Hodgkin 1
Caleb Hodgkin
Professor Hammond
Modern US History
20 February 2025
Nuclear Weapons in Vietnam
During the Vietnam war, the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons against Vietcong
forces was considered and discussed by the United States government. Barbara Bick, the editor
for Memo, wrote an article detailing what a tactical nuclear weapon is and the repercussions of
using such a device in Vietnam. Bick was against the deployment of nuclear weapons and
outlined the consequences of their use and provides detailed explanations on the dangerous
results. Bick’s detailed presentation of the hazards of deploying tactical nuclear weapons in the
Vietnam conflict makes it clear that deploying these weapons in the conflict would have had
disastrous results.1
Barbara Bick had a long history as a writer and activist. During the 1940s, she worked as
a columnist in Northern California for the Communist Party paper. Then in the 1960s, during the
Vietnam war, she joined an anti-war organization called the Women Strike for Peace and was the
editor for the group’s newsletter Memo in Washington DC. Later, Bick participated in a liberal
think tank known as the Institute of Policy Studies. It was while she in Women Strike for Peace
that she wrote the article “There Has Been Increasing Talk of Using Tactical Nuclear Weapons in
Vietnam” for Memo.2
