Meehanized Murder Nuclear Bombs in Vietnam?

MR. NIXON'S horrid ruse has, for the moment, succeeded. Nearly a month after the bombing and armed incursion into North Vietnam, most of America remains quiet, convinced that these macabre acts are somehow connected with his professed concern for a few hundred prisoners of war.

Yet on another level, the U. S. government is having its share of troubles in Southeast Asia. It's not that its conduct of the war has been remarkably dishonest and brutal; such petty thoughts have hardly been known to wear on the consciences of our national leaders. The problem is a more technical one. Despite America's monopoly of sheer physical force, the war is quickly becoming a stalemate, and the NLF, Pathet Lao, and North Vietnamese-badly tattered as they have been by the American military machine-aren't about to give in.

The time is ripe for another escalation of the war, not only because the American people have shown they will stand for it, but also because the military is becoming increasingly hard-pressed to draw its ten-year armed extravaganza to a successful conclusion. The U. S. has gained the upper hand in South Vietnam, but insurgent forces in Laos and Cambodia are still holding major areas of these countries and are seriously threatening to topple pro-American governments there. Extensive U. S. bombing has done its share of murder and other physical damage, but has not diminished the insurgents' strength and has only increased their resolve.

This time, however, the American escalation will be one of technology, not one of men. During the last several years, the U. S. military has reversed its policy of massive ground war and has instead employed a sophisticated range of machinery to enforce America's will in Southeast Asia. Veterans of the war would scarcely recognize the American command posts in Vietnam if they returned to them today. Instead of guns and arms and all the familiar furniture of colonial warfare, they would see a maze of "electronic battlefields" programmed with up-to-date communication, spewing forth "enemy" positions in any given area. They would see a complex of computers buzzing with information from the latest "unarmed reconnaissance" flights over China or North Vietnam. American ground troops are doing very little of the fighting any more. With "inputs" immensely improved by the new technology, it has become possible to conduct the war from the air. Mechanics has taken over the American war effort; the boys may be returning home, but machines have stayed behind to do the killing for them.

To a significant extent, the mechanization theory of counter-insurgency warfare has reversed the tide in Southeast Asia and enabled the United States to progress toward its ultimate goal of ruling the area. Realizing that there was no other way to defeat a liberation movement which commanded a majority following, U. S. leaders opted for mechanical elimination of rural support. The strategy has worked almost completely in Vietnam; and with one-third of Laos now living in caves and one-tenth of all Cambodia rendered homeless by U. S. bombing, there is reason to believe that the strategy will also work in those countries if given enough time.

BUT America's immense technological complex in Indochina-sophisticated and deadly as it is-has moved only haltingly to provide complete military victory. Daily pounding of the Ho Chi Minh trail by America's entire Southeast Asian B-52 fleet has failed to stop the flow of supplies from the North (raids on supply depots in the North are probably being contemplated as a result). In fact, the entire war has tied down America's air apparatus so extensively that the U. S. military would be hard-pressed to mount a comparable offensive if confronted with other wars of national liberation such as those in Southeast Asia.

High government officials now realize that U. S. involvement in Vietnam has failed to yield any simple strategy that might cope with insurgent movements elsewhere in the Third World. That is perhaps more significant than the failure to produce victory; for, above all else. Vietnam evolved as an "experiment," a sort of testing ground where the U. S. military could first apply its new weapons and strategies to the ugly business of counterinsurgency warfare. While not losing sight of their concrete aim-complete and permanent U. S. domination of Southeast Asia-American leaders have been acutely aware of the war's "experimental" nature, and its relevance to other situations of potential insurgency has remained uppermost in their minds.

The methods of brute genocide which the United States is now carrying out in Southeast Asia are quite enough for purposes of simple aggression, but they cannot serve as the model for a policy which is designed to contain several wars of national liberation all at once. Newer and more destructive means of warfare will have to be tried in Vietnam before that can possibly happen. As the next logical step in the escalation process, America will begin to test and use tactical nuclear weapons in Southeast Asia.

American scientists are now reported to be researching a "neutron" bomb which could render large areas uninhabitable for brief periods of time in addition to wiping out all those in the vicinity of the blast. C. L. Sulzberger writes in the New York Times that the bomb's "short-lived radiation effects could destroy an enemy's troops without causing unacceptable damage in cities or other areas." In other words, the once-proven "urbanization" theory could be successfully applied without all the fuss and expense of repeated bombings. Contaminate the countryside, and you are bound to cause a mass exodus into the cities. And only one raid would do the job.

TACTICAL nuclear bombs, if developed and mass-produced, would "rationalize" and strengthen America's war machine to an unprecedented degree. And they would enable that machine to undertake almost limitless counter-insurgency activity, should the need arise. It all seems so obvious. Even Richard Nixon once suggested it, as early as 1954.

There are other advantages to having such weapons at one's disposal. As Sulzberger adroitly notes, tactical nuclear bombs in the hands of the American military would "make up for the deficiency in conventional forces its own political system refuses to provide." No more dickering with popular opinion here. With these weapons, an entire air war could be carried out and concluded-as the "conventional" air war in Laos has-without public knowledge. It is true enough that widespread antiwar protest virtually stopped with the decline in American casualties and the beginnings of mechanized war. But even if Americans should feel extreme revulsion at the thought of their government committing nuclear aggression-however "tactical"-then the political system which allows them to oppose it need only be removed.

It is possible, too, that America will find it difficult to reconcile the use of tactical atomic weapons with its present international standing. Only Russia, of course, has the power to stop them, although the U. S. holds a nuclear Sword of Damocles over even the Russians' heads; the other nations are virtually powerless to resist; And there is always the likelihood of sustained international outcry, although the U. S. has not often been swayed by moral arguments.

There is nothing now that can stop America from undertaking nuclear war in Southeast Asia, not even a tactical argument; even if the weapons should fail or backfire, they are all in the nature of the "experiment."