The same question had been raised at the recently concluded Geneva peace conference, regarding Korea and Indo-China, by the Cambodian representative, with Undersecretary of State Walter Bedell Smith, the U.S. representative at the time in Geneva, also having not provided an answer to the question, which had never been seriously considered by the State Department. Now that the question had reached the NSC, Joint Chiefs chairman Admiral Arthur Radford had taken a strong stand against giving Cambodia such a guarantee, appearing somewhat odd, as Admiral Radford had been the Administration's strongest advocate for intervention to save Indo-China.

The Alsops suggest that it was not hard to figure out his reasoning, however, as Cambodia, one of the three Associated States of Indo-China, was a French colonial possession until recently, had no army of any consequence and was supplied through Saigon in what was now, since the truce, South Vietnam. If Saigon were to fall under Communist control, which the Alsops believe the truce terms virtually assured, Cambodia could not be easily defended, and Admiral Radford likely reasoned that, with the loss under the truce of North Vietnam, there was not much use in taking great risks to save little Cambodia.

The State Department disputed the latter view, admitting that no local defense of Cambodia was possible in case of direct attack, but that it might still be protected in the same manner which indefensible West Berlin was protected, through a Western guarantee of its political integrity.

The issue remained undecided, and Mr. McClintock had been recalled to provide a first-hand report on the matter. But the central issue remained as to why there should be great risks taken to defend such a small country as Cambodia. The Alsops posit that the best answer was probably that provided by the President at his April 7 press conference, when he had said that if one had "a row of dominoes set up", and one was knocked over, it would be "a certainty that the last one will go very quickly, too." His point had been that the loss of Indo-China would start a disintegration in Southeast Asia which would have the most profound influence on the free world. Since that press conference, North Vietnam had been lost to the Communists under the Geneva truce agreement, and, the Alsops suggest, it was likely that it would be followed by South Vietnam and probably Laos, with Cambodia next in line. Cambodia surrounded Siam, Thailand, like a long curving hand, and already "the far-sighted Communists had completed preparation to give the Siamese domino the necessary added push."

They indicate that as soon as the Geneva conference had ended, the Chinese Communists had put on Peking radio a former wartime Siamese premier, who called on his fellow Siamese to overthrow the "reactionary" Siamese Government, calling it a "tool of American imperialism". Opinion was divided on Siam, as to whether that was merely psychological warfare or a preview to an eventual Communist Chinese attack.

Burma would be the next domino in line, and there were apparently reliable reports out of Burma that Communist guerrilla bases were being established on the border with China, easily supplied from China on the same pattern which had worked so well with Indo-China.

They conclude, therefore, that with one domino down, the Southeast Asian dominoes were beginning to tumble, just as the President predicted, that if all of them would not fall very quickly, a line would have to be drawn somewhere in Asia, and there appeared to be no better place to draw it than along the borders of Cambodia; but, they warn, this time, if such a caveat against incursion were provided to the Communists, the U.S. would have to mean it and stick to it, whatever the risk.

It might be noted that, while the Alsops had on several occasions, for about five years or more, previously referred to the idea of a "domino theory" in Southeast Asia, this marks the first time that they had actually used the analogy by name, as provided by the President at his April 7 press conference. The analogy would come to represent the shorthand rationale for U.S. involvement directly in Vietnam, starting with military advisers in 1958, and continuing through and beyond the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in August, 1964, in the wake of two patrol boat attacks on American warships, the U.S.S. Maddox and U.S.S. Turner Joy, the second of which, on August 4, turned out not to be an actual attack, though unknown to both the President and the Congress at that time, the result of a misinterpreted radar screen on one of the ships by the radar operator, but both incidents, nevertheless, leading eventually to the start of the build-up of U.S. troops in early 1965 in the Vietnam War, the August 7, 1964 resolution having given the President the authority to do so when national security interests required in accord with SEATO member states. Everyone who followed the news at all at that time was aware of the phrase "domino theory", even if one were a child, but the actual basis for it remained murky not only to children, who were expected to fight in that war one day, adolescents, who were on the precipice of fighting in that war one day, but also to most of the late adolescents and older who were actually drafted to become the soldiers in that war.

Fault whomever you wish for not communicating the matter more clearly, the press, the Administration, members of Congress, but the great unpopularity of that war, not from its inception, but certainly by around mid-1967 and increasingly thereafter, might be laid, at least in part, to a failure to communicate with clarity the reason why, if the dominoes did fall, the loss of Southeast Asia to the Communist world was considered so critical to the security of the United States. There was plentiful discussion of particular operations of the war, albeit, in terms of the overall conflict, becoming confused and enmeshed in a morass of never-heard before and never-heard again Oriental names of obscure places in an obscure foreign field of battle, and the rationale for those particular operations in terms of military strategy of the moment, appearing to change mercurially from season to season, but not the overriding reason, beyond the simplistic phrase "domino theory", beyond commitments under SEATO, for U.S. participation in the war, itself.

Those who understood the basis for the Pacific War in World War II understood, to some extent, the rationale, perhaps, but times and military capabilities had changed markedly in the postwar world, with sea power, which was so important to success in World War II, no longer having the dominance vis-à-vis nuclear warheads attached to intercontinental ballistic missiles, not rendering the Navy obsolete, but certainly of less critical importance than it had been earlier. And by understanding the basis for the Pacific War, we do not mean to limit it to the obvious fact of an attack by a foreign power on Pearl Harbor, American territorial soil. But the overriding practical reasons for reaction, beyond the more emotional, prideful ones, had to do with Japanese Empire interests, their so-called Co-Prosperity Sphere, being extended throughout Asia and thereby limiting Western access to the tin, tungsten, manganese, chrome, nickel, mercury, rubber and other basic commodities necessary for a thriving industrial economy, the automobile industry, the steel industry, the associated coal and coke industry, etc., as well as providing stepping-stones through progressive island-hopping to afford bases from which potentially to launch air attacks on the Western continental United States. The value to the U.S. and the Western world generally of these commodities had been the reason why the U.S. acquisition of the Philippines at the end of the brief Spanish-American war at the turn-of-the-century had been so important in the age of dollar diplomacy and empire interests, especially important to the island nations, such as Britain and Japan, with France, Spain, and the Netherlands involved in competition with the British Empire interests, in Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia.

While we do not profess that the "domino theory" was never explained by anyone with clarity, it was certainly not stressed with sufficient repetition and incisive precision such that any person could readily understand the reason for it, apart from the concrete representation of dominoes falling in succession, a nice picture in need of its basic raison d'etre. The real question was, why, if the dominoes fell, there was such a great issue in the loss of the dominoes involved. One could readily understand the crucial importance at the time of the Middle East and its oil to oil-dependent modern societies, but not as readily Southeast Asia and its importance to the free world and its economic sustenance, and, with particularity, the reason why the rice paddies of Vietnam were so strategically important to the free world. The reason for assuring the independence of South Vietnam was both geographical, to protect against the other dominoes falling, however circular that reasoning begins to appear without further rationale regarding the dominoes, themselves, and as a source of rice, a chief component of the diet of the Nationalist Chinese on Taiwan and the Japanese. The fear, as articulated in the mid-1950's, was that the Communist Party in Japan, if losing its export-import trade capability with South Vietnam, might take over in the midst of resulting starvation and then stimulate trade with Communist China as the saving grace. The complexities of the rationale make it difficult to explain in short, easily understandable lessons. Thus, came the simple "domino theory" as the most usually presented catchphrase for the rationale, incomplete as it was.

Of course, the domino theory proved itself, in the end, after the fall of Saigon and South Vietnam to the Communists in spring, 1975, more than two years after the Paris Peace Accords ending formal U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, not to be a viable theory, as it had been based on the World War II model for Asia. Nevertheless, that is not to say that those who promulgated the theory were doing so with disingenuousness, as no one knew whether the domino theory would prevail or not, and the passage of 20 years of time, including eight years of active U.S. involvement in the war, plus interim developments in the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis of October, 1962, having its antecedents in the Formosa standoff with Communist China in 1958, the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963, the Strategic Arms Limitations Treaty of 1972, the talks for which had begun during the Johnson Administration, in 1967, at Glassboro, N.J., had served to cool any ardor for hot war and had chilled the Soviets in their steady postwar quest for expansion of the Communist socio-economic system. Thus, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and U.S. participation in those wars, along with the other Cold War developments, can never be said to have been in vain, even if the Vietnam War, ostensibly, was "lost", ultimately, to the Communists under Ho Chi Minh, with many at the time, following the 1953 Armistice in Korea and predicted failure of the 1954 Geneva conference to reunify Korea by providing for supervised, all-Korean elections, having also concluded that, essentially, the Korean War had been not been won and thus, for all intents and purposes, was lost, as promising future war from the Communists, as well as having freed up Communist Chinese supplies for use in support of the Vietminh in the final year of the Indo-China war with the French. As with the American Revolution, the Communist guerrillas fighting in the Vietnam War and the Indo-China War before it, were fighting for home and country, in a strictly patriotic sense, to push out the "imperialist invader", even if some of their own leaders had originally invited in the "imperialists", initially the French, though not the Japanese during World War II, the basic premise for such invited imperialism in essentially peasant subsistence economies being the notion of lifting all boats in basic standard of living as the economy, with the infusion of foreign money, increases—as often as not, however, subverted through political graft and corruption in the ruling regime of the moment, with the result of destabilizing internal coup and counter-coup, often with foreign "imperialist" influence, starting the cycle anew.

It is a very difficult thing to defeat any army, especially a guerrilla army not confined to the traditional rules of warfare, fighting on its home soil. General Washington, Ho Chi Minh's role model, had no respect for Christmas, for instance, when he attacked the Hessians in 1776. History, when studied closely, is a great deal more complicated than merely catchphrases and slogans.

The Congressional Quarterly asks whether U.S. security regulations were frustrating American scientists, indicating that the Federation of American Scientists was deeply concerned about the need to revise present Government policies in handling scientific personnel. A member of the FAS executive committee said that a committee on loyalty and security was presently drawing up legal wording aimed at changing what it had called "a rather desperate" situation in security policies.