Did we really have to nuke vietnam in order to win?

Question

I think we could have won without the nuke. Don't you think?

I do mean korea! Not Japan!

Answer 1

Please tell me that you don't think me "nuked" Vietnam.

Nice to see that you failed 8th grade history

Answer 2

Didn't nuke Vietnam; the only time nuclear weapons have been used in conflcit was against Japan in 1945. My own thoughts are, better to have gotten it out of the way then -- when nuclear weapons were relatively primitive -- than wait around for some crazy leader to see "what nuclear weapons can do" now that the technology is more than 1000 times more destructive!

Answer 3

There were lots of blown opportunities. My opinion has always been that we could have won with almost anybody except Johnson in the White House. Nixon came into office on a Vietnamization platform, and even then still had opportunities. And cutting off funding to the South Vietnamese after we left was just criminal. On the other hand, I'm not sure it would have been so great for the Vietnamese if we had won. It still would have left a bunch of corrupt nominal Catholics running a Buddhist country.

Answer 4

The only failing of Vietnam was Lyndon Baines Johnson. This sorry blight on American history lost his appetite for war, following the TET offensive. The VC and N.Vietnamese had lost eighty thousand troops during Tet, and they were all but defeated.
General Westmoreland went to Johnson for additional troops to put the N. Vietnamese out of their misery and Johnson turned him down and told him they were taking a new approach to the war, and that was the peace talks held in Paris, for the next seven years.

Answer 5

Absolutely -- we were not defeated in Vietnam, the American people lost their will to continue the fight, and we pulled out.

It is documented fact that the precision bombing of supply lines in the North near the end of the war drove the North Vietnamese to the bargaining table with us. Only after we had withdrawn our troops, and then the perfidious fellow-travellers in Congress reneged on the promise to support the South Vietnamese was the North finally able to invade and overrun the South.

Goldwater suggested nukes to create a radioactive no-man's-land along the border, but it wouldn't have worked, because the NVA was using the Ho Chi Minh trail through Laos and Combodia to outflank the inter-Vietnamese "border".

Answer 6

I am guessing you mean Japan since that is the only time the US has used nuclear weapons against another country.

They had plans for the invasion of Japan, casualties rates were expected to be in the millions for the US.

It was expected that most of the civilian population of Japan would have fought to the death against the US since they believed that the emperor was a living god and that if he wanted them to fight then they should.

So the use of nuclear weapons to attempt to disuade them from continueing the war was seen as a more human route than simply invading Japan getting 1 million of our own people killed, and then having to kill the entire population.

Sorry but using nuclear weapons was the more humane thing to do given the situation.

Answer 7

Ouch John Q...as a republican here, just wondering which tent flap you crawled under.

Think it might be a little bit late...but gonna mention it anyway...what say...you try just a weeee bit of schoolin' before you open your mouth about dropin' the big one on Viet Nam....shhh...don't want the rest of the world to find out about bombin' that place....

Damn, you can't even get it right in additional details. Now you mean Korea????????? JOHN Q. IT WAS JAPAN that was NUKED!!!

Answer 8

I was unaware that a nuke was dropped on Vietnam...damn public schools, they don't teach you s h i t!

Nagasaki and Hiroshima are the only cities a nuke has been dropped on during a war time situation as far as I'm aware.

Answer 9

As many people have previously said, a nuclear weapon wasn't used during the Viet Nam conflict, it was used on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima (Aug 6 1945) and Nagasaki (Aug 9 1945) to bring about a forcible end of World War 2 and the Pacific battles.

Having read a little on the Viet Nam war, I thought that the US did well to survive quite so far into the conflict before its withdrawal. You don't seem to quite understand the conflict itself so heres a bit of a history lesson - did you fall asleep in yours?
It ran from 1959 to 1975, between the communist North Vietnam armies and the Republic of Vietnam armies. In effect, North Vietnam was aided by the Soviet Union (now Russia), and the Republic joined in battle by the US. You have to be remotely aware of the global Democracy vs. Communism debate right? The war itself ended following the capture of the Republic of Vietnam's capital - Saigon - by the Communist north, the withdrawal of the US troops and the reunification of Viet Nam.

In effect, I don't think that the US ever won in Viet Nam. It saw that support for the war was waning because of the high casualties sustained in the conflict by the US against the highly specialised in jungle warfare communist army, and passing of the 1974 Foreign Assistance act rendered all support in Viet Nam for the Republic south illegal. The troops were brought home, leaving Viet Nam to fall. The war involved some biological and chemical warfare (look up Agent Orange on this one), so perhaps without spraying thousands of gallons of pesticides on communist troops the US could have suffered further devastating losses.

Have you ever seen Platoon? I HIGHLY recommend this film for its take on Viet Nam.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platoon_(movie)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091763/
Trailer (if a little old:) - http://mymovies.net/player/default.asp?filmid=841&url=/film/fid841/trailers/trid917/wm/bb.asx

Answer 10

Vietnam was not "nuked", maybe you need to get off YA and read a book or two.

Answer 11

Umm...we didn't use nuclear weapons on Vietnam. Japan is the only country that we have ever used them on, and then it was a last resort.