奠边府战役甲子：美曾欲供法核弹？

choi

BBC Chinese, May 6, 2014
www.bbc.co.uk/zhongwen/simp/worl ... am_war_a_bomb.shtml

, which is translated (PARTIALLY) from

Dien Bien Phu: Did the US offer France an A-bomb?  BBC Chinese, May 4, 2014
www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27243803
The battle of Dien Bien Phu is today overshadowed by the later involvement of the Americans in Vietnam in the 1960s. But for eight years between 1946 and 1954 the French had fought their own bloody war to hold on to their Empire in the Far East. After the seizure of power by the Communists in China in 1949, this colonial conflict had become a key battleground of the Cold War. The Chinese provided the Vietnamese with arms and supplies while most of the costs of the French war effort were borne by America. But it was French soldiers who were fighting and dying. By 1954, French forces in Indochina totalled over 55,000.

Note:
(a) Of course this is old news, first disclosed in the Pentagon Papers.

(b)
(i) Battle of Dien Bien Phu (Mar 13-May 7, 1954)  Wikipedia
(ii) Điện Biên Phủ is the capital of Điện Biên Province
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Điện_Biên_Province
(The province's name derives from Sino-Vietnamese [qv] "奠邊," meaning "stable frontier")

(c) “At the end of 1953, French commander in chief [of Indochina] Gen [Henri] Navarre had decided to set up a fortified garrison in the valley of Dien Bien Phu”

Navarre
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navarra

is English proper name--Spanish: Navarra--for an autonomous community in Spain.

(d) “Saturday 3 April 1954 has gone down in American history as ‘the day we didn't go to war.’ On that day Dulles met Congressional leaders who were adamant they would not support any military intervention unless Britain was also involved. Eisenhower sent a letter to the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill warning of the consequences for the West if Dien Bien Phu fell. It was around this time, at a meeting in Paris, that Dulles supposedly made his astonishing offer to the French of tactical nuclear weapons. In fact, Dulles was never authorised to make such an offer and there is no hard evidence that he did so. * * * ‘He didn't really offer. He made a suggestion and asked a question. He uttered the two fatal words “nuclear bomb,"’ Maurice Schumann, a former foreign minister, said before his death in 1998. ‘Bidault immediately reacted as if he didn't take this offer seriously.’”
(i) 83rd United States Congress
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/83rd_United_States_Congress
(1953-1955; senate: 47 Democrats, 1 Independent, 48 Republicans; House: 213 Democrats, 1 Independent, 221 Republicans)
(ii) Winston Churchill (1874-1965; prime minister 1940-1945, 1951-1955)
(iii) Maurice Schumann (1911-1998; French Minister of Foreign Affairs 1969-1973 under under president Georges Pompidou)  Wikipedia

(d) “The last weeks of the battle of Dien Bien Phu were atrociously gruelling. The ground turned to mud once the monsoon began, and men clung to craters and ditches in conditions reminiscent of the battle of Verdun in 1916. On 7 May 1954, after a 56-day siege, the French army surrendered. Overall on the French side there were 1,142 dead, 1,606 disappeared, 4,500 more or less badly wounded. Vietnamese casualties ran to 22,000.”
(i) Battle of Verdun
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Verdun
(Feb 21-Dec 18, 1916; French victory)
(A) photo legend: “French trench at Côte 304, Verdun”

French English dictionary:
côte (noun feminine): "hill"
(B) Quotation: “The concentration of so much fighting in such a small area devastated the land, resulting in miserable conditions for troops on both sides. Rain combined with the constant tearing up of the ground turned the clay of the area to a wasteland of mud full of human remains. Shell craters became filled with a liquid ooze, becoming so slippery that troops who fell into them or took cover in them could drown. Forests were reduced to tangled piles of wood by constant artillery-fire and eventually obliterated.”

(ii) Verdun
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verdun
(Verdun (Latin: Verodunum, meaning "strong fort") was founded by the Gauls)


(e) “In the history of decolonisation it was the only time a professional European army was decisively defeated in a pitched battle. It marked the end of the French Empire in the Far East, and provided an inspiration to other anti-colonial fighters. It was no coincidence also that a few weeks later a violent rebellion broke out in French Algeria - the beginning of another bloody and traumatic war that was to last eight years. The French army held so desperately on to Algeria partly to redeem the honour it felt had been lost at Dien Bien Phu. So obsessed did the army become by this idea that in 1958 it backed a putsch against the government, which it believed was preparing what the generals condemned as a ‘diplomatic Dien Bien Phu.’ This putsch brought back to power Gen de Gaulle who set up the new presidential regime that exists in France today. So the ripples of Dien Bien Phu are still being felt.”
(i) Algeria
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algeria
(section 1 Etymology; section 2.4 French Algeria: From 1848 until independence [1962], France administered the whole Mediterranean region of Algeria as an integral part and département of the nation)
(ii) Algerian War
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algerian_War
(Nov 1, 1954-Mar 19, 1962’ section 2.7 Fall of the Fourth Republic)
(iii) French Republics
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republics

(f) “It was also in 1954 that France began working on its own independent nuclear deterrent.”

(g) “For the Vietnamese, however, Dien Bien Phu, was only the first round. The Americans, who had refused to become directly involved in 1954, were gradually sucked into war - the second Vietnam War - during the 1960s.”
(i) Indochina Wars
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indochina_Wars
(First Indochina War (December 1946-July 1954); Second Indochina War (called the Vietnam War in the West; no declaration of war - 1975))
(ii) France tested its first atomic bomb in 1960.  Wikipedia