The Vietnam (American) war is a very good analogy - it was never a formal war and fought under the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution [1] to explicitly avoid the declara

The Vietnam (American) war is a very good analogy - it was never a formal war and fought under the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution [1] to explicitly avoid the declaration of war. If the US had declared war on North Vietnam I suspect the outcome would have been different even without the use of nuclear weapons - either the US would not have fought in the first place (the most likely) or if they did they would have fought a total war like in WWII. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_Resolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_Resolution