For Scale

The US dropped 5 million tons of explosives during the Vietnam War. How many bombs is that? How can you imagine it? Operation Rolling Thunder was meant to be an act of persuasion. The US believed that a drawn-out bombardment would pressure the North to cease its aggression on the South — or, at least, encourage it to ease up. “I saw our bombs as my political resources for negotiating a peace,” President Lyndon Johnson claimed. His framing was belied by the words of Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Curtis E. LeMay, who said, “We’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age.” Rolling Thunder was supposed to take eight weeks. Instead, it lasted more than three and a half years, with hundreds of thousands of sorties. It was longer than any bombing campaign during World War II or any other war that came before; it remains the longest bombing campaign in history. It cost the US $900 million, compared to an estimated $300 million in damage to the North Vietnamese. Given that the conflict con ... Read full article.