Nuclear Weapons, Coercive Diplomacy, and the Vietnam War: Perspectives on Nixon's Nuclear Spector

Editor's Note: The publication of Nixon's Nuclear Spector, by William Burr and Jeffrey P. Kimball, in 2015 generated a good deal of discussion about the nuclear dimension of coercive diplomacy. Drawing extensively on U.S. archival evidence, Burr and Kimball explore the Nixon administration's attempts to force a settlement of the Vietnam War by relying on nuclear threats. We asked two distinguished scholars—Robert Jervis and Mark Atwood Lawrence—to offer their assessments of the book. Their commentaries are presented here along with a reply by Burr and Kimball.

Commentary by Robert Jervis

When I was asked to contribute to this symposium, my initial instinct was to decline because I had read the book already. But then I thought I might get even more out of it a second time, and indeed I was right. The book is so rich in detail and so thought-provoking that it cannot be fully absorbed in one reading.

William Burr and Jeffrey Kimball have written well-regarded articles on Richard Nixon in Vietnam, but this book goes much further. Two initial chapters examine nuclear weapons and what Alexander George calls "coercive diplomacy" in the first two decades of the Cold War, and a final chapter covers U.S. policy in Vietnam for the last five years of the war, but the bulk of the narrative scrutinizes Nixon's attempt to extricate the United States from the war in his first year in office. In doing so, the authors draw on a marvelous array of sources and skillfully triangulate among the H. R. Haldeman diaries, official papers, and later memoirs. The evidence accumulated here underscores how much has been declassified and how many gaps remain because of classification barriers (mainly blocking information on nuclear weapons and intelligence sources) as well as meetings and conversations that were never documented—in addition to the obvious incentives the major players had to deceive one another (and perhaps themselves) and not to lay out their fundamental assumptions and reasons.

Although many aspects of Nixon's foreign policy succeeded very well—the opening to China, the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, and the agreements that essentially settled the vexing issue of Berlin—Vietnam was Nixon's highest priority when he took office, and on this issue he and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger failed. Their failure was not for lack of a plan, as Burr and Kimball show. The basic idea was to ratify Lyndon Johnson's view that a military solution was impossible, while gaining a victory at the negotiating table by coercing the USSR into putting sufficient pressure on North Vietnam to withdraw its troops from the South. This was to be done through a combination of telling Soviet leaders that the United States would not proceed in areas that Moscow cared deeply about (arms control, the Middle East, East-West trade) unless the USSR was helpful in Vietnam (the "linkage" strategy), combined with the stick of dangerous escalation unless the war could be brought to a quick end. Nixon and Kissinger got nowhere with this, as most experts on the Soviet Union would have predicted had they been consulted. In an irony that Kissinger occasionally appreciated, linkage often worked in reverse. Partly because of the pressures of domestic politics, Nixon was at least as invested in lowering tensions and reaching arms control agreements as were his Soviet counterparts.

Why did people as knowledgeable as Nixon and Kissinger think their strategy might work? Although Burr and Kimball do not discuss this in detail, they present the elements that form an explanation. First, Nixon was under great pressure. The Vietnam War had destroyed Johnson, and even if Nixon believed that the foreign policy advantages of prevailing in Vietnam militarily were worth the blood and treasure, he was well aware that the U...