man of war vietnam weapons cache location

Starting in 1969, B-52 raids demolished vast areas in North and South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Operation Rolling Thunder, begun in March 1965, continued for three years and dropped more bombs on Vietnam than had been dropped on all of Europe in WWII. interests, prestige, and security.Īs the war escalated, the United States was willing to maintain policies of great destructiveness. officials repeatedly declared that the United States could not tolerate the loss of Southeast Asia to communism, and that the war was vital for U.S. During the ten year military commitment to South Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, the United States sustained large losses in men, money and materiel at tremendous political cost. In Vietnam, the United States chose to lose a humiliating and destructive war against a small, nonnuclear adversary while all its nuclear weapons remained on the shelf. Of all cases of Cold War conflict in which the United States could have used nuclear weapons, the Vietnam War provides one of the strongest tests of a taboo against their first use. State been greater never was it less likely to be invoked. She can be contacted at 65 or had the military gap between a superpower and a nonnuclear

Nina Tannenwald is Joukowsky Family Research Assistant Professor at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, and is currently a Carnegie Scholar on leave at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. The chapter on the Vietnam War is the most extensive discussion to date of the issue of nuclear weapons in the Vietnam War. The analysis draws on extensive primary source material, including declassified documents and materials obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, as well as personal memoirs and interviews. The book argues that a nuclear taboo has developed in global politics, which has helped to delegitimate nuclear weapons as weapons of war. president and his advisers thought about the use of nuclear weapons in times of crisis, and analyzes military, political, and normative factors that constrained resort to their use. This paper, “Nuclear Weapons and the Vietnam War,” is a chapter from Nina Tannenwald’s forthcoming book The Nuclear Taboo: The United States and the Nonuse of Nuclear Weapons Since 1945 (from Cambridge University Press). (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press) The United States and the Nonuse of Nuclear Weapons Since 1945

Man of war vietnam weapons cache location