It is more than 35 years since he was shunted out of office, but the thought of former US president Richard Nixon’s finger on the nuclear trigger still has the power to terrify.
Now it has been revealed that the highly erratic president’s metaphorical digit was hovering even closer than was widely realized as his administration laid plans for an atomic strike against North Korea in 1969 following the shooting down of a US spy plane.
According to newly-revealed government documents, Nixon is even believed to have ordered nuclear bombers to be put on standby for an immediate strike after North Korean jets downed the US plane as it flew over international waters collecting electronic and radio intelligence.
The documents, obtained by the National Security Archive (NSA) in Washington after a freedom of information request, describe the plan codenamed “Freedom Drop,” which called for “pre-coordinated options for the selective use of tactical nuclear weapons against North Korea.”
Surprisingly, the contingency plans predicted that — depending on the scale of the nuclear strike — there could be as few as 100 casualties and no more than a few thousand.
A June 1969 memo from then-US secretary of defense Melvin Laird to then-national security adviser Henry Kissinger outlined a number of options for a conventional and nuclear response to what were perceived as growing provocations by North Korea.
These included a plan to “conduct strikes against military targets in North Korea employing one nuclear weapon on each target.”
The memo suggested a “punitive attack” against 12 targets listed as command centers, airfields and naval bases, but in what appeared to be an acknowledgment that the use of smaller scale nuclear weapons of less than 10 kilotonnes would prompt North Korean retaliation, a second option was added.
“An attack with nuclear weapons with a yield of 70 kt [kilotonnes] each to neutralize the North Korean air order of battle in response to a North Korean air attack on South Korea,” the memo said. “All 16 major North Korean airfields can be struck under this option.”
The NSA’s Robert Wampler said the Nixon administration saw the North Koreans as an “imminent threat.” He said planners concluded that the consequence of any such strike was likely to be all-out war and so if the US were to attack North Korea, it would have to be with overwhelming force.
A former US fighter pilot told National Public Radio in Washington that he was put on alert for a nuclear attack. Bruce Charles, who flew an aircraft armed with nuclear weapons based in Kunsan, South Korea, said he was called in to see his commanding officer.
“When I got to see the colonel, it was very simple. He described the shooting down of the EC-121 about 100 miles [160km] at sea and he had a message, which he showed me at that time, saying to prepare to strike my target,” Charles said.
Charles said his aircraft had been armed with a B61 nuclear bomb, about 20 times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
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