In discussing this position with his senior advisers, Eisenhower revealed that his patience was running out. If the communists tried to snatch all of Indochina now, he said, the U.S. response would be massive: “There should be no half-way measures or frittering around. The Navy and the Air Force should go in with full power, using new weapons, and strike at air bases and ports in mainland China.” As Dulles put it to Smith, war with China, “waged primarily with sea and air power and modern weapons”—by which he meant nuclear weapons—was “infinitely to be preferred to the task of intervention in
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