In case Nixon’s bombing and threats failed to bring the National Liberation Front (NLF) and the North to heel, he and Kissinger prepared to deliver a crippling blow. Nixon had Admiral Thomas Moorer, the chief of naval operations, secretly draft the plan for Operation Duck Hook without Laird’s knowledge.25 Kissinger instructed the special NSC committee charged with evaluating the plan, “I refuse to believe that a little fourth-rate power like North Vietnam does not have a breaking point…. It shall be the assignment of this group to examine the option of a savage, decisive blow against North Vietnam. You start without any preconceptions at all.”26
Roger Morris, research coordinator for the planning group, saw plans targeting two sites in the North for nuclear airbursts. He noted, “Savage was a word that was used again and again… a savage unremitting blow on North Vietnam to bring them around.”27 Haldeman told Special Counsel to the President Charles Colson that “Kissinger had lobbied for nuclear options in the spring and fall of 1969.” Laird said the nuclear threat had been “always… an option” for Kissinger.28 Even without nuclear weapons, Duck Hook would be brutal beyond comparison. Options included invading North Vietnam, saturation bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong, mining Haiphong harbor, and bombing North Vietnam’s dikes to destroy its food supply. Kissinger met secretly with the Vietnamese in Paris in early August and conveyed the planned ultimatum: “If by November 1 no major progress has been made toward a solution, we will be compelled—with great reluctance—to take measures of the greatest consequences.”29 On October 2, Kissinger sent Nixon a top secret memo stating, “we must be prepared to play out whatever string necessary…. To achieve its full effect on Hanoi’s thinking, the action must be brutal.”30
Kissinger’s late-September meeting with Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin was interrupted by a prearranged phone call from Nixon, after which Kissinger alerted Dobrynin, “It was a pity that all our efforts to negotiate had failed. The President had told me in his call that the train had just left the station and was now headed down the track.”31
Fortunately, the train pulled back into the station. For a number of reasons, including opposition by Laird and Rogers, concerns about effectiveness, growing antiwar sentiment, and major upcoming antiwar protests, Nixon called Duck Hook off. “The only chance for my ultimatum to succeed,” he reasoned, “was to convince the Communists that I could depend on solid support at home if they decided to call my bluff. However the chances I would actually have that support were becoming increasingly slim [given] signs of a new level of intensity in the antiwar movement.”32 He opted to convey his toughness another way.
On October 13, 1969, Nixon put the U.S. military on secret nuclear alert. Nuclear-armed SAC bombers were dispersed to military bases, awaiting the order to attack. Thirty-two B-58s, 144 B-52s, and 189 KC-135 refueling tankers were readied. Nixon was signaling the Soviets that they had better dramatically increase pressure on Hanoi to negotiate.33 Laird thought it a futile gesture vis-à-vis Vietnam and a potentially reckless one if the Soviets misread U.S. intentions. Undeterred, the United States escalated further on October 25, loading more aircraft with nuclear weapons and placing them on SAC runways. The following day, SAC began flying nuclear-armed B-52s over the polar icecap, taking them ominously close to the Soviet Union. Largely unknown to U.S. leaders, at the same moment the Soviet Union and China were on the verge of war over a border dispute. The Soviets had even sounded out the United States’ willingness to collaborate on a preemptive strike against Chinese nuclear facilities, much as Kennedy and Johnson had sounded out Soviet willingness a decade earlier. China had mobilized nearly a million soldiers and was prepared to respond with nuclear weapons to a Soviet attack. The Soviets might have interpreted Nixon’s provocation not as a signal regarding Vietnam but as a real attack in coordination with China.
Morris later acknowledged that Duck Hook had been a harebrained scheme: “The Chiefs had been trotting this crap out for years. It was one more quick fix in a war which had no quick fixes…. It was a military and political fiasco which had taken on reality in… the Pentagon, where, to put it kindly, some not-very-gifted minds were applying military solutions to these problems.”34 Even hawkish Edward Teller found the nuclear option “irrational.” He later told an interviewer, “Only a few idiots—and they really were idiots—suggested the use of nuclear weapons in Vietnam.”35
Nixon went out of his way to suppress attendance at the October and November antiwar marches. The White House spread rumors of Communist involvement. Prowar groups orchestrated by the White House suddenly popped up, condemning the planned rallies. Infiltration of antiwar groups intensified. Antiwar members of Congress were targeted. The beleaguered president even tried to placate the antiwar movement by announcing further troop withdrawals, temporarily suspending draft calls, and firing Lewis Hershey, the despised head of the Selective Service Board, whose announcement that draft boards would review protesters’ records had made him a target of activists’ wrath.
Despite this unprecedented effort to suppress attendance, some 2 million protesters gathered in cities and towns across the nation on October 15. Nixon recalled, “Although publicly I continued to ignore the raging antiwar controversy, I had to face the fact that it had probably destroyed the credibility of my ultimatum to Hanoi.”36
American society became so polarized around the war and other issues that some people began speaking of a civil war. College campuses were the front lines in the battle. Demonstrations, rallies, and strikes erupted on hundreds of campuses. Government and industry spokespersons set foot on campuses at their own peril.
Activists condemned the unethical use of science to further the country’s military agenda. Scientists, having helped spark the antiwar movement, were often in the forefront of such protests. The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the nation’s largest scientific body, with more than 100,000 members, was the first professional organization to pass an antiwar resolution in December 1965. The resolution stated:
Prolongation of the Vietnamese war, with its increasing danger of universal catastrophe, threatens not only the lives of millions, but the humanitarian values and goals which we are striving to maintain…. Beside this concern which we share with all citizens, we bear a special responsibility as scientists to point out the large costs of war for the continued vigor of scientific research. Like all scholarship, the sciences cannot fully flourish, and may be badly damaged, in a society which gives an increasing share of its resources to military purposes.37
Scientists’ opposition only intensified in subsequent years. In January 1966, twenty-nine scientists from Harvard, MIT, and other nearby institutions condemned the United States’ use of chemical agents to destroy crops. The statement, presented by Harvard biochemist John Edsall, decried the “barbarous” use of such an indiscriminate weapon. “The fact that we are now resorting to such methods,” the scientists charged, “shows a shocking deterioration of our moral standards. These attacks are also abhorrent to the general standards of civilized mankind, and their use will earn us hatred throughout Asia and elsewhere.”38 The AAAS urged McNamara to stop the spraying, and Johnson received a petition from some five thousand scientists, including many Nobel laureates, demanding that he do the same.