Word: mcnamara
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...addition, to complement the extraordinary plentitude and quality of footage, the producers conducted over 300 interviews, 100 in Vietnam. Interviewees include top brass from the period in North and South Vietnam and America, and only former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Richard Nixon and South Vietnamese ex-President Nguyen Van Thieu refused interviews. Equally important are the discussions with numerous combatants and non-combatants on both sides...
...thing has remained clear: the conventional force equation is at the root of the European political split that fuels our nuclear dilemma. Nukes only destroy; they don't conquer territory, achieve revolution or political reform, or even apply total pressure. Nuclear weapons' only use, as former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara has recently written, is for deterrence; as a practical component of Western defense strategy, they are useless. Not so with convention forces. The MBFR talks offer a chance for the West to start redressing what some have estimated as a 3-1 Wasrsaw Pact advantage in conventional strength--where inequality...
...rejecting "first use," McNamara discarded a major element of the "flexible response" strategy, which he helped to design, and which was adopted as official NATO policy in 1967. In a Foreign Affairs article last year, McNamara and three other former architects of U.S. foreign policy (McGeorge Bundy, National Security Adviser to Kennedy and Johnson; George F. Kennan, former Ambassador to the Soviet Union; Gerard Smith, the chief negotiator of SALT I) stirred wide controversy in Europe by arguing that the concept of "first use" was antiquated and dangerous...
...press briefing last week, McNamara said the U.S. should adopt a doctrine of "no first use until." Until what? Said he: "Until we know exactly what our opponent intended to do, at what level the order to use nuclear weapons originated on his side, and whether there is any chance that the conflict might still be confined without our resorting to nuclear retaliation." McNamara also recommended a major buildup of NATO'S conventional defenses to raise the "threshold" at which a conflict would "go nuclear"; the creation of a "nuclear-free zone" on either side of the Iron Curtain...
...McNamara added force to his argument with a provocative historical revelation. In private conversations with Kennedy and Johnson, McNamara says he recommended that they never "under any circumstances" use nuclear weapons. "I believe they accepted my recommendation," he wrote. According to McNamara, Kennedy never considered using nuclear weapons during the Berlin crisis in 1961 or the Cuban missile showdown...