Good guy Kissenger wanted us to bomb schools with conventional weapons like civilized people.

If James Blunt could stop nuclear war, it’s not weird that Kissinger did it twice.

Kissinger wanted to bomb brown people with just conventional bombs. He hated doing it the easy way with nuclear weapons.

he did everything he could to justify giving more million for lockheed martin i guess

I mean if you let Evil Dick to resort to the nuclear option, where is the fun?

Arguably the US official responsible for the most deaths

Context: There are two (supposedly three) instances in which Henry “Lets make Laos the most bombed place on earth” Kissenger played a significant role in preventing nuclear war from occuring.

The first time was during the 1969 Damansky island incident between the USSR and communist china. The two nations got into a pretty intense border conflict where it escalated to the point where the soviets were informing NATO and the rest of the nuclear club its intentions to nuke China and kindly requesting that they don’t do anything about it. While I can’t say anything about the rest of NATO. The US was particularly jubilant at the idea of the two largest communist states nuking each other. It was a cold warriors wet dream. Basically everyone in Washington was in complete support of declaring neutrality in the conflict. Everyone except, Henry Kissenger.

The man, regardless of whatever you think of him, was wise enough to see the disaster of the usage and normalization of nuclear weapons in war would have been for humanity. Kissenger who just started his career as the secretary of State, influenced Nixon to support China instead. Which saw the Soviets deescalate from their desire to nuke Beijing.

The second instance was during the 1973 Yom Kippur between Israel and the Arab forces led by Egypt and Syria. At some point, the war was going so badly for the Israeli’s that Tel Aviv informed both Moscow and Washington that if Arab forces got within range of being able to physically threaten nuclear stockpile, they would nuke the Arabs.

Moscow, who had managed to find itself entangled with defence agreements with both Syria and Egypt at the time, informed Washington that they were unable to influence the arab armies as much as they wanted to and that if Israel nuked the Arabs, they would be obligated to nuke Tel Aviv in response. Kissenger, not wanting to see a potential nuclear exchange interrupting the brief detente that the US and USSR enjoyed. Urged Nixon to support Israel. This US support would prove instrumental in preventing arab forces from breaking through Israeli lines.

The third instance of Kissenger stopping a nuclear war is rather apocraphyal since I’ve never been able to find any information confirming its authenticity but supposedly Nixon one time got so inebriated that he got into an alcohol fuelled rant about the soviet union, where he ended the rant by pressing the nuclear button and ordering the joint chief of staff to launch the a nuclear strike at moscow. Kissenger, who was secretary of state and therefore had no military authority. Heard Nixon drunken ramblings, immediately informed the joint chiefs to ignore the president’s orders due to his inebriation.