Well, I think I’ve found the dumbest person in my little town and it boggles the mind at the sheer amount of utter and unadulterated stupidity residing within his head. In a casual conversation, he brings up the death toll from the U.S. using nuclear weapons in Cambodia.
I will repeat it again if you didn’t understand it: He brought up the subject that the U.S. dropped, from B-52 bombers, tactical nuclear weapons in the kiloton range on Cambodia during the Viet Nam conflict.
His defense was that:
The Khmer rouge could not have killed the number of people they did without fighting an uprising against them.
He read it in a ‘major’ scientific journal.
We (my friends and I) immediately attacked his argument.
Q: What cities did we destroy with these bombs?
A: None, they we dropped in the jungle.
Q: Where is the dead zone from the radiation?
A: The radioactive plutonium ash would be washed away within a year, leaving no trace.
Q: How did we kill so many people by dropping these small yield nukes in the jungle?
A: The bombs are more devastating than you think.
Q: Why didn’t the U.S.S.R. or China retaliate?
A: They had no reason to defend Cambodia or their armies would have been in the country.
Q: What was the major scientific journal that printed this article you are citing?
A: Just a major one. (We usually take this kind of evasion to mean he read it somewhere on the Internet.)
Now that you know I know a complete and utter moron, has anyone here ever heard about this claim?
I can’t refute his claim, but I’ve never heard of it before, and it doesn’t make sense. Most of the “tactical” nukes were either artillary shells (for taking out armor and infantry formations en masse, at a reasonably close range) or torpedos and depth charges (for taking out ships & subs quick and easy). These tac nukes were for taking out military units in a tactical situation, not for taking out bases and transportation infrastructure (strategic) which is what the strikes on Cambodia were all about.
They had a small yield, but they were still nukes, with all the baggage that carries. IIRC, they were intended to be used in desparate situations, like a sudden USSR attack on Western Europe. Since the USSR had a big conventional advantage over the US through just about all of the Cold War, they were made to be used a last resort, right before a general strategic attack (bombers & missles take out Moscow).
Actually, reliable post-war analysis shows that the Soviets never had a conventional advantage over the West, and were far inferior, qualitatively. What we heard over those, lo, many years was utter nonsense, fed to us by those who wanted defense spending maximized for their own rather self-evident reasons. The same can be said of the former Soviet economy, once trumped up as the world’s second most powerful, yet today known as a basketcase. Yes, the Sovs had tons of nukes. Aside from that, however, their vast empire was a house of mirrors. Better yet, a house of cards.
[hijack reply]OK. Hindsight is 20-20. We can also say that Napoleon and Hitler were pretty stupid to attack Russia in winter.
The Sovs didn’t have a big advantage worldwide, but they could project a whole lot of power into Western Europe pretty darn quick. What did the US have in Europe at the peak of the Cold War? I think it was no more than 1 Army Group (2 Corps, 6 divisions), plus quite a bit of the Air Force. There was a quite credible threat that the Sovs could have taken West Germany and a bit of other real estate before the US could mount an overwhelming counterstrike. I think there is a pretty good chance that things would have gone to strategic nukes not too long into this scenario.
This isn’t a general Cold War military history discussion thread. I was just supplying info on why I thought the scenario in the OP didn’t make sense.[/hijack reply]
Tell your friend that had we used any kind of nuclear weapon in southeast Asia the Russians would have found out and it would have started World War III. Guaranteed.
I’m wondering how this compares to some things that I was once told by someone who I trust that the russians and chinese have exchanged tactical nukes near the mongolian border?
The individual used to work in intelligence, so he would know if it had happened… I’m just curious if it’s something others have heard. And this is a good place to ask.
“The individual used to work in intelligence, so he would know if it had happened”
What? Please explain. I’ve known a lot of peole who “work in intelligence” and none of them struck me as omniscient. (Of course, they also tended to keep their mouths shut.)
Well, I can’t go into a lot of detail, mainly because I don’t have it to give, but we were discussiong potential conflicts with Russia or China, and we got off on a tangent on Russo-Sino relations… they don’t get along, and havnen’t for a while, so I don’t think it’s hard to see.
The gentleman in question used to do something for the Air Force, and has also worked for the NSA… I know his Air Force thing was to listen to foreign radio traffic, and he’s VERY knowledgeable on ELINT methods and suchlike… that’s pretty much all I know. Hope it helps…
It sounds like the gentleman mentioned in the OP, and the supposed spook who commented on the Mopngolian conflict are both . . .
FULL OF SHIT???!!?
I run into these losers all the time . . .usually after a few beers, they start spewing off bullshit they heard from a friend of a friend etc. When you back them into a corner with the facts, or ask for their sources, their little stories star falling apart.
Good to see your friend can be kept with classified information and our nations secrets, if you know what I mean, Tristan!!!
It’s a shame more of us Dopers can’t be like Pudgy, and tell a dope that he is truly a stupid moron when he is obviously one!
However, I would be a bit more careful claiming folks to be fecal-filled without getting to know them…
While the gentleman I know is a bit of an oddball at times, the few times we have discussed stuff of an esoteric nature he’s always been dead on.
I’m not saying that I believe him, but I am capable of keeping an open mind, enough so that I am going to start doing some research this weekend… Hmmmm…
Well, Short, this ‘friend’ of mine usually makes such unbased and obviously false claims. What really got me is that this is the most outrageous of them all and he is adamant about not changing his claim. (We have labled him a pathological liar for some of his other claims.)
Bosda, this twit claimed that ‘erosion would have washed away the radioactive plutonium ash and any other signs’ of nuclear weapon use. It is his beleif that a nuclear weapon just spreads radioactive plutonium using a really big explosion and that the reaction itself doesn’t create any radiation.
I just had to ask if anyone else had ever heard of this claim, but apparently no one here has. I couldn’t even find anything on the Internet about this.
I’ve looked for a while on Google, and I can’t find a ghost of a suggestion that the U.S. ever used nuclear weapons in Cambodia, even on the most hysterical of conspiracy sites. If your friend read this on the Internet, he sure found it in an obscure place.
That makes no sense to me. Kruschev and Brezhnev were not suicidal. They were very comfortable old men, and the last thing in the world they wanted was to provoke a U.S. strike that would kill them and, incidentally, the millions of their countrymen whose labor kept them in luxury. Vietnam meant less than nothing to them; it was a just a convenient way to bleed the “Western imperialists.” Think what would have happened if the Soviets had nuked Afghanistan; we’d have screamed, raged, and howled, and then we would have done absolutely nothing. No U.S. president would have started World War III over the fate of a Third World country. The Soviets would have responded to a nuclear attack in Cambodia the same way: sound and fury, signifying nothing.
I can remember in the glorious days of the Cold War when our local forecasters could predict with amazing accuracy when the next radioactive cloud from the atomic bomb tests (both ours and the Russkies) would be overhead.
Had there been a nuclear blast associated with any part of the Vietnam War – even a teeny tiny tactical nuclear blast – the peace movement would have had no trouble getting that information, and there would have been cross-country vigils in the path of the jetstream.
And while I don’t have any resources with me here at work, isn’t the half life of plutonium (and enriched uranium for that matter) in the hundreds of years, if not the thousands? If there were a nuclear blast in the jungles of Cambodia 30 years ago, there would still be a hot zone there, and there’d be a lot more noise about it than a single reference in some “major scientific journal” someone read somewhere.
