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Contoh Ulasan Artikel

William Burr and Jeffrey P. Kimball, Nixon's Nuclear Spectre: The Secret Alert of 1969,
Madman Diplomacy, and the Vietnam War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2015), XV +
415 pp.

William Burr and Jeffrey Kimball have written what is likely to become the ultimate analysis of
the October 1969 Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) Readiness Test, when the Nixon administration
failed to bring about an early conclusion of the Vietnam War through a bizarre mishmash of
coercive diplomacy and sheer bluff. Both scholars have been working on this subject for a long
time. Kimball has authored several significant contributions to the historiography on the Vietnam
war, while Burr, a senior analyst at the National Security Archive, has an unsurpassed
knowledge of the intricacies and nuances of US nuclear history. They have combined their
expertise to produce an outstanding, minutely reconstructed narrative of the October 1969 secret
nuclear alert and of the events that led up to it. The book is based on extraordinary archival
research, as the authors have examined with painstaking precision all sorts of published and
unpublished materials related to their topic. A crucial policy choice is usually scrutinised from
the different points of view of all the personalities involved, and the documentary evidence is
often supplemented and integrated with interviews with some of the protagonists - or confronted
with their own published version of the events. Such a meticulous effort enables the authors to
offer an almost day-by-day account of the decision-making process in the White House.

As Burr and Kimball abundantly make clear, both Richard Nixon and his National
Security advisor, Henry Kissinger, held a firm belief in the need to back up their diplomacy with
a robust military stance which did not exclude the use of force (or the threat of force). Nixon’s
strategic upbringing in the 1950s, in his capacity as Dwight Eisenhower’s Vice-President,
exposed him to the idea that the US could and should use its nuclear advantage vis-a-vis the
Soviet Union to force upon its adversary the successful conclusion of a crisis. Kissinger might
even have gone a step further, the authors suggest: not only did he believe in the need to
accompany diplomacy with an aggressive demeanour, but he might have been willing to
seriously consider the use of tactical nuclear weapons as an ‘acceptable risk’ to ‘keep an
opponent from a given course’ (p. 63). Together, the President and his key advisor seemed to
have nurtured an unlimited trust in their capacity to strike a strategic posture that would
intimidate their Vietnamese opponents, compel the Soviets and the Chinese to lend a helping
hand, and facilitate a negotiated settlement of the war. More significantly, they both firmly
believed that it was necessary to project an aura of unpredictability about the way the US
intended to use its military force. Nixon, who called this approach ‘the madman theory, relished
the idea of being perceived as erratic, if not slightly unhinged. He repeatedly instructed Kissinger
to portray him as such in his conversations with Soviet and Vietnamese officials. As he told his
Chief of Staff, H.R. Haldeman, ‘they’ll believe any threat of force that Nixon makes because he
is Nixon. [...] We’ll just slip the word to them that “for God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed
with Communism. We can’t restrain him when he’s angry - and he has his hand on the nuclear
button”... and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace’ (p. 53).

To be fair, Nixon and Kissinger had not been dealt a very strong hand of cards. By 1969
the negotiations in Paris had barely started and they seemed unlikely to produce any significant
result any time soon, if ever. In the meantime, the military stalemate was hard to break unless the
administration might consider a dramatic escalation. Such a choice, however, was made very
difficult by both the mounting antiwar sentiments at home and by the international context of the
late 1960s. Strategic nuclear parity with the USSR made it imperative to avoid any unnecessary
risks, while Nixon’s intention to develop better relations with the People’s Republic of China
further constrained his freedom of manoeuvre. Nor was the prospect of simply pulling out (or to
‘bug out, as Nixon seems to have been fond of saying) any more enticing, as it obviously meant
abandoning the fragile South Vietnamese government to its fate. Burr and Kimball rightly
acknowledge the limited options available to the US at the beginning of Nixon’s mandate. Yet,
they highlight the confidence of the new President in his own skill to quickly achieve a
negotiated settlement.

Most of the book is dedicated to how Nixon and Kissinger tried to accomplish this goal.
By March 1969, their strategy began to take shape with the secret bombing of North Vietnamese
bases in Cambodia, which was conceived as the first step of an even more dramatic escalation to
put the North Vietnamese government under increasing pressure. In the following months, plans
for aggressive initiatives were repeatedly drafted and discussed - such as operation DUCK
HOOK, which included both the mining of the Haiphong harbour and new, more violent bomb-
ings of North Vietnam. Interestingly, Burr and Kimball draw a distinction between a more
cautious Nixon and a slightly more bellicose Kissinger: throughout the spring and summer of
1969 Nixon, ‘the proponent of the Madman theory’ (p.204), was ‘intellectually and emotionally
open’ to both the mining and the bombing options, but he was also very much aware of their
high political costs - both domestically and internationally. Concerned about the vacillations of
his boss, Kissinger is portrayed as caught in between the intellectual intention to stiffen him up
and the opportunistic inclination not to distance himself from whatever decision he might make.
By the Fall, Nixon’s political instincts prevailed and he eventually ruled out DUCK HOOK as a
practicable option. Before doing so, however, he settled on an additional measure that had been
discussed in the previous months either as a prelude to the mining option or as an alternative to it
- the nuclear alert.

The last and longest chapter of the book analyses in unprecedented, minute detail the
different steps of the JCS Readiness Test, which lasted almost three weeks and involved US
forces scattered across several continents. It was meant to be ‘unusual and significant’ but ‘not
threatening to the Soviets’, in the words of Kissinger’s aide General Alexander Haig.(p. 267)
The most conspicuous part of the test was the so-called grounding alert: a large number of US
nuclear bombers suspended their routine flights and were put on ground alert to increase their
operational readiness. Equally relevant were a number of other activities, such as the unusual
monitoring of a number of Soviet ships and above all the GIANT LANCE operation: on October
27 (an ill-chosen date, one would think, for running any nuclear risks) the Strategic Air
Command conducted an airborne alert by which several nuclear-armed B-52s continuously flew
over the Arctic.

It did not work. While the authors point out that we still lack the unrestricted access to the
Soviet and Vietnamese documentation which would allow a full assessment of the impact of the
alert, they firmly believe that what is available is already enough to support their conclusion.
Months of endless deliberations eventually produced an elaborate show of force which, as far as
the authors have been able to ascertain, did not yield the slightest result. While the White House
seemed to have hoped for ‘a big break’, (p. 288), the North Vietnamese did not move an inch
from their negotiating stance, nor did Moscow feel compelled to put any additional pressure on
them to do so. In the end, Nixon and Kissinger realised that their expectations to quickly wrap up
the war were misplaced and resigned themselves to the ‘long route’ - it would take another three
years - and a large number of US and Vietnamese casualties - before all US forces were
withdrawn from Vietnam and a shaky peace agreement achieved.

The book has to be commended for many reasons. Aside from the magisterial archival
research, Burr and Kimball provide an important contribution to our understanding of what
Nixon intended to achieve in Vietnam. Students of the war are familiar with the never-ending
debate between the ‘peace with honour’ and the ‘decent interval’ theses - i.e. whether Nixon
intended to achieve a solution to the war which would grant the Thieu government in Saigon a
reasonable chance to survive after all US troops had been withdrawn, or whether he merely
wanted to postpone the inevitable victory of the North, so that it could be blamed on his suc-
cessor. The authors convincingly show that both Nixon and Kissinger were persuaded from the
start that the war could not be won militarily and that achieving a negotiated settlement was the
best they could hope for. They also point out, however, that most of the available evidence they
have collected supports the ‘decent interval’ interpretation: neither Nixon nor Kissinger held
much faith in the capacity of South Vietnam to hold out for a long time. They repeatedly
discussed what would happen to the Thieu government after all US forces had gone: at best, they
concluded, it would be given a slim chance to survive. As Nixon himself told Haig in October
1972, ‘Call it cosmetics if you want. This has got to be done in a way that will give South
Vietnam a chance to survive. It doesn’t have to survive forever. It’s got to survive for a
reasonable time. Then everybody can say “goddamn we did our part”’ (p. 317).

Besides being a valuable contribution to the history of the US involvement in Vietnam,

the book offers a number of insights on some current US foreign policy conundrums. The
agonising debate in the Nixon White House about how to ensure the survival of the allied
government in Saigon without committing American troops to an endless permanence on its soil
is clearly reminiscent of the endless discussions about the US presence in Afghanistan or in the
broader Middle East. Readers who may want to draw lessons from the book for contemporary
issues, however, need not stop here. The sinister huffing and puffing from the present occupant
of the White House, as well as his firm conviction in his own capacity to intimidate his
opponents, bear an eerie resemblance to Nixon’s own faith in his madman theory. Given
President Trump’s reported reluctance to read books other than the ones he writes himself, one
would hope that at least some of his better educated advisers spend some time reading Burr and
Kimball’s work to reflect on the effectiveness of such an approach, as well as on the risks it
involves.