Editing Operation Linebacker II (section)

===Decisions===
Nixon was now working against a January deadline. Kissinger's "peace is at hand" statement had raised expectations of a settlement among the US population. Even weightier on the President's mind was the fact that the new [[93rd United States Congress|93rd Congress]] would go into session on 3 January, and the President feared that the heavily Democratic legislative branch would preempt his pledge of "peace with honor" by legislating an end to the war.<ref name=lw24/>

Also prompting the President toward some form of rapid offensive action was the cost of the force mobilization that had accompanied ''[[Operation Linebacker]]''. The additional aircraft and personnel assigned to Southeast Asia for the operation was straining [[the Pentagon]]'s budget. The cost of maintaining this "augmentation force" totaled over $4 billion by mid-autumn and [[United States Secretary of Defense|Secretary of Defense]] [[Melvin Laird]] insisted that the President request a supplementary defense appropriation from Congress to pay for it.<ref name=lw24>Lipsman and Weiss, p. 24.</ref> Nixon and Kissinger were convinced that the legislative branch "would seize the opportunity to simply write the United States out of the war".<ref>Earl H. Tilford, ''Setup''. Maxwell Air Force Base AL: Air University Press, 1991, p. 253.</ref>

After returning from Paris on 14 December, and after consultations with Nixon, Kissinger fired off an ultimatum to Hanoi, threatening "grave consequences" if North Vietnam did not return to the negotiating table within 72 hours.<ref>Casey 1987, p. 40.</ref><ref>Lipsman and Weiss, pp. 24–25.</ref> On that day, Nixon ordered the reseeding of North Vietnamese ports with air-dropped naval mines and that the [[Joint Chiefs of Staff]] direct the Air Force to begin planning for a bombing campaign (a three-day "maximum effort" operation) which was to begin within 72 hours.<ref>Tilford, p. 254.</ref> Two days after the 16 December deadline had passed, the U.S. bombed Hanoi. Senior Air Force officers James R. McCarthy and George B. Allison stated years later that the operation had been mainly politically driven, as a negotiation tool to "bring the point home".<ref name = 'McCarthy 1'/>

Many historians of the Vietnam War follow the lead of President Nixon, who claimed that Hanoi's representatives had walked out of the talks, refusing to continue the negotiations.<ref>These include Stanley Karnow, ''Vietnam: A History'', p. 652, Marc Leepson, ''Dictionary of the Vietnam War'' p. 228, John Morocco, ''Rain of Fire'' p. 146, and Harry Summers, ''The Vietnam Almanac'', p. 228, and four of the authors of the U.S. military quoted in this article, Gilster, McCarthy and Allison, and Tilford.</ref> Both sides had proclaimed their willingness to continue the talks; however, Hanoi's negotiators refused to set a date, preferring to wait for the incoming Congress.<ref name="Asselin, p. 139"/> The goal of President Nixon was not to convince Hanoi, but to convince Saigon. President Thieu had to be assured that "whatever the formal wording of the cease-fire agreement, he could count on Nixon to come to the defense of South Vietnam if the North broke the cease-fire."<ref>Stephen Ambrose, ''The Christmas Bombings'', New York: Random House, 2005, p. 403.</ref>