Reply #19: Daniel Ellsberg has spoken about this recently...

[cascadiance]

He noted this here in San Diego and has in other places. I'm not sure if he was held back from revealing this earlier in the Pentagon Papers or if it was newer information he had access to or not, but it was documented that Nixon had plans for a nuclear attack on North Vietnam that was subverted.

You can google for Ellsberg probably to find more articles on this. Here's one that has a relevant paragraph in it that I found quickly:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200210u/pp2002-10-23

The Temptation of War
A new memoir by Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers, warns that Presidents will do anything to avoid losing wars

Reading the complete Pentagon Papers for the first time in the summer of 1969, Daniel Ellsberg had two revelations. One, of historical interest today, concerned the character of the Vietnam War; the other was about the war powers of the presidency, and how they corrupt Presidents. The relevance of this second revelation, as President Bush decides whether to exercise the authority Congress has given him to attack Iraq, is profound.

...

Over the next year, he shared parts of the study with anti-war politicians, with negligible results. Then, through sources within the Nixon Administration, he learned that Nixon planned to intensify the lethality of the war if the North Vietnamese did not bend to his will. There was talk of using nuclear weapons. Ellsberg had to act. With a Rand colleague he gave the study to The New York Times. On June 13, 1971, the world first learned of the Pentagon Papers.

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