Would you have nuked North Vietnam?

[A18]

I think it was a great idea

[they don't love you like i love you]

No, I'd call up Ho Chi Minh and tell him that once all American POWs were released I'd hand him South Vietnam on a silver platter.

[AuH2O]

Of course, if I couldn't just avoid the war to begin with.

[David S]

No. Why should we be involved in the internal politics of third world countries on the other side of the world? At the time of the war it was claimed that if we didn't intervene the countries of Asia would fall to communism like a row of dominos and that the communists would soon be at our shore attacking us. Well  we didn't win that war and neither of those things happened. So our intervention was pointless and the effort cost us over 50,000 American lives and many billions of dollars.

Yes we could have nuked the country and killed millions of innocent people but how would we be better off today?

[migrendel]

I see no reason to make an already disastrous affair infinitely worse.

[Erc]

The war in Vietnam wasn't an isolated event...it was clearly tied in with the rest of the Cold War, a fact which Johnson recognized.  He feared that if he invaded North Vietnam, the Chinese would intervene (just as they did in Korea), and that things could get messy and go nuclear.

He couldn't abandon S. Vietnam either (as that would have been politically unfeasible)...so he took the middle course, which was the worst thing he could have done...sat there and fight a pointless guerilla war on the Vietcong's terms.

Goldwater, in my opinion, would have handled it much better.  He'd probably have gone to the North Vietnamese and said: stop backing the Vietcong or you die.  And if they refused, he'd have invaded.  And since Goldwater was a bit trigger-happy when it came to the nuke, everyone else would have been very reluctant to get involved...

"They said that if I voted for Goldwater, we'd have a war in Vietnam.  Well, I voted for Goldwater, and that's what I got."

[Jake]

I would've given the commanders in that theater the tools they needed to destroy the Vietcong or if this is later, get the North Vietnamese to surrender.

[Gustaf]

Attacking a soverign country posing no threat with nuclear weapons is very unjustifiable. The US would be in an infinitely worse position than it is diplomatically if that had been done. Imagine the anti-war movement squared, at the very least.

[minionofmidas]

Expect a nuclear winter.

[Beet]

very unjustifiable.

Like anybody cares about that anymore.

[they don't love you like i love you]

The best thing to do would be to pull all American troops out, end all American involvement there meaning no more American lives or money wasted, and just let the Vietcong destroy the extremely corrupt and repressive South Vietnamese regime which didn't deserve our support. South Vietnam was not worth a single American live or single American dollar to save.

[minionofmidas]

Some beautiful pussy, though.

[dazzleman]

No.  But if it was worth fighting there (which is debatable), then I would have brought the war to the enemy.

It makes no sense to fight a war in your ally's territory, on the enemy's terms.  That's totally retarded, but that's what LBJ did in Vietnam.  If it's too costly to take the war to the enemy, then it's not worth fighting.

Even consistent bombing of the north, absent an invasion, would have been preferable to the way we fought the war.  But there's no reason that our ally should have had to fight a purely defensive war on their own territory while the north was sacrosanct.

[jokerman]

Yes, definitly.

[Hitchabrut]

No, it couldn't go by in a vacuum. If we did, goodbye Los Angeles...