Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam

by Fredrik Logevall

Dulles himself, at this very Paris meeting, formally raised the matter of atomic weapons and their possible use, though without explicit reference to Indochina. In a speech to the NATO Council on the evening of April 23, he declared that Soviet advantages in manpower were too great—in military, political, or economic terms—for the West to overcome. Therefore, nuclear weapons must be considered part of NATO’s “conventional” arsenal. The secretary went on to assert that it must be “our agreed policy,” in the case of either general or local war, to use atomic weapons “whenever or wherever it would be of advantage to do so, taking account of all relevant factors.”43 Dulles sought here to speak to the furor in Europe resulting from the recent H-bomb tests, and he may also have been wanting to keep Moscow and Beijing guessing as to what the West might resort to in Indochina; but his language is a further indication that the use of the bomb in the jungles of Tonkin in the spring of 1954 was, from the administration’s perspective, decidedly within the realm of possibility.