The reluctance Dulles met in both cases was in part of his own making because the alarm raised by his “massive retaliation” speech of the previous January caused the allies to worry about America initiating atomic warfare. On 7 May, Dien Bien Phu fell, giving the Viet-Minh a stunning triumph to support their claims at Geneva. Braving it out, Dulles assured a press conference that “Southeast Asia could be secured even without perhaps Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia”—in other words, the dominoes would not be falling as expected.
