Commentary

I have perused the JASON report evaluating possible use of nuclear weapons against North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces in the Vietnam War during the 1960s, and also examined what materials I have in my files at home that bear on the 1966 JASON summer study during which the report was generated and searched my memory carefully. I caution readers about memory, however. Events, even those that were vital and important at the time, do tend to fade, collapse into each other, and get distorted in the recollection after nearly 40 years, so I cannot guarantee that all I am about to note is totally accurate. But the memories from that period are vivid, still, so I hope what I am about to recount is not too far off from what actually transpired.

First, it is worth a note on how the study was generated, and describing my involvement. As is well known from other sources, JASON was at the time a self-starting organization (I assume they still are, but I have had no contact with them for at least two decades). They were an organization highly respected in the Defense Department, and their scientific inputs on key issues were much valued. At the time, they were supported by ARPA (the Advanced Research Projects Agency, now DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), which set aside an amount of money to cover their activities for each year. Administrative support and technical backup were provided by the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), a federally funded studies and analyses center under contract to the Defense Department. Typically, the JASONs were briefed at a few meetings during the academic year on major issues and problems the Defense Department faced that the Department judged could benefit from sound scientific advice and in which JASON expressed interest, and they decided, on the basis of the briefings and their judgments about where they were interested and could make a useful contribution, what they would work on during a summer study that would last about 6 weeks.

At the time of this summer study, I had just returned to IDA from a two-year leave of absence during which I was Special Assistant for Counterinsurgency in the Defense Department, reporting to Harold Brown, then the Director of Defense Research and Engineering. My major responsibility during those two years had been the establishment of a research and development program to support the efforts of U.S. forces in Southeast Asia. I had just returned to IDA in January or so of 1966, when JASON started to think about their next summer’s work.

U.S. participation in the Vietnam War having been in full motion by then, and the university community having been rising in protest against the war effort, the JASONs thought they had a contribution to make. Specifically, as I recall, they were troubled, as were many Americans, about the seemingly endless bombing of North Vietnam and whether it was accomplishing anything. They hoped that they could help the nation find a way out of the stalemate that the bombing represented, and thought to use the coming summer study (1966) to explore means to do that. With the help of George Kistiakowsky, they inquired of Secretary of Defense McNamara whether that would be welcome, and he agreed. John McNaughton, then the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, was an important contributor to Mr. McNamara’s development of the war strategy, and I believe that he likely acted as an intermediary in this exchange, as we briefed him on the study results afterward, before briefing Mr. McNamara.

Since I had recent experience and association with the management of the war effort in he DOD, I was a natural IDA staff member to work with JASON, to provide them technical support and input on the study. The study involved a preliminary meeting during the Spring of 1966 at a girl’s school in Massachusetts, where the general plan for the summer study (which took place at the University of California, Santa Barbara campus, in a dormitory building that was empty for the summer) and its topics were worked out. As I recall, there were to be three sub-studies: one, evaluating whether the bombing strategy, and the war of attrition strategy more broadly, were accomplishing what they were intended to accomplish; a second, whether it would be possible to devise a barrier to infiltration of people and supplies from North Vietnam to the battlegrounds in the South, and thereby ease the pressure to bomb the supply sources in the North itself; and a third, whether it made sense to think about using nuclear weapons to close off the supply routes, which had to go through a few difficult mountain passes to reach the Ho Chi Minh trail through Laos over which the supplies and people moved.

I don’t remember much of the genesis of the nuclear weapons sub-study (I will return to that in a moment). My attention was given to the other two aspects of the overall study. In support of the question of whether the strategy was working, I do remember contributing a short paper that showed that we could not win the war of attrition that was our fundamental strategy because, since they initiated most of the actions, the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong could control their attrition and keep their recruitment in balance with it and with the size of their military age cohort. Most of my attention throughout the study was given to the barrier issue, however, since I was familiar with all of the programs and machinery that could be brought to bear on it. I remember that I spent an afternoon, at the girls’ school, with 5 of the JASONs (Fred Zachariassen, George Zweig, Henry Kendall, and two others whom I don’t remember), during which we devised the basic scheme for what later became the “Air Supported Anti-Infiltration Barrier,” reported in IDA report S-255 of that name. Then, at the summer study main session, I spent most of my time on that issue, and helped write the report describing the supply routes and the proposed barrier system design in detail. (I thought I had a copy of this report, but can’t find it. I believe it was declassified about the time I retired from IDA in 1988. The barrier report’s conclusions are described briefly in the Pentagon Papers (pp 506-509 of the Bantam Books paperback edition), but the richness of the JASON detective work that scoped out the nature of the Ho Chi Minh trail system for the first time, so that the barrier could be designed to work against it, is left out of the Pentagon Papers’ brief excerpt.).

I’m not sure whether the issue of using nuclear weapons in Vietnam was raised by Mr. McNamara or Mr. McNaughton in the preliminary discussions, but there had been enough talk around the Pentagon about using such weapons that they may very well have raised the issue as part of their interest in agreeing to support JASON’s proposed study. In the circumstances of how this study began and was defined, I can’t imagine that JASON would have volunteered to study that issue unless it had been spoken of seriously in some venue that made it a topic of concern. Knowing how he worked, I would judge that if he raised it, Mr. McNamara would have said, “There has been some talk about using tactical nuclear weapons to close the passes into Laos; tell me what you think of the idea.”

The passes had been viewed as especially troublesome. As I recall, the Mu Gia pass, through which a large fraction of the reinforcement and supply moved, was said to have a roadway carved out of a steep hillside, much like the road through Independence Pass southeast of Aspen, Colorado. This was a particularly difficult bombing target for the technology of the day, and although the general area of the pass was bombed heavily and incessantly, it was hard to hit and collapse the road itself. The North Vietnamese rapidly repaired any damage and the flow of people and supplies through it was almost uninterrupted. Frustrations such as this, combined with the sparse population in such areas, made the passes appear to be especially attractive targets for tactical nuclear weapons.

In that connection, I do remember at first hand that there had been not infrequent talk among some of the military people involved in planning the war effort, with whom I had contact, that “a few nukes” dropped on strategic locations, such as the Mu Gia pass through the mountainous barrier along the North Vietnamese-Laotian border, would close that pass (and others) for good. That, it was postulated, would force the North Vietnamese supply route into the southern part of North Vietnam and across the Demilitarized Zone dividing North from South, and along the coastal plain and waters, where it would be much more accessible to counter-action. The subject came up often enough in my casual conversations about the war effort, although it was aside from my main effort of building an R&D program, that it could have originated at a high enough level to have captured the Secretary’s attention. But at this point you would have to consider that speculation on my part.

Although I was not involved in the Dyson group’s study, I did hear their briefing-it was the JASON pattern that all sub-studies were briefed to the entire JASON summer study group at the end of the study period. I remember being struck by the main conclusion, that if we started down that route we risked being hurt much more than the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong, because I had been uneasy about the easy talk of using nukes right along.

The only thing I remember from the outbrief with John McNaughton was his unhappiness with the result of the study of the bombing and war of attrition strategy, that the data on enemy casualties and infiltration were so chancy and uncertain that he could not judge, based on those data, whether he had a war-winning strategy or not. (His reaction was not, “I’d better rethink our strategy,” but rather, “you haven’t been able to prove I have a winning strategy,” implying that the study had failed. That kind of response sticks in the memory.)

I was also in the debriefing of Secretary McMamara, with George Kistiakowsky and some of the other JASONs (I believe, Bill Nierenburg, Murph Goldburger, and Hal Lewis, for sure, and also Johnny Foster, who had by then become DDR&E (Director of Defense Research and Engineering), and possibly one or two others whom I don’t remember now). My recollection of that is, that the Secretary expressed great interest in the air supported barrier idea, since, as he remarked, all the expenditures on the bombing campaign, and R&D toward being able to bomb in all weather, did not seem to be producing results. The barrier idea was something new he could try, and he indicated that he was inclined to do so. I later flew up with him to attend a meeting at the Cape Cod house of Jerrold Zacharias, with some of the JASONs who had worked on the barrier part of the study, and after much discussion of possible North Vietnamese countermeasures he indicated that he liked the idea well enough to risk implementing it, even though we had told him it had about a one in twenty chance of success. (For a somewhat hostile rundown on this meeting and the background to it, see Science, Vol. 179, Feb. 2, 1973, pp 459 ff. There is a good description of the background to JASON in this article, however.)

I don’t remember any discussion of the nuclear weapons issue at the Pentagon outbrief or at the later meeting, although I can’t imagine that it didn’t come up, since it was part of the overall report. That lapse may be in part due to the way the Pentagon briefing went. As we started, prepared to brief him on all the study results, Mr. McNamara cut us off and commented that he had read the report, and he had some questions, whereupon he opened it to pages he had marked and we talked mainly about the barrier idea. So, if he had simply absorbed the results of the nuclear weapon part of the study and had no special questions about it, it may not even have come up.

I do remember, however, that when I returned to the Pentagon in the Fall of 1966, after Johnny Foster twisted my arm to come back and manage the ARPA program of R&D in Southeast Asia (known as Project Agile, and, at the time, “Remote Area Conflict,” which I changed to “Overseas Defense Research,” since the conflict was not remote for the people involved in it), I heard no talk at all of using nuclear weapons in the Vietnam conflict. Although I don’t know, I think it is reasonable to conclude from that that, if consideration had been given to the idea before the study, Mr. McNamara simply dismissed it as something not to think about seriously, and therefore the talk simply went away.

In sum, regarding the question at hand: Yes, there had been some kind of consideration of using tactical nuclear weapons to close the passes between North Vietnam and Laos, as a way of stopping troop and supply movement from the North to the South, informal as far as I know but possibly formal, and at high enough level to have made it a topic for the JASON study that was agreed with the Secretary of Defense. The results of the JASON study of the subject were known to the Secretary of Defense. To the extent of my personal knowledge, the talk of using nuclear weapons in that war stopped after the JASON report on the subject. To me it is a reasonable inference that the Secretary was troubled enough by the talk to have asked the JASONs to look at the question, or to have acquiesced in their proposal to look at it, and that after the study he put a stop to the discussion of it, or the topic went away because he refused to consider it. Therefore, in my view, the study had the desired effect.

Interview

On February 25, 2003, Peter Hayes conducted an email interview with Mr.. Deitchman on his account of the JASONs’ reports in 1966. The questions and answers follow: