Word: laird
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...missing in Indochina sent shock waves through the tightly knit family organizations, as did Secretary of State William Rogers' insistence that the U.S. "can't absolutely abandon our national objectives to pay ransom." The deferential briefings from Presidential Adviser Henry Kissinger and Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird are recalled by some with bitterness. How many P.O.W. families share the disenchantment is impossible to determine. But Mrs. Fuller voices a biting new version of the briefings: "Now that I know about 'orchestration' and 'crescendo' and all those beautiful words they use for war-which makes...
JAPAN Nukes for Nippon? Unlike recent junkets by other Administration officials, Defense Secretary Melvin Laird's ten-day swing through Tokyo and Seoul seemed carefully calculated to be thoroughly unspectacular. Laird's message was the same for both allies: they could count on continued protection from the Seventh Fleet and the U.S. nuclear umbrella, but they would have to furnish "credible deterrence" on the ground themselves. Who could get upset over what amounted to yet another sales pitch for the Nixon Doctrine...
...Rising Smoke. To the Japanese, however, Laird's visit was about as soothing as an eruption of Mount Fuji. Laird's purpose was primarily to urge Japan to upgrade its armed forces-preferably with arms purchased in the U.S.-and to take a larger economic-aid role in Asia. But almost from the start of the Secretary's stay in Tokyo, U.S. officials were kept busy batting down dark rumors that the U.S. was dragooning Japan into 1) taking over the role of the Seventh Fleet and 2) becoming the biggest nuclear arsenal west of Los Alamos...
...State Department and the Pentagon quickly protested. No one, said State, saw any "necessity or possibility" that Japan might have to become a nuclear power. "I was not asked the question," Laird complained. "It did not come up in our discussions." Then how did it come up? The Laird visit, TIME learned, was deliberately used by the Japanese Defense Agency to raise the nuclear issue. For some time, Japanese strategists have worried over America's Asian withdrawal, the rise of China's nuclear capability, and the increasing presence of Soviet warships in the seas around Japan. Many...
...What does inhibit Japan, however, is the deep-seated "nuclear allergy" of its 103 million people. Some authorities in Tokyo want them to begin thinking about the unthinkable. Thus when Laird came to town, Japanese Defense Agency officials recruited sympathetic Western reporters to raise the nuclear issue, knowing that almost any reply would produce considerable fallout. It was, Japanese officials predict, only the first effort in a continuing campaign to "season the minds" of the Japanese public...