25. A Crazy Plan to Nuke North Vietnam
For General William Westmoreland, 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 been wearing thin for some time. Then in early 1968, the communists launched the Tet Offensive – a massive surprise attack against cities and towns throughout South Vietnam – and Westmoreland came to be seen by 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.
