An angry Nixon scrawled on the memo that years of bombing had achieved "zilch", and demanded to know why.
We may want Isis stopped, but two years of bombing have made little, if any, progress towards its defeat.
By comparison, the German capital Berlin was hit by 67,607 tonnes of TNT over five years of bombing.
The years of bombing have taken their toll on the local civilian population in the neighbourhood, barely 1% of the 300,000 who lived there before the fighting began.
Khalid Aziz, a former chief secretary of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, notes that tribal Pushtuns, which the assailants appear to have been, have endured years of bombing, displacement and army attacks.
After all, mainland Britain survived 20 years of bombing by the IRA and Spain's economic growth has not been thrown off course by the activities of ETA, the Basque separatist group.
If the best part of two years of bombing with more than enough high explosive hasn't solved this problem, how would Britain's widow's mite of a few extra bombs help?
The suffering of the Syrian city's children, who have lived through years of bombing, was thrust back into the headlines this week by a photograph of five-year-old Omran Daqneesh, bereft and bloodied in the back of an ambulance.
Governor Calderon said the study offered "dramatic evidence" that 50 years of bombing exercises on Vieques, a small island off the eastern coast of Puerto Rico, had harmed the health and lives of its 9,000 residents.
