North Korea and the Bomb

Abstract

ON 30 NOVEMBER 1950 at a press conference in Washington, D.C., President Harry S. Truman inadvertently suggested that General Douglas MacArthur as "military commander in the field" had the authority to unleash atomic bombs. That same day, General George E. Stratemeyer in Tokyo sent a cable to General Hoyt S. Vandenberg requesting that the Strategic Air Command (SAC) should be "prepared to dispatch without delay medium bomb groups to the Far East .... This augmentation should include atomic capabilities."1 MacArthur's staff was clearly rattled about the possibility of Dunkirks in Korea, or a humiliating armistice. At 8:30 a.m. the next day in Washington, a high-level meeting that included just about every policy maker but the president convened in the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) conference room in the Pentagon. Chairman General Omar Bradley worried whether MacArthur could hold at any point in North Korea, and whether Chinese air power would have to be interdicted so that troops at worst might withdraw safely. "To do so might draw in the Soviet air [force]. If this is true, we might have to defer striking." Army Chief of Staff Lawton Collins supported Bradley. "If we hit back, it is a strong provocation of the Chinese and may possibly bring in Soviet air and even submarines. The only chance then left to save as - if that happened -- is the use or the threat of use of the A-Bomb. We should therefore hold back from bombing in China even if that means that our ground forces must take some punishment from the air." He was beginning to think that Korea "was not worth a nickel." "If we do hit back," Secretary of State Dean Acheson warned, "it may bring in Russian air support of the Chinese and we would go from the frying pan into the fire." "We would have to evacuate [Korea] and probably would be engaged in war [with Russia]," Gencral Bedell Smith. the new CIA chief, predicted. At that, Collins contended that the United States would have to "consider the threat or the [actual] use of the A-Bomb, It would [otherwise] be very difficult to get our troops out."2 Later In the day, Bernard Baruch, long a White House adviser on military and atomic matters, visited Defense Secretary George Marshall, who had been at the JCS meeting, to press on him the feeling in the country, "in view of what is regarded as a very desperate situation"- the massive Chinese intervention -"for use of the atomic bomb." Marshall observed that he didn't think it would "do any good in the circumstances," and questioned what it could be "dropped on." The Chinese, he claimed, "were totally unmoved by this threat.... Their propaganda against American aggression was stepped up." Marshall scoffed at the Nehru-Panikkar claims of neutrality as an "Indian rope trick." While atomic talk was swirling about Washington and British Prime Minister Clement Attlee was flying to the United States to confront Truman, General Curtis LeMay, SAC chief and former commander of the 20th Air Force, which had deployed the bomb over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, responded to the message from Stratemeyer. The SAC understanding, said LeMay, had been that nuclear weapons, according to an earlier JCS advisory, would not be used except during "an overall atomic campaign against China." If the situation had actually changed, he wanted to be in on the deployment. He and his men, he boasted, were the only ones with the knowledge required to deliver atomic bombs.3 Preparing on 3 December for Attlee's hurried visit, State Department officials reminded the JCS of "the rather widespread British distrust of MacArthur and the fear of political decisions he may make based on military necessity. Bearing on this is the British belief in the [establishment of a] buffer area and their stand against [UN] attacks across the Yalu. Also involved is the fear of the effect on Asiatics of use of the atomic bomb or even open consideration of its use." British concerns, Acheson went on, were "very sincere. …