President Richard Milhous Nixon, aka, Tricky Dick,
is infuriated as he hiccups his way through his office, stumbling over the
lip of a rug with a freshly opened bottle of Chateau Lafite Rothschild in his hand.
He pours himself a glass and gets on the phone with his Joint Chiefs of Staff. As soon as he
gets through, he growls, “We've got to nuke them…Bomb the BLEEP out of them.”
And this, dear viewers, is not some fiction the Infographics Show has created. We might
not know the exact words Nixon used, but he definitely did order a nuclear strike
against North Korea while he was wasted. In fact, you’d be surprised how often Nixon called around,
saying there was no time to spare and a nuclear strike was necessary. As Henry Kissinger,
Nixon’s National Security Advisor, once said about him, “If the president had his way,
there would be a nuclear war each week!” Before we get to Nixon almost unleashing hell
on our Korean brothers, we think we should explain to you some things about the USA, its enemies,
and how close they were to being nuked. As you know, talk of nuclear weapons is all
the rage again. In the fall of 2022, US media was saying that President Joe Biden’s national
security adviser had just warned Russia that if it used nuclear weapons, there would be “catastrophic
consequences.” It’s not the kind of thing you want to hear while you’re eating your cornflakes in
the morning. Anyone alive for a few decades probably thought, “Oh God, not this again.”
Before we go on, we should clarify something that might have been troubling some of you.
You’ve likely heard people talking about tactical and strategic nuclear
weapons. There’s a difference, although the exact definition is not always…well…exact.
In short, tactical nukes are smaller. They will likely be used for short-range attacks,
mainly aimed at locations with tactical value rather than cities. They have less
of an explosive yield, perhaps anywhere from one kiloton to 50 kilotons. But 50 kilotons
is hardly a firecracker, given that the atomic bomb that devastated Hiroshima was 15 kilotons.
A strategic nuclear weapon might yield 100 kilotons to over a megaton of TNT.
The USA’s B83 has a yield of 1.2 megatons. Russia’s Tsar Bomba,
which was tested in 1961, was said to have had a yield of around 50 megatons.
So, not all nukes do the same damage, but when you consider that altogether nuclear states have about
13,000 nuclear warheads, you can see why most rational people are scared of escalation
between the atomic nations. Russia and the US have the vast majority of such weapons,
tactical and strategic. The other nuclear states are the UK, France, Pakistan, China,
India, Israel, and North Korea, each with various types of atomic weaponry.
As many people have said regarding the Ukraine war, a tactical strike could lead
to a strategic strike, and then we might as well kiss goodbye to life as we know it. Experts say
that one tactical strike could indeed lead to large-scale retaliatory nuclear attacks.
Still, most of you are likely thinking, well, it would just never come that. Our
leaders of the free-ish world and those leaders of the un-free world are not that mad. Surely,
you think, they’d tell you first. They wouldn’t even launch a tactical strike,
you imagine, because they know how quickly that would escalate to a full-on nuclear war.
We hate to tell you this, but some people have had what you might call a trigger
finger. Nixon was one of them, and we reckon you’ll agree with us by the end of this show.
As you know, the Americans were the first to test a nuclear weapon. During WWII, British scientists
teamed up with US scientists, and along with some other big-brained scientists from Europe,
they worked on the Manhattan Project. At the time, the Soviets were trying to make
the bomb but were way behind (Stalin liked to murder his best scientists), and Germany,
despite having brilliant physicists, was not even close. The Allies didn’t know that, though.
On July 16, 1945, President Harry Truman received the message, “Babies satisfactorily
born.” That meant the first nuclear test had been successful. The next day, Truman,
Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin started their lengthy talks at the Potsdam conference.
At one point, Truman walked up behind Stalin as Stalin was sitting down, and he whispered
in his ear the news about the US’ “new weapon of unusual destructive force.” Stalin’s expression
didn’t change, but inside he was seething. His minister of internal affairs, Sergei Kruglov,
later said at that moment, Stalin realized his dream of a socialist revolution all over Europe
was likely over. The US and the rest of the western capitalists had the upper hand…for now.
In short, the US later understood that it could use its new power to make other
countries do as they were told. The US could employ nuclear blackmail,
which went something like, “If you don’t get the hell out of dodge,
we will bomb the crap out of you.” These countries knew exactly what that meant because they’d seen
what had happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The thing is, nuclear blackmail only really
works when you have more firepower than the nation you’re blackmailing. It’s not
ideal when the outcome could be a Mexican standoff, aka, mutually assured destruction.
Having seen what those weapons could do, Truman was not keen on having his name
connected to more streets full of wrecked houses and dead men, women, and children, but in 1950,
he considered using those bombs again. This time the enemy was China, which was fighting
the US in the Korean War. It should be noted that the Soviets had tested a nuclear weapon in 1949,
but an airdrop would not be undertaken until 1951. The idea was that a bunch of nukes could hit
various places in China, and the Korean War, which was proving to be a very difficult and
deadly war for the Americans, could come to a conclusion very quickly. General Douglas
MacArthur later admitted that he had the plan to launch “30 to 50 tactical atomic
bombs” that he said would mean an end to the war in less than 10 days. Truman disagreed
and famously fired MacArthur as a result. MacArthur blamed Truman for not ending the war
quickly. He said Truman was needlessly sacrificing American lives. We know from documents that were
declassified many years later that Truman and others believed attacking China could
lead to mayhem in Asia. If Russia got involved, things would get really bad. On top of that,
those documents revealed that American’s military strength wasn’t exactly what MacArthur and many
American citizens believed it was. An attack on China, they concluded, would be extreme and
utterly reckless. Just bear in mind, many powerful Americans did not think the same.
In 1954, when the French were struggling in Vietnam, the US said it would help under what
it called Operation Vulture. The plan was to send B-29s over and drop a load of tactical
nukes on the Vietnamese, thereby smashing their army. Still, what if China got involved?
Vice President Richard Nixon, and the Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles,
were totally up for nuking the Vietnamese, but President Dwight D. Eisenhower wasn’t so sure.
He, like Truman, had not felt great about what happened in Japan. Still, his generals didn’t
seem to concern themselves too much regarding mass-murder scruples. Eisenhower once told them
in a meeting, “You boys must be crazy. We can't use those awful things against Asians for a
second time in less than ten years. My God!” They were deadly serious. Eisenhower later
agreed to Operation Vulture, but said it could only happen on two conditions. First,
the operation must pass in Congress, and second, the Brits must be on board. Eisenhower explained,
“Without allies and associates, the leader is just an adventurer, like Genghis Khan.” The US
nuking everyone, he knew, wasn’t a good look. He didn’t want the Americans to do this alone,
so if it happened at all, it had to be an Anglo-American attack, but in the end,
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill said no way Britain was getting involved. So,
that was that, and anyway, Eisenhower eventually became convinced nuking Vietnam was a bad idea.
In 1955, yet gain the US considered a nuclear strike. This time the reason was China seizing
islands in the Taiwan Strait during what is called the first Taiwan Strait Crisis. At first,
Eisenhower said he was on board with that plan, famously saying that nukes
should be used just like a bullet from a gun. Vice-President Nixon, yet to be known in all
his trickiness, but already fond of very expensive French wine, was of course, up for using them as
he always was. At the time, he said, “Tactical atomic weapons are now conventional and will be
used against the targets of any aggressive force.” Later in life, Eisenhower made a famous speech
about what he called the American “military-industrial complex.” This
was not the kind of thing Nixon would have said. Eisenhower talked about how
the industry could get out of hand. After all, he’d been surrounded by hawks during his time
in power. One of them was Mr. Nixon, who was about to get even more hawkish. Eisenhower,
a former military leader and hero of World War II, kind of shocked people with that speech.
We should also say that Eisenhower increased spending on nuclear weapons. Still,
he saw what was happening in the arms race and warned Americans about a “disastrous rise
of misplaced power” that might not always act in the interest of ordinary Americans. But he
also knew the US needed to protect itself. If you want peace, prepare for war is the
term that springs to mind. Nixon might have said, there’s no such thing as peace, so just go to war.
Ok, so now you know a few things. One, you know that the US was, on a few occasions,
very close to using nukes. Two, you know the world in those days was a pretty unstable place. There
were conflicts everywhere, proxy wars, and the main conflict was between the Communist Soviet
Union and the US, with Great Britain at its side. China was, of course, on the side of the Soviets.
Remember at this point that Britain had been considerably weakened after WW2, and the US
had risen like a magnificent phoenix…that, at times, maybe flew a bit too close to the sun.
At least Stalin was dead. Now Nikita Khrushchev, who’d established himself as the leader in 1955,
said he wanted “peaceful coexistence” with the US. It’s hard to know what Nixon wanted, but as
you’ve seen already, he was hardly a pacifist. In 1969, just as the hippies were preaching
love and peace, their nemesis, Nixon, came to power. And what an awkward juxtaposition that
was. Nixon was about to unleash hell, but a hell that most Americans would know nothing about.
For instance, many years later, a Secret Service agent said he was with Nixon and
some of his staff one day, and they were talking about what to do with Cambodia. The former agent
said Nixon was drunk, as he often was. He added, “They were half in the tank,
sitting around the pool drinking. And Nixon got on the phone and said: 'Bomb the BLEEP out of them!'”
Cambodia did get bombed. It got bombed a lot, which was kept a secret as it went against
international law. Some experts say about 500,000 Cambodians died in the campaign,
called Operation Freedom Deal. About two million people were displaced from their homes, and for
decades after, kids lost limbs when they stepped on unexploded bombs. Nixon’s drunken wish also
helped the tyrant Pol Pot come to power, which led to one of the worst genocides in human history.
We might learn from this that a drunken man sitting in a pool can say a few words that
lead to a crisis of unimaginable proportions for millions of people on the other side of the
world. We are not saying Operation Freedom Deal only went ahead because of what Nixon
said right then in the pool. Of course, that didn’t happen, but he sometimes gave serious
orders when he was wasted. After Cambodia, his next victim was supposed to be North Korea.
One country absolutely on the side of the Soviets was North Korea,
the so-called hermit kingdom. There was nothing the US could do to get it on its side. There were
no tyrants to install who would say nice things about capitalism as they tortured their people.
North Korea was untouchable in this respect, and the US disliked that, even though North Korea
was far from being able to make nuclear weapons. For Nixon, this black sheep secretive state needed
to go. Nixon had already professed to many people that he was good with the idea of nuking Vietnam.
When he came to power, a man named David Young, the Administrative Assistant to Henry Kissinger,
heard Nixon and Kissinger talking. Nixon was drunk again. Young later said he heard Nixon say,
“Henry, we've got to nuke them.” Such threats were not of the idle kind. You
already know what happened in Cambodia. Then in 1969, Nixon was informed that some
North Korean fighter jets had just shot down an unarmed American spy plane. This was an American
EC-121 reconnaissance plane, and onboard was a full crew. The plane was flying over international
waters near Japan when it was hit. The US never expected this. The plane had performed such
operations before without a problem. Of course, North Korea didn’t much like the idea of American
planes gathering intelligence on them, so they blasted it out of the sky, and all 31 crew died.
Understandably, Nixon was absolutely infuriated when he heard this, but again,
he’d been drinking, so his emotions got the better of him. What happened
next remained a secret to Americans for decades. That day, a guy named Bruce Charles was on duty
at Kunsan Air Base in South Korea. His job was to wait for an alert regarding what was called the
Single Integrated Operational Plan. This basically meant waiting around to get a message that told
him to get on a plane and attack a target. That day he received the order to prepare for
a strike on North Korea. The plane he was to use for the strike was an F-4 carrying a B61 nuclear
bomb. This yielded about 330 kilotons of TNT, 20 times bigger than the bomb dropped over Hiroshima.
This order, Charles knew, was serious business. Many people would die if he went through with it,
but as the attack was going to be on an airfield, not a city, it would have been no Hiroshima.
Charles waited and waited until a few hours later, he was told to stand down. He later
said in an interview, “The order to stand down was just about dusk, and it was not
a certainty. The colonel said, 'It looks like from the messages I'm getting, we will not do
this today. I do not know about tomorrow.' " Two days later, Nixon was speaking at a press
conference, saying how he believed that even though the loss of that crew was a
terrible tragedy, US retaliation could lead to something very ugly, and that, said Nixon,
could not happen on his watch. His administration was all about finding peace in Asia. He said:
"A number of developments…have convinced me that the chances for bringing this war to a peaceful
conclusion have significantly improved." Some of the press were surprised,
as was the public. They heaped praise on Nixon for being so level-headed and, for once, showing
restraint where it was due. As usual, they only knew half the story, well, about one-fifth of it.
At the time of the order, Nixon, blasted on booze, had shown no restraint at all. He got on the phone
with his Joint Chiefs and said scramble the jets right now. He ordered an imminent nuclear strike.
He’d clearly had enough, and North Korea had now provided him with a good reason to use nukes.
It all sounds like satire, but this isn’t a joke. It’s the truth. There are documents to prove it,
which were released in 2010 under a freedom of information request. The documents talked
about operation “Freedom Drop,” which consisted of “pre-coordinated options for the selective use of
tactical nuclear weapons against North Korea.” Nixon was so drunk he fell asleep, and while
he was out cold, Kissinger got on the phone with the Joint Chiefs and told them not to
do a thing. North Korea could wait. The report states that the Joint Chiefs “agreed not to do
anything until Nixon sobered up in the morning.” It seems Nixon wasn’t in the mood for mass murder
when he awoke later, and possibly thousands of North Korean lives were spared that day,
not to mention the escalation of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. As Kissinger said,
if Nixon had had his way, life on planet Earth could have been severely disrupted. Nonetheless,
Christoper Hitchens, who was usually a very reliable critic, said Kissinger should be
prosecuted “for war crimes, for crimes against humanity, and for offenses against common
or customary or international law, including conspiracy to commit murder, kidnap, and torture.”
We guess that made Nixon just one hawk of many on that rugged hill of politics.
Now you really need to watch “What If North Korea Launched a Nuclear Bomb (Minute by Minute).” Or,
have a look at “What if Russia Launched a Nuclear Bomb (Minute by Minute).”