Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire The Korean War - should we have used nukes?

Watching a great show on The Military Channel about this war, and the question I have is...should we have used nuclear bombs against China? Also, the show states that Truman decided that using nukes would have caused a spread of the war, and made things worse...do you agree with that?

My opinion is that Truman should have listened to his "prima donna", old Dugout Doug. Now China is the "sleeping giant" we need to fear. I'm not an expert, just voicing my personal opinion.

The sleeping giant has been awake for some time now.

"No" to your first question; "maybe" to your second. If you really have an interest in the war, from tactical level small-unit action to the world situation that drove some of the decisions, read T.R. Fehrenbach's "This Kind of War (A Study in Unpreparedness)". Very well written. Chapter 25, titled "Proud Legions" is probably some of the best writing on the role of the military in a free society that I have ever read.

I'm a big fan of Teddy Roosevelt. Speak softly and carry a big stick works for me . We should have impressed on Mau that he could leave or face the consequences. I believe he would have reacted just like Kruschev did in the Cuban Missile Crisis. If not,the rest of the world would have been aware that the Chinese made a choice and suffered the consequences.
It continually seems that our leaders are too timid to use the power we have because they're always worrying about "world opinion" ,whatever that is. Not using the full force of our power has gotten a lot of American blood spilled....and "world opinion" doesn't seem to include much respect for our efforts.

Thanks for the book info. Fehrenbach is one of my favorite historians.

Google Taiwan Straits Crisis for what happened in the late 1950s in that area. Some info suggests that there was a possibility of using nukes against China if Taiwan had been invaded.

It's interesting how everybody is familiar with the Cuban missile crisis, but hardly any attention is paid to the conflict between Taiwan and the Mainland a few years earlier.

Paul

No,
Mao was prepared and said so, to sacrifice 50,000,000 people if the United States used atomic bombs.

Fifty-million to that butcher was just a yawn

*thought* how is it that the absolute most lunatic butchers wind up as heads of state?

No. President Truman used the bomb against Japan and if there was anybody who was equipped to make that decision it was him. We'll never know all that went into the making thereof.

Yep the whole cold war would have never happened along with Vietnam.

Agree. A nuclear war with China would have been a disaster for all involved. Its easy to use our rational thinking about world issues. Unfortunately, our values don't apply to some of the most ruthless dictators. Look at what Hussein did in the Middle East. I served in the early to mid-sixties with some veterans of the Korean War. It was a brutal war that now seems hardly a footnote in history. America was ill equipped & ill prepared for another war so soon after WWII. Troops lacked proper training especially the Army & Marine reserves. Most weapons were antiquated & many in short supply. Its easy to have hindsight. If the UN had stopped at the 38th. parallel it might have been possible to reach a peace settlement. I remember watching the nightly news & the body bag count. When the peace process began the North Koreans & China let the process drag on over a year. An actual peace settlement was never obtained only a cease fire. Another mess by both our government, military, & UN.

I think him using it twice made him even less equipped to make that decision.

The world put nukes back in the bottle after WWII. A few times it was touch and go. If we had used them again in Korea it would have lowered the threshold for there future use.

It would have also changed the rate of proliferation. Instead of being symbol of a countries power, nukes would be a requirement for its defense and survival and many other countries would have seen the need to develop them.

Besides what were you going to do with china after you nuked them? Occupy? set up a democracy like japan? Or just leave 800 million of them with a festering hate for the US that equals that which they have for Japan?

Yes, it's nothing short of a miracle that nukes have stayed in the bottle since WW II, and that sanity prevailed. Plenty of times that fingers have been on the trigger.

Paul

Mao killed about that number of Chinese himself....but that doesn't mean he would really have shrugged off a US nuclear strike.


We didn't need to nuke China....just bomb the Yalu bridges and let our fighters pursue Chicom aircraft back over the line. At the most, bomb their airfields north of the river.

North Korea was a wasteland, and the Chinese armies there were completely dependent on resupply convoys over those bridges. Bomb them, and they're eating each other in a month. Truman thought that would be too much of a provocation.

It IS a miracle that "only" two of those have been used. Oct 1962 was close enough for me. That was getting spooky.

21, nice avatar.

I don't think China had nukes back then. We should have not only nuked the Yalu, we should have broken up China. If we had done that, they'd still be fighting amongst themselves over fiefdoms. We'd have had peace with the former China for the next 150 years.

The problem wasn't with China's reaction to getting nuked, it was with the reaction of the major communist power: Russia. Particularly with what Russia could have done in Europe, where NATO was in it's infancy. The Russians didn't go through the drastic demobilization after WWII that we did, so manpower was not an issue for them. The U.S. military of June 1950 was not the U.S. military of August 1945 in either quantity or quality.