French artillery outposts fell within hours, and a dismal trickle of wounded survivors into Dien Bien Phu's garrison hospital began.
The French, with the encouragement of some US officials based in Saigon, pressed hard for the US to launch an overwhelming air strike to save Dien Bien Phu.
[3] Discussions involved General Ély, U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and Admiral Arthur W. Radford, Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff.
[1] At a meeting in Washington on 20 March 1954, Admiral Radford proposed to General Ély a plan calling for United States to use 60 B-29 bombers in the Philippines together with the aircraft of the 7th Fleet based in the Gulf of Tonkin to bomb the Vietminh forces besieging the French at Dien Bien Phu.
[5] Another version of the plan envisioned sending 60 B-29s from US bases in the region, supported by as many as 150 fighters launched from US Seventh Fleet carriers, to bomb Giap's positions.
[1] The Joint Chiefs of Staff drew up plans to deploy tactical atomic weapons, U.S. carriers sailed to the Gulf of Tonkin, and reconnaissance flights over Dien Bien Phu were conducted during the negotiations.
[1] Admiral Radford was the leading voice within the government for Operation Vulture, citing a study that three tactical atomic bombs "properly employed" would decisively smash the Vietminh forces besieging the French at Dien Bien Phu, and thereby turn a certain defeat into a victory.
[7] Ridgway thought that Radford as an admiral was far too dismissive of Chinese power and that he was blind to the political dangers of the United States fighting again against China in less than a year after the end of the Korean War, causing much discord on the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
[8] Both the Vice President, Richard Nixon, and the Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, were all for Vulture and lobbied Eisenhower hard to accept it, arguing that it was essential to stop Communism in Vietnam.
[7] The congressional leaders rejected Nixon's lobbying to pass a resolution giving the president the power to use nuclear weapons in Vietnam at his own discretion, but were willing to reconsider if the British joined in.
[7] The American journalist Stanley Karnow wrote that it was a major irony that Johnson in 1954 was opposed to passing a resolution giving Eisenhower the power to wage war in Indochina.
Eisenhower for his part felt that it was essential that Britain join in, saying that based on his experiences as a general in World War Two that: "Without allies and associates, the leader is just an adventurer, like Genghis Khan".
[7] Eisenhower's chief of staff, Sherman Adams, later told Karnow in an interview in 1981: "Having avoided one total war with Red China the year before in Korea, when he had United Nations support, he was in no mood to provoke another in Indochina...without the British and other Western allies".