3,100 were produced from 1963 to 1967.
It could be carried by the F-4 Phantom II, A-6 Intruder, A-4 Skyhawk, SH-3 Sea King and other aircraft.
Dikes, dams, bridges, roads, tunnels, caves and other targets could be bombed with these low-yield weapons.
are we still fighting that war?
Much simpler, lower cost strategy would have been to invade Cambodia and capture the entirety of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. One northern general stated that if the US had done that, the war would have been over in 6 months. It’s all about supply lines.
Could have done it from orbit...it's the only way to make sure.
Yes. We were fighting a war our leaders were unwilling to win. One nuke between N Vietnam and China would have done the trick. Our enemies learned we weren't willing to use our own weapons. We still aren't.
I don’t know about Vietnam but they sure would have come in handy in Korea.When the (insert racial slur here) started pouring over the border a couple of small,well placed,nukes on the *Korean* side of the border along with the public announcement that “there are plenty more where *those* came from” would have been very effective.
We needed something like a bunker buster that could cave in tunnels. 2/3 of the NVA lived ungerground. We needed to fight an insergant war like an insergant war. This was NOT WWII
Davy, Davy Crockett, king of the wild frontier...
Wouldn’t have done any good.
After the Demonrats took-out RMN, they snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in VN.
I don't know, but they would have been wizard at Tora Bora.
We weren’t just fighting the North Vietnamese but the Soviet Union and Red China. Any use of nukes on our part would have prompted a similar response from North Vietnam’s two major patrons.
From a purely military POV this would no doubt have been highly effective.
However, we were engaged in a cold war in which Vietnam (and Korea) were merely sub-theaters.
Maintaining plausible status as “the good guys” was critical to our eventual victory in that war. Our deciding to use nukes to deal with an essentially irritating rather than existential threat would have dealt a severe blow to that plausibility.
It also ignores the distinct possibility of escalation by the other side.
We got through the Cold War without it going nuclear. We really shouldn’t pretend today that things couldn’t have gone very wrong indeed. Hundreds of millions, possibly billions, of people could have died.
Anywho, would we have wanted to give our implicit approval to the use of nukes in counter-insurgent warfare? If so, on what logical basis could we have objected to the Soviets later using them in Afghanistan?
I have always thought we should have taken all the good Viet Namese and put them out to sea in a single kayak, then nuke the entire country, sink the kayak and wait for radiation to subside and pave it so it could be a parking lot for SE Asia.
For obvious reasons, details of this deployment are super-sketchy. I only know about it from collecting anecdotes about how difficult it was to transport the equipment sets, which were not designed for forward deployment. There was a similar (confirmed) nuclear deployment in S. Korea in the same timeframe. A battery consisted of 18-24 missiles. I've got no details on warheads equipped, exact timeframes or length of deployment.
And to answer the titular question, IMHO nukes would have been next to useless in 'Nam. The whole issue in 'Nam was that we were fighting a guerilla war with a decentralized enemy. There wasn't any target anywhere worth wasting a nuke on.
Lloyd Bentsen urged the use of nukes in Korea. The idea was rejected, in part because of the problems caused if the North Koreans did not surrender.
We had already destroyed every dam, dike, canal, power node, and power plant, so there was no guarantee that they’d quit if we dropped The Big One on Pyongyang.
And if we dropped it and they did not surrender, there goes the “nuclear deterrent”, since there was an example of it plain not working.
Likewise nuking something in VN, it was unlikely that they’d just quit, and highly likely that they’d gain more global sympathy and more UN help. And every lefty government in the world would report a rash of radiation-induced problems, money being the antidote (look at the very effective DU penetrator. The enemy, rather than spend millions on a better-armored tank, spent 100,00 on a publicity campaign to get us to stop deploying them).
McArthur was fired for the strong push to use them in Korea.
We got away with using them once, and for a variety of reasons. Use ‘em again, even the small ones, and a precedent is set.
I’m not saying it would be bad, but it would change the worlds geopolitical culture regarding the use of nukes.
BTW, this site is pretty cool. It shows just how little physical damage nukes actually do (compared to what most people think they do):
http://www.carloslabs.com/node/20
1. Nukes are impossible to use without harming innocent bystanders/noncombatants.
2. Using nukes would have turned our allies even further from us - and we had very few standing with us to begin with in Vietnam.
3. Horrible terrain for using nukes: too many compartments/obstacles/hill masses to employ the blast/burn/ irradiate parts of the weapons.
4.Would have affected the US and allied forces almost as much as the target, as far as downrange radiation contamination goes. Not that it would have influenced our Defense Department too much at the time - we are still "enjoying" the poisonous aftereffects of the deforestation plans. We were just an expendible item to them, like Kleenex, back then.
In short, no way, Jose...
No.
Vietnam was fought about the same way I fight fire ants in my yard.
I can kill every hill in the yard tho it takes a lot of effort but then in a few days they will re-appear.
Had we bombed the starch out of that area (say 10 miles N-S of Hwy. 9) and denuded the forests with Agent White previous to our attack, results would have been different and we would not have had to spray/bomb such a vast area of SE Asia.
If you study this Op, you will find the NVA fought like Tigers. They had to! It was their jugular vein. Casualty reports vary, however, many state 20K NVA and 1/2 that many ARVN KIA during this 2 month Op....
Not advocating war, simply saying, in the long run, if we had to go in, we would have sustained far fewer KIA/WIA.