Not crazy American's. Crazy right wingers and crazy nixon.
There are no less the 14 instances, at last count, where Nixon threaten to
use nukes in Vietnam itself -- which would have started WWIII and ended
the world.
Nixon was a stubborn jackass who would not admit defeat, much as the right
winger bush will not admit defeat in iraq.
57665-680f-4fe6-8691-29af58b0298e@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>, on
03/01/2008
at 03:21 AM, "ltlee1@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
" <ltlee1@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> said:
>Crazy American's crazy plan.
>No wonder Americans believe all kinds of conspiracy theories, including
>9/11
>was an American or Israeli job.
>This kind of activity also made America the #1 rogue nation of the world.
>http://www.wired.com/print/politics/security/magazine/16-03/ff_nuclearwar
>------------------------
>WIRED MAGAZINE: 16.03
>Politics : Security
>The Nukes of October: Richard Nixon's Secret Plan to Bring Peace to
>Vietnam
>By Jeremi Suri 02.25.08 | 6:00 PM
>Top Secret
>The following do***ents offer additional proof of the plan hatched by
>Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger to end the conflict in Vietnam by
>pretending to launch a nuclear strike on the USSR.
>· Memorandum for the President
>· Memorandum for Colonel Haig
>· Notes on Increased Readiness Posture of October 1969
>On the morning of October 27, 1969, a squadron of 18 B-52s -- massive
>bombers with eight turbo engines and 185-foot wingspans -- began racing
>from the western US toward the eastern border of the Soviet Union. The
>pilots flew for 18 hours without rest, hurtling toward their targets at
>more than 500 miles per hour. Each plane was loaded with nuclear weapons
>hundreds of times more powerful than the ones that had obliterated
>Hiro****ma and Nagasaki.
>The B-52s, known as Stratofortresses, slowed only once, along the coast
>of Canada near the polar ice cap. Here, KC-135 planes --
>essentially 707s filled with jet fuel -- carefully approached the
>bombers. They inched into place for a delicate in-flight connection,
>transferring thousands of gallons from aircraft to aircraft through a
>long, thin tube. One unfortunate ****ft in the wind, or twitch of the
>controls, and a plane filled with up to 150 tons of fuel could crash into
>a plane filled with nuclear ordnance.
>The aircraft were pointed toward Moscow, but the real goal was to change
>the war in Vietnam. During his campaign for the presidency the year
>before, Richard Nixon had vowed to end that conflict. But more than 4,500
>Americans had died there in the first six months of 1969, including 84
>soldiers at the debacle of Hamburger Hill. Meanwhile, the peace
>negotiations in Paris, which many people hoped would end the conflict,
>had broken down. The Vietnamese had declared that they would just sit
>there, conceding nothing, "until the chairs rot." Frustrated, Nixon
>decided to try something new: threaten the Soviet Union with a massive
>nuclear strike and make its leaders think he was crazy enough to go
>through with it. His hope was that the Soviets would be so frightened of
>events spinning out of control that they would strong-
>arm Hanoi, telling the North Vietnamese to start making concessions at
>the negotiating table or risk losing Soviet military sup****t.
>Codenamed Giant Lance, Nixon's plan was the culmination of a strategy of
>premeditated madness he had developed with national security adviser
>Henry Kissinger. The details of this episode remained secret for 35 years
>and have never been fully told. Now, thanks to do***ents released through
>the Freedom of Information Act, it's clear that Giant Lance was the
>leading example of what historians came to call the "madman theory":
>Nixon's notion that faked, finger-on-the-button rage could bring the
>Soviets to heel.
>Nixon and Kissinger put the plan in motion on October 10, sending the US
>military's Strategic Air Command an urgent order to prepare for a
>possible confrontation: They wanted the most powerful thermonuclear
>weapons in the US arsenal readied for immediate use against the Soviet
>Union. The mission was so secretive that even senior military officers
>following the orders -- including the SAC commander himself -- were not
>informed of its true purpose.
>After their launch, the B-52s pressed against Soviet airspace for three
>days. They skirted enemy territory, challenging defenses and taunting
>Soviet aircraft. The pilots remained on alert, prepared to drop their
>bombs if ordered. The Soviets likely knew about the threat as it was
>unfolding: Their radar picked up the planes early in their flight paths,
>and their spies monitored American bases. They knew the bombers were
>armed with nuclear weapons, because they could determine their weight
>from takeoff patterns and fuel use. In past years, the US had kept
>nuclear-armed planes in the air as a possible deterrent (if the Soviets
>blew up all of our air bases in a surprise attack, we'd still be able to
>respond). But in 1968, the Pentagon publicly banned that practice -- so
>the Soviets wouldn't have thought the 18 planes were part of a patrol.
>Secretary of defense Melvin Laird, who opposed the operation, worried
>that the Soviets would either interpret Giant Lance as an attack, causing
>catastrophe, or as a bluff, making Wa****ngton look weak.
>The US had come perilously close to nuclear war before: During the Cuban
>Missile Crisis in 1962, the nation's nuclear forces were poised for
>imminent use in response to Soviet actions. And on several occasions,
>aircraft carrying nuclear weapons had crashed; other times, radar
>operators had misinterpreted flocks of migrating birds as a Soviet first
>strike. October 1969, however, was different. This was the only moment we
>know of when a president decided that it made strategic sense to pretend
>to launch World War III.
>Nixon's madman pose and Giant Lance were based on game theory, a branch
>of mathematics that uses simple calculations and rigorous logic to help
>understand how people make choices -- like whether to surge ahead in
>traffic or whether to respond to a military provocation with a strike of
>one's own. The most famous example in the field is the Prisoner's
>Dilemma: If two criminal suspects are held in separate cells, should they
>keep mum or rat each other out? (Answer: They should keep quiet, but as
>self-interested actors, what they will do is betray each other and both
>go to jail.) In the Cold War, the "games" were much more complicated
>simulations of war and bargaining: Would the Soviets be more likely to
>attack Western Europe if we kept missiles there or if we didn't?
>Kissinger had studied game theory as a young academic and strategic
>theorist at Harvard. In the early '60s, he was part of a group of World
>War II veterans who became the oracles or "whiz kids" of the nuclear age.
>Working at newly formed institutes and think tanks, like the RAND
>Cor****ation, they preached that the proper way to deal with the existence
>of nuclear weapons wasn't to act as if the situation was so grave that
>one couldn't even discuss using them; it was to figure out how to use
>them most effectively. This was the attitude mocked by Stanley Kubrik in
>Dr. Strangelove, in which RAND appears thinly disguised as the Bland
>Cor****ation.
>...
>---------------------------
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