sense of the realities of both

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international and domestic politics than they did. He was a skeptic of linkage and coercion from the start and was quicker to grasp that the only way out was Vietnamization, even though this would take much longer than the White House wanted. He also realized that public and congressional opposition to the war meant that steady and fairly rapid troop withdrawals were required despite Kissinger’s (correct) fear that this would undermine U.S. bargaining leverage. When necessary, Laird simply announced withdrawals without ﬁrst clearing them with the White House. He was a true realist. As Burr and Kim- ball show, Nixon and Kissinger, for all their skill and brilliance, lived in a fantasy world when dealing with Vietnam. Even if my amendments are valid, this is a book to be read, reread, argued with, and learned from.

Commentary by Mark Atwood Lawrence

Shortly after winning the White House in November 1968, Richard Nixon made clear his determination to end the war in Vietnam as quickly as possible so that he would avoid the fate of his predecessor, Lyndon Johnson. “I’m not going to end up like LBJ, Bob, holed up in the White House afraid to show my face on the street,” Nixon told his aide H. R. Haldeman. “I’m going to stop that war. Fast. I mean it!” Nixon’s urgency stemmed from his con- viction that achieving his biggest international priorities depended on ending the massive political distraction and drain of resources in Southeast Asia. But it also ﬂowed from his belief that his honeymoon with the U.S. public, ex- hausted and divided by years of inconclusive ﬁghting, would last no more than nine months. But how exactly to end the war? This was the question that bedeviled Nixon and his chief foreign policy adviser, Henry Kissinger. Candidate Nixon had tantalized the electorate with talk of a “secret plan” to end the war, but he assumed the presidency with precious few clear ideas. Even so, William Burr and Jeffrey P.Kimball make clear in their dense but path-breaking Nixon’s Nu- clear Specter that one possibility loomed disturbingly large in the new administration’s thinking: a dramatic escalation of U.S. military operations, including even threats to use nuclear weapons. On the whole, this point will come as little surprise to scholars of the Vietnam War, who have long understood Nixon’s and Kissinger’s belief that bold military action would help to intimidate Hanoi and thereby bring about a peace settlement on U.S. terms. But Burr and Kimball go well beyond previous scholarship in piecing together the details of the administration’s

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calculations and behavior during Nixon’s first nine months in office. Indeed, Nixon’s Nuclear Specter offers one of the most meticulous reconstructions of U.S. policymaking with respect to any period of the war in Vietnam. That Burr and Kimball accomplish this feat in connection with an exceptionally fluid period, when U.S. leaders worked hard to hide their intentions, is testa- ment to the extraordinary patience and insight and sheer archival elbow-grease of two leading historians of U.S. foreign policy in the Nixon era. The authors shine above all in piecing together the event that lends the book its title, the Nixon administration’s “nuclear alert” in October 1969. Speculation about the alert—a top-secret, worldwide array of military maneu- vers associated with preparations for nuclear war—goes back to 1983, when investigative journalist Seymour Hersh first described aspects of the episode in a biography of Kissinger. But the event remained shrouded in mystery for decades because of a lack of documentation and sparse interest among historians. Even as more evidence trickled out, some scholars concluded that the alert was related to U.S. officials’ fears of a Soviet attack on China and had nothing to do with Vietnam. Not until the early 21st century, Burr and Kimball as- sert, did the episode come into focus for them thanks to dogged archival work, numerous interviews with participants, and successful requests for declassification of materials through the Freedom of Information Act and Mandatory Declassification Review. Nixon’s Nuclear Specter, the result of a decade-and-a- half of such digging, convincingly shows that Nixon and Kissinger ordered the alert as a warning to the Soviet Union, which had become North Vietnam’s main arms supplier and patron. The book also demonstrates that the United States was contemplating a major escalation in Vietnam and that all escalatory options were on the table. The alert was the culmination of the administration’s efforts to frighten Moscow, and by extension its North Vietnamese ally, into major concessions. Burr and Kimball are on target in their bitingly critical assessments of the motives and mindsets that led Nixon and Kissinger to go ahead with the alert. Perhaps most damning, the book reveals the tenacity and self-congratulatory bravado with which the two leaders clung to the idea that threats of massive escalation in Vietnam could have the desired effect in Moscow and Hanoi. To be sure, Burr and Kimball point out that the alert was consistent with a tendency among a wide array of U.S. officials, dating back to the first years of the Cold War, to believe that nuclear threats could be used for diplomatic purposes. Most notably, Nixon had a good deal of company in accepting—rightly or wrongly—that President Dwight Eisenhower’s hints about the possible use of nuclear weapons in 1953 had pushed China into negotiating a ceasefire to end the Korean War.

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Burr and Kimball also contend, however, that Nixon’s and Kissinger’s belief in the effectiveness of nuclear intimidation went well beyond a sober analysis of historical precedents. Their outlook was just as much an irrational matter of faith rooted in their self-perceptions as men of action unwilling to be constrained by generally accepted norms of international behavior. Natu- rally, the book cites Nixon’s oft-quoted comment to Haldeman in 1968: “I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war,” Nixon as- serted, according to Haldeman’s account (p. 53). But Burr and Kimball show that the president and his national security adviser repeatedly invoked the idea throughout their years in the White House, a period when U.S.-Soviet nuclear parity might have indicated that the window for brandishing nuclear threats had closed. Most famously, Nixon and Kissinger acted on the Madman The- ory in ordering a nuclear alert designed to intimidate the Soviet Union during the October 1973 Middle East war. All in all, Burr and Kimball conclude that there was just enough strategic sense in Nixon’s and Kissinger’s thinking that they do not quite qualify as “crackpot realists,” the memorable term coined by sociologist C. Wright Mills to describe nuclear strategists willing to contemplate massive human suffering to accomplish geostrategic goals (p. 65). But the two leaders, in Burr and Kimball’s view, came perilously close to epitomizing the type. The arrogance and even cruelty of the administration’s calculations are reinforced by the authors’ insistence that Nixon and especially Kissinger came into office with no hope of achieving core U.S. objectives in Vietnam and little confidence of preserving an independent, anti-Communist South Vietnamese state into the indefinite future. On the contrary, the book, echoing Kimball’s seminal 1998 study Nixon’s Vietnam War, deploys impressive evidence that the two men accepted from the outset of their time in the White House that the best the United States could achieve was a “decent interval” between a peace deal that permitted the withdrawal of U.S. forces and the ultimate collapse of South Vietnam. Some readers may feel that Burr and Kimball overstate the administration’s certainty about the inevitability of South Vietnam’s defeat and the single-mindedness with which Nixon and Kissinger embraced the “decent interval” logic. The two policymakers, after all, made a wide variety of comments about U.S. prospects in Vietnam during their years in office. Nonetheless, the book’s broader contention is persuasive: Nixon and Kissinger contemplated monumental destruction despite being keenly aware that South Vietnam would likely collapse in the long run no matter what they did. Almost as damning is the book’s suggestion that the bravado with which Nixon and Kissinger embraced their ends-justify-the-means approach stood in

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sharp contrast to the fecklessness with which they implemented it. Kissinger stands out as the more hawkish, a Strangelovean figure who repeatedly ex- horted the president to go ahead with various escalatory ideas in mid-1969. Nixon, by contrast, blows hot and cold in the narrative, sometimes proclaim- ing his no-holds-barred desire for devastating blows in Vietnam but usually shelving proposals for action out of fear of invigorating the antiwar movement or antagonizing dovish members of his administration, especially Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird. In the end, Burr and Kimball show, Nixon acted on his hawkish impulses by secretly bombing North Vietnamese bases in Cam- bodia, a story well told in the book’s early chapters. Beyond that step, though, Nixon approved only two elaborate bluffs: the nuclear alert of October and a separate flurry of naval operations earlier in the year (the so-called mining readiness test), intended to signal to Hanoi and Moscow that the United States might be preparing to mine North Vietnamese harbors, another story Burr and Kimball tell for the first time. Proposals for bolder action against North Vietnam—especially mining and a new round of bombing above the 17th Parallel—never made it beyond the drawing board. Rather than audacious innovators and men of decisive action, Kissinger and especially Nixon come across as weak, perpetually frustrated leaders unable to overcome political and bureaucratic barriers to realizing their grand ambitions. Burr and Kimball stand on slightly shakier ground in asserting that the nuclear alert, like the larger pattern of threat and bluff, was counterproductive to the administration’s purposes. They are categorical on this point: “For all of Nixon’s and Kissinger’s concerns about the credibility of American power, their use of nuclear alerts for signaling purposes on occasions when there was no threat or when the action was far out of proportion to any possible danger raised the level of risk to global security and undermined the credibility of the decision makers themselves” (p. 333). Admittedly, this contention is entirely plausible, and it is easy to imagine that Communist leaders were more confused by the Nixon administration’s inconsistencies than cowed by its threats. Moreover, it is clear that neither the Soviet Union nor North Vietnam changed its attitude toward the war or the negotiations in any obvious way as a result of the mining ruse or the nuclear alert. The book adduces one shard of striking evidence about Soviet views of U.S. behavior, quoting Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko as saying that “Americans put forces on alert so often that it is hard to know what it means” (p. 333). Without more extensive use of Soviet and Vietnamese Com- munist decision-making sources, however, it is impossible to know precisely how U.S. gestures were perceived. It is equally impossible to know the extent to which the bluff raised the “level of risk to global security” or undermined

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U.S. credibility. Might U.S. blandishments have alarmed some Communist policymakers or stirred debate over policy toward the war or the negotiations, even if there were no clear-cut shifts? Did their perceptions of the United States change in any way as a result of the nuclear alert? Did U.S. credibility suffer when the bluffs—first the mining “ruse” and then the nuclear alert— fizzled out with no decisive U.S. action? Without consideration of a fuller array of Soviet and North Vietnamese records, and perhaps materials from elsewhere around the world, we cannot answer these questions. A more significant problem lies in the book’s curious ambiguity on a question that looms large over the book: whether Nixon and Kissinger might have been willing to contemplate the actual use of nuclear weapons in Vietnam if not for the bureaucratic and political obstacles that constrained them. These impediments clearly inhibited the two men from ordering the mining of key harbors and the renewal of intensive bombing of North Vietnam, parts of a package of escalatory steps code-named Duck Hook. But did they ultimately make a difference in the administration’s thinking about nuclear weapons? Or did the administration always view nuclear weapons solely as instruments of political posturing? Given the book’s lack of evidence suggesting concrete planning for nuclear options, it seems likely that Nixon and Kissinger, despite their tough talk, never imagined anything beyond the elaborate bluff they carried out—a conclusion that cuts against the sensationalistic implications of the book’s title. Judgments on this question would necessarily entail a degree of speculation and counterfactual thinking. But Burr and Kimball are better placed than anyone else to offer opinions. One way to handle this issue might have been to situate Nixon’s and Kissinger’s thinking about the possibilities of nuclear intimidation within consideration of the two men’s approach to nuclear weapons more generally. Perhaps the book’s biggest weakness, though, lies not in the authors’ com- mand of their subject but in the exceptional density and, in a few places, redundancy with which they tell their story. The book is likely to appeal to only the most determined of scholars with deep interest in nuclear history, the Vietnam War, or the Nixon administration. Part of the problem is that Nixon’s and Kissinger’s behavior varied only slightly across the months from January to October 1969. The two men repeatedly entertained proposals for dramatic escalation, agonized over them, and then made decisions—usually against action. This behavior, narrated in deep detail, makes for repetitive reading. Part of the problem, too, is the book’s focus on a non-event: the mere “specter” of a nuclear war that never came close to occurring in practice. Burr and Kimball face daunting storytelling challenges in bringing to life a tale of a dog that did not bark.

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This quibble is related to a larger characteristic of the book: its meager attention to the broader geopolitical and domestic political contexts within which Nixon and Kissinger contemplated escalation. Perhaps such omissions are unavoidable in a text that already weighs in at a hefty 334 pages and confronts readers with a formidable array of detail and terminology, but they are notable nonetheless. A more engaging approach might have set the deliberations at the heart of the book within a more comprehensive, multi-vocal narrative encompassing not only the administration’s flirtations with escalation but also the ground war in Vietnam, the international context, the ebb and flow of U.S. public opinion, and the political setting within which Nixon and Kissinger operated. Such a rendering would perhaps have helped readers appreciate more fully the extraordinarily complex environment that helped shape the Nixon administration’s decisions and would have reinforced one of the book’s most persuasive points—that the first nine months of the new presidency constituted a discrete period of flux and possibility. By the late fall of 1969, the book convincingly contends, the administration had given up on the possibility that bold inno- vation would end the war quickly. Instead, it committed the United States to a “long-road” strategy aimed at achieving a satisfactory negotiated settlement only after an extended period of bolstering South Vietnamese forces to offset the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops (p. 252). These quibbles are, however, just that—mere quibbles. Burr and Kimball succeed brilliantly in their goal of writing authoritatively about a series of events that have eluded historians for nearly half a century. No serious scholar of the Vietnam War in the Nixon years will be able to ignore Nixon’s Nuclear Specter. Other scholars would do well to pay careful attention, too. The book provides both inspiration and a model for any researcher determined to piece together events long suppressed by official cynicism and secrecy.

Reply by William Burr and Jeffrey P. Kimball

The positive reviews of our book by two eminent scholars, Robert Jervis and Mark Atwood Lawrence, are much appreciated. We are pleased that they read our book carefully and thoughtfully. Our initial reaction to their comments is that they show how much common ground we have with them. For all in- tents and purposes, both of them accept our ﬁndings about Richard Nixon’s belief in the “Madman Theory” as well as the “larger pattern of threat and bluff” in the Nixon administration’s strategy. Moreover, both of them agree with our interpretation that the Madman strategy was central to the October

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1969 secret alert, although Jervis proposes “amendments” to this argument. Lawrence has more to say about the “decent interval” concept and agrees that it was a key component of the Vietnam diplomacy pursued by Nixon and Henry Kissinger. Perhaps these areas of agreement suggest that a histori- ographic consensus is forming about important aspects of U.S. policy during the Nixon-Kissinger era. Underlying the consensus are differences of emphasis and interpretation. In our response, we will address Jervis’s and Lawrence’s propositions, elabora- tions, and criticisms. Jervis postulates that Nixon’s invocations of his Madman Theory might have been motivated less by a desire to project madness and more by an effort to “disguise his tendency to hesitate, vacillate, and (sensibly) back away from dangerous moves.” We agree that Nixon often hesitated to act, vacillated in choosing his threatened course of action, and backed away from dire and potentially dangerous threats he had made. In our book we document these behaviors, including his and Kissinger’s scrapping of threats to use nuclear weapons. But Nixon did not always waver or retreat. In 1969 and 1970, he bombed and invaded Cambodia (after hesitating) and stepped up the bombing of Laos, South Vietnam, and the panhandle of North Vietnam (without much vacillation). In 1971, he instigated the South Vietnamese invasion of southern Laos, and in 1972 he launched operations Linebacker I and II against North Vietnam (with some hesitation). We also agree with Jervis that Nixon’s motivation for blustering could have partly been the product of a psychological disorder, whereby he simulta- neously sought to conceal his irresoluteness from others and bolster his self- image as a decisive and strong leader. Freudians might see a subconscious displacement or transference process for this behavior, and cognitive psychol- ogists might diagnose it either as a narcissistic or a passive-aggressive personal- ity disorder. Like Jervis, we prefer to avoid speculative armchair diagnoses and simply describe his conduct, letting the reader decide. What we did try to explain was that Nixon’s actions and inactions in- frequently matched his public image as the smartest and toughest player in the game, thus refuting the narrative that he and to some degree Kissinger put forward in their postwar statements and published memoirs. As Jervis and Lawrence note, we also argue that Nixon’s and Kissinger’s “mad” threat- making was dangerous—whether implemented or not—and often ineffective or counterproductive. Jervis, however, doubts that the October 1969 nuclear alert (ofﬁcially known as the Joint Chiefs of Staff Readiness Test) “conveyed madness”—even though he believes it “was a bit bizarre.” In addition, he disputes our claim in

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the epilogue to the book that the December 1972 “Christmas bombing” was a legitimate expression of the Madman Theory. Regarding the October 1969 alert, it had originally been conceived as the prelude to operation Duck Hook. Although Nixon aborted Duck Hook, the nuclear alert proceeded as a desperate attempt to “jar” Moscow and Hanoi into believing his prior warnings that something big was about to happen and that the United States would be prepared for any contingency—even a nuclear contingency. As we point out in the book, the alert had its ﬂaws as a mad signal to Moscow and Hanoi, but in the minds of Nixon and Kissinger it was an expression of the Madman Theory: the principle that a country’s leader could coerce an adversary by threatening to unleash extraordinary force, including nuclear force, especially if the leader was perceived to be unpredictable, erratic, or crazy. In Nixon’s mind, his decision to bomb Hanoi and reseed mines in the 1972 Christmastime operations, Linebacker II and Pocket Money, was fraught with political and diplomatic risks, and as with all big decisions the reasons behind the operations were many and complex. We highlight some of the reasons, including Nixon’s desire to shock Hanoi before the negotiations re- sumed in January and to signal that he would repeat the operation if North Vietnam violated the pending armistice down the road. In Nixon’s mind, it was indeed an expression of the Madman Theory. On the day the bombs be- gan to fall, for example, he told a select group of dinner guests at the White House: “He did not care if the whole world thought he was crazy in resuming the bombing and mining. If it did, so much the better: the Russians and Chi- nese might think they were dealing with a madman and so had better force North Vietnam into a settlement before the world was consumed in a larger war.”1 Jervis also doubts that Kissinger had to be “persuaded” by Nixon to accept the Madman Theory. Our use of this verb in the epilogue of our book (p. 333) may have been a bit too strong—but probably not. In chapter 2, we refute the widespread misconception that the Madman Theory was Kissinger’s invention. We not only cite H. R. Haldeman’s claim that “Henry bought into the Madman Theory” but also offer a history of Nixon’s thinking on this matter and an analysis of Kissinger’s pre-1969 theories about the use of military force in support of diplomacy, as well as his views in favor of “rational” nuclear use over “irrational” nuclear threat-making. His Cold War–era ideas are too labyrinthine to summarize here, but sufﬁce it to say that Kissinger did

1. Richard Wilson, “The Unbelievable Scene,” Washington Star-News, 12 August 1974, p. 7.

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not need much persuading to buy into Nixon’s Madman Theory. It was not much of a leap for him to go from his advocacy of using force in support of diplomacy—including the use of “tactical” nuclear weapons—to accepting the potential efficacy of Nixon’s madman premise of threatening “excessive” force while posing as a potentially “irrational” international actor. Kissinger might also have embraced the Madman Theory because it was one means of ingratiating himself with his boss, thus gaining more leverage in his struggle with Secretary of Defense Laird and Secretary of State William Rogers for policy influence within the administration. More may be learned on this point if Kissinger’s and Nixon’s diaries are ever opened to researchers. Although we briefly discuss Thomas Schelling’s theories of coercion in chapter 2 of our book, we defer to Jervis’s deeper understanding of the dis- tinction Schelling made between the “rationality of irrationality” and “threats that leave something to chance.” Nonetheless, we do not believe that the page of our book he cites (p. 116) supports his suggestion that “you do not have to be a madman to take actions that have some chance of leading to a disaster if you believe this will compel the other side to back down.” Our discussion of Kissinger’s March 1969 report to Nixon on this and other pages has to do with their emerging strategy, whose purpose, Kissinger reminded Nixon, was to signal the Soviet Union and North Vietnam that the war might “get out of control” or “out of hand.” With these phrases, Kissinger was not simply suggesting that the war might—by chance—become more dangerous, as wars often do. He was also writing about proposed military actions that would signal to Moscow and Hanoi that the United States was prepared to unleash extraordinary force with the potential to expand the war and risk a great-power confrontation—extraordinary in the context of international perceptions of the state of the war at this juncture. Meanwhile, in backchannel meetings with Anatolii Dobrynin, Kissinger was conveying the same warning. One of our chief documented arguments, as Jervis observes, is that neither Nixon nor Kissinger, nor any other top figure in the administration, believed that a U.S. military victory in Vietnam was possible or that public opinion or the U.S. economy would or could sustain the current level of fighting for an indeterminate period into the future. How, then, to exit the war without damaging U.S. great-power credibility and honor—not to mention Nixon’s own credibility and honor? Their answer to this conundrum was to provide a “reasonable chance” for President Nguyen Van Thieu of South Vietnam to survive for a decent interval of time following a favorable negotiated agreement between the United States and North Vietnam and the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Indochina.

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How might they achieve such an agreement? Their answer was “sticks and carrots”—or in the Communist Vietnamese vernacular, “fight while talking.” The sticks were particular kinds of military escalations in Indochina coupled with mad threats suggesting that North Vietnam could be destroyed and the war could spin out of control—an eventuality that would damage the prospect of improving U.S.-Soviet relations and benefit China (the “China card” in Nixon’s game vis-à-vis the Soviet Union). A more ominous implication was that the U.S. escalation of the war in North Vietnam might even trigger a confrontation with the USSR. Linked to these sticks of diplomacy were the Nixon administration’s carrots of détente and the prospect of nuclear arms control agreements, negotiations concerning the Middle East and Germany, and improved trade—but only if Moscow cooperated in settling the Vietnam War by pushing Hanoi to make concessions at the negotiating table. Jervis rhetorically asks: “Why did people as knowledgeable as Nixon and Kissinger think their strategy might work?” He concludes: “When no other path seems to exist, people may not realize that the one they are on leads to a dead end.” True enough, but we also document Nixon’s and Kissinger’s belief in 1969 that they could militarily and diplomatically force Hanoi to accept a negotiated settlement that would create the illusion of victory—namely, a reasonable chance for Thieu’s and South Vietnam’s survival for a period of at least five years. As Kissinger told his aides in September 1969: “I refuse to believe that a little fourth-rate power like North Vietnam does not have a breaking point.” When Nixon decided in early October 1969 to abort his threatened Duck Hook operation against North Vietnam, his administration’s strategy shifted to an emphasis on gradual and unilateral U.S. troop withdrawals and the strengthening of Saigon’s forces (de-Americanization and Vietnamization). Again, these policies were to be coupled with mad threats and big military operations, great-power diplomacy (détente and rapprochement), and an evolving reduction of U.S. demands in private negotiations with Hanoi’s representatives in Paris. Nixon and Kissinger continued to hope they could achieve the illusion of peace with honor, which would now, however, include a negotiated cease-fire-in-place, the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Indochina, the retention of Thieu in power (for a time), and the placing of blame for the ultimate fall of South Vietnam on the Democrats in Congress, the antiwar movement, and the press (and implicitly the South Vietnamese). As time passed without the signing of an agreement, the length of the projected decent interval shrank from five years to three, then two or even one. As Kissinger reminded Nixon on 3 August 1972: “If a year or two years from now North Vietnam gobbles up South Vietnam, we can have a viable foreign policy if it

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looksasifit’stheresultofSouthVietnameseincompetence....Sowe’vegot to find some formula [in the negotiations] that holds the thing together a year or two, after which—after a year, Mr. President, Vietnam will be a backwater.” Lawrence comments that “some readers may feel that Burr and Kimball overstate the administration’s certainty about the inevitability of South Viet- nam’s defeat and the single-mindedness with which they embraced the ‘decent interval’ logic.” If we communicated certainty and inevitability, it was not our intention. Kissinger’s mention in 1969 of a decently long five-year interval between a negotiated armistice and the coming to power in Saigon of the Provi- sional Revolutionary Government was coupled with demands resembling the Geneva Agreements of 1954: the mutual withdrawal of U.S. and North Viet- namese troops from South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, and internationally supervised elections for a new government in Saigon. These demands were to be incorporated within a Metternichian international framework, wherein the Soviet Union (and later China) might act to restrain North Vietnam from resuming the conflict (meanwhile Thieu might have succeeded in eviscerating the Viet Cong). Nixon and Kissinger realized, however, that South Vietnam’s future was perilous, and as the war continued past 1969 South Vietnam’s defeat was seen as a near certainty. Their desperate reliance on and faith in the Madman Theory, the decent-interval solution, and great-power accommoda- tion had the effect of extending the U.S. war in Vietnam to January 1973 in an effort to build up South Vietnamese forces and to negotiate a U.S. exit on terms that Saigon, Hanoi, and the American Right would accept. Lawrence voices additional “quibbles,” as he calls them. He writes: “Rather than audacious innovators and men of decisive action, Kissinger and especially Nixon come across as weak, perpetually frustrated leaders unable to overcome political and bureaucratic barriers to realizing their grand ambitions.” These are not criticisms that we express directly in Nixon’s Nuclear Specter. Moreover, one could argue that our account reveals that Nixon and Kissinger were sometimes decisive, sometimes not, and that they were moderately inno- vative in the design and implementation of their Vietnam War exit strategy, as well as in their diplomatic approaches to the Soviet Union and China. More- over, they occasionally took risks (e.g., secret bombings and nuclear alerts), and, as was evident in the mining readiness test and the October 1969 alert, they found ways to circumvent and manipulate the national security bureau- cracy. They sometimes stumbled and failed, but they succeeded in their major goal: withdrawing U.S. forces from Vietnam under terms perceived by particular audiences to be “honorable”—although without fully acknowledging the concessions they had made, their lack of confidence in Saigon’s future, and

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how much the antiwar movement and other critics of the war had shaped key decisions. Owing to their secrecy and lack of candor, Nixon’s and Kissinger’s byzantine policy, strategy, and public relations narrative not only prolonged the war but muddied the waters of politics and history for decades. But this, too, was one of their goals. Lawrence also writes that

Burr and Kimball stand on slightly shakier ground in asserting that “the [Octo- ber] nuclear alert, like the larger pattern of threat and bluff, was counterproductive to the administration’s purposes.”...WithoutmoreextensiveuseofSoviet and Vietnamese Communist decision-making sources, however, it is impossible to know precisely how U.S. gestures were perceived. It is equally impossible to know the extent to which the bluff raised the “level of risk to global security and undermined” Nixon’s and Kissinger’s credibility.

We agree that evidence from Moscow and Hanoi about the impact of Nixon’s threats is woefully scant. These lacunae are unlikely to be filled in the fore- seeable future. Nonetheless, we do cite evidence from the Dobrynin-Kissinger backchannel conversations, North Vietnamese and U.S. transcripts of the Le Duc Tho–Kissinger negotiations, captured Vietnamese documents, U.S. intelligence assessments of Soviet reactions, public statements, and participant interviews indicating that Nixon’s and Kissinger’s Madman threats, including the October nuclear alert, were met with scorn, incredulity, and defiance. This, to us, suggests that the administration’s signals and threats undermined its credibility and caused doubt in Moscow and Hanoi that the United States would risk a regional or global expansion of the war and a nuclear confrontation between the great powers. Moreover, our account of this 1969 episode— as well as our well-documented survey in chapter 1 of U.S. and Soviet nuclear threat-making and nuclear alerts from 1945 through 1968 (plus, in the epilogue, Kissinger’s 1973 DEFCON 3 alert)—were not only intended to trace the origins and history of “atomic diplomacy” (the prelude to the October 1969 alert) but to demonstrate or at least suggest that nuclear saber- rattling usually stretches credulity— unless, of course, it is done by a truly mad threatener. At the same time, this history suggests that nuclear alerts and mobilizations are inherently dangerous inasmuch as they have the potential for escalated rhetoric, heightened tensions, increased chances for accident and misjudgment, and accelerated momentum toward actual nuclear use. Lawrence also identifies what he considers a

more signiﬁcant problem . . . in the book’s curious ambiguity on a question that looms large over the book: whether Nixon and Kissinger might have been willing to contemplate the actual use of nuclear weapons in Vietnam if not for the

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bureaucratic and political obstacles that constrained them. . . . Given the book’s lack of evidence suggesting concrete planning for nuclear options, it seems likely that Nixon and Kissinger, despite their bravado, never imagined anything beyond the elaborate bluff they carried out—a conclusion that cuts against the sensationalistic implications of the book’s title. . . . One way to handle this issue might have been to situate Nixon’s and Kissinger’s thinking about the possibilities of nuclear intimidation within consideration of the two men’s approach to nuclear weapons more generally.

In fact, we do address these counterfactual matters in chapter 1, within the main text, and in the epilogue. The short answer here—but put more bluntly—is that they would likely have used nuclear weapons absent the con- straints of the nuclear taboo; that is, if they had encountered circumstances in which a nuclear strike would have made a difference militarily and not have involved the risk of catastrophic escalation, and if the bureaucratic, political, moral, and international obstacles that constrained Nixon and Kissinger had not existed. But that would have meant a very different world, one in which the use of nuclear weapons against Japan in 1945 and the terrible danger of thermonuclear weapons had not shocked domestic and global sensibilities. Moreover, in chapter 2 and in the epilogue we consider their ideas and approaches to nuclear weapons more generally. We also provide documentary evidence that the Duck Hook plan included options for the use of “tactical” nuclear weapons, although we did not have or gain access to speciﬁc military plans—if there were any. The point to keep in mind about what Lawrence calls our “sensational- ist” book title (Nixon’s Nuclear Specter) is that Nixon and Kissinger wanted to haunt or perturb the minds of North Vietnamese and Soviet leaders with the prospect that the United States might destroy North Vietnam with conven- tional or possibly nuclear weaponry. That was Nixon’s own understanding of the Madman Theory, which was squarely in the tradition of nuclear diplomacy and brinkmanship. We also quote Nixon’s comment in a March 1969 transcribed telephone call with Kissinger in which he said that the point of their threat-making was to “hold up the specter of pressures for hitting the North” as a way of intimidating Hanoi into making diplomatic concessions. Moreover, the JCS Readiness Test in October 1969, whose purpose was, in Kissinger’s word, to “jar” Moscow and Hanoi, was the equivalent of a nuclear alert. Thus the book’s title. Lastly, Lawrence remarks that we told our story with “exceptional density and in a few places, redundancy” and that Nixon’s and Kissinger’s behavior “varied only slightly,” which made, for him, “repetitive reading.” We agree that our account is dense, as beﬁts the topic, although we doubt it is denser than

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the average well-sourced historical account, including some best sellers, and we are unaware of any redundancy on our part. We also agree that Nixon’s and Kissinger’s behavior varied slightly, but we had no control over that. Indeed, the regular patterns in their conduct are central to the story. Again, we thank Jervis and Lawrence for sharing their thoughts about Nixon’s Nuclear Specter. No historical study is ever the ﬁnal word. There is always more to be learned as hitherto closed sources become available for re- search and as investigative techniques change. No doubt there will be future surprises about this fascinating and troubling period in U.S. history. Never- theless, we believe our book establishes the facts and settles the meaning of some key developments during the ﬁrst year of the Nixon administration.

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