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The Craziest Schemes that the Government Ever Tried to Push on the Masses

Khalid Elhassan August 13, 2022 39 min

9. A Top General’s Plan to Nuke Hanoi

Plan - General Westmoreland and President Johnson in Vietnam — General Westmoreland and President Johnson in Vietnam. National Museum of the United States Air Force

For General William Westmoreland, the overall US military commander in Vietnam since 1964, 1968 was a bad year. His repeated predictions that a corner was about to get turned, and that the war was on schedule for a successful conclusion, had long since worn thin. Then in early 1968, the communists launched the Tet Offensive, a massive surprise attack against cities and towns throughout South Vietnam. The resultant chaos made Westmoreland seem to many as overly optimistic, or even ludicrous.

To add to his woes, a separate North Vietnamese offensive had besieged a remote US Marine garrison at Khe Sanh, near the demilitarized zone between North and South Vietnam. Fourteen years earlier, the Vietnamese had besieged and forced the surrender of a remote French garrison at Dien Bien Phu. For a while, it was feared that the Marines at Khe Sanh might suffer the same fate. As documents quietly declassified in 2016 reveal, the mounting stress got to Westmoreland. He ended up seriously exploring a crazy plan, code named Operation FRACTURE JAW, for nuclear strikes against North Vietnam.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.