JOHNSON EDGES CLOSER TO ATOMIC WAR
The Pentagon has widened the air war in North Vietnam by deliberately bombing the port facilities at Campha and Haiphong for the first time. According to U.S. military sources in Saigon, these attacks on the docks were made in response to those who have been calling for some means of closing the channel short of mining it.
Johnson decided to escalate the air strikes after a prolonged controversy between the Joint Chiefs of Staff and certain members of his administration who resisted further extension of the bombings.
The raids came only two weeks after Defense Secretary McNamara had told the Senate Preparedness Subcommittee that bombing of the port area was too risky because Soviet, Chinese and other Communist bloc vessels might be hit. Attacks on such targets, he testified, run “the risk of direct confrontation with Communist China or the Soviet Union" and these dangers outweigh the military desirability of striking then.
The overriding of McNamara's arguments indicates that the president is now bent on maximizing the air war even though that involves greater risk of conflict with China and the Soviet Union. Behind and beyond this decision to press ahead regardless of consequences looms the specter of the nuclear mushroom cloud.
General Curtis Le May, former head of the air force, who has been demanding total destruction of the port of Haiphong and all installations allowing North Vietnam to receive supplies from abroad, is also one of the most vociferous advocates of wiping out China under the steamy slogan of "let's nuke the Chinks."
The idea of an atomic war is so ghastly, irrational and inhuman that many people incline to confuse their spontaneous revulsion against such a possibility with its rejection by the U.S. military strategists. However, the Pentagon has prepared contingency plans for nuclear warfare which can be set into motion whenever the command comes from the supreme head of the armed forces in the White House.
Its occupant has considered resorting to atomic weapons at several junctures over the past fifteen years. Kennedy, the most liberal postwar Democratic president, was ready to bring nuclear weapons to bear in the 1962 confrontation with the Soviet Union in the Caribbean.
On September 10 C.L.Sulzberger, diplomatic correspondent of the New York Times, pointed out that top men at the Pentagon were eager to open their nuclear arsenal early in 1954 when the French were defeated at Dienbienphu. They not only sought to limit the victory of the Vietnamese but to wage preventive war against the entire Communist bloc. Here is what Sulzberger wrote in the September 10 issue of the New York Times:
"Admiral Radford, Eisenhower's Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and profoundly influential on Secretary of State Dulles, wanted to intervene with tactical atomic bombs to help France at Dienbienphu. But, according to men then prominent in American officialdom, his real hope was to get the United States engaged first in Indochina, then in China, in order to provoke a preventive war against the latter before it became a great power.
"Radford realized that more than Chiang Kai-shek's troops on Taiwan would be needed to crush Communist China. This meant the use of American military force. Radford reckoned that if the Soviet Union were to intervene in such a war it would have to be hit with thermonuclear weapons and the Strategic Airforce. At that time Russia was just edging into the superweapons race and had no long-range delivery systen.
"The Radford theory was that the relative advantage of the U.S.A. was fading, that the Russians were catching up, and that China itself would eventually be a threat. What he really wanted was to get involved in a preventive war against China -- and even perhaps Russia -- without letting the American people know."
Eisenhower vetoed Radford's course and turned instead toward the Geneva accords which cut Vietnam in two and led to the present situation.
In the light of the new developments, is there much doubt that what the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was urging more than thirteen years ago within the Republican administration is again being projected by the nation's top generals within the present Democratic administration? That would account for the warnings that have come from Senator Mansfield and other highly placed figures in Washington over the past two months.
The ominous extension of the air attacks in North Vietnam, following the flights of planes over Chinese territory, is fraught with tremendous dangers, especially when this reckless policy brings the U.S. imperialists no closer to victory in Vietnam than it has done up to now.