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Nuclear Threats Against North Korea: Consequences of the ‘forgotten’ war

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2025

Bruce Cumings
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The media claim that North Korea is trying to obtain and use weapons of mass destruction. Yet the United States, which opposes this strategy, has used or threatened to use such weapons in northeast Asia since the 1940s, when it did drop atomic bombs on Japan.

THE forgotten war – the Korean war of 1950-53 – might better be called the unknown war. What was indelible about it was the extraordinary destructiveness of the United States' air campaigns against North Korea, from the widespread and continuous use of firebombing (mainly with napalm), to threats to use nuclear and chemical weapons, and the destruction of huge North Korean dams in the final stages of the war. Yet this episode is mostly unknown even to historians, let alone to the average citizen, and it has never been mentioned during the past decade of media analysis of the North Korean nuclear problem.

Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 3 , Issue 1 , January 2005 , e7
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2005

References

(1) Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman, “First victims of biological warfare,” Le Monde diplomatique, English language edition, July 1999.

(2) Quoted in Clay Blair, Forgotten War, Random House, New York, 1989.

(3) US National Archives, 995.000 file, box 6175, George Barrett dispatch of 8 February 1951.

(4) National Archives, RG338, KMAG file, box 5418, KMAG journal, entries for 6, 16, 20 and 26 August 1950.

(5) See the New York Times, 31 July, 2 August and 1 September 1950.

(6) See “Air War in Korea,” Air University Quarterly Review 4 no 2, autumn 1950, and “Precision bombing,” ibid, n° 4, summer 1951.

(7) MacArthur Archives, RG6, box 1, Stratemeyer to MacArthur, 8 November 1950; Public Record Office, FO 317, piece n° 84072, Bouchier to Chiefs of Staff, 6 November 1950; piece n° 84073, 25 November 1959 sitrep.

(8) Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, vol. 2, Princeton University Press, 1990; New York Times, 13 December 1950 and 3 January 1951.

(9) Newsweek, 24 March 2003.

(10) New York Times, 30 November and 1 December 1950.

(11) Hoyt Vandenberg Papers, box 86, Stratemeyer to Vandenberg, 30 November 1950; LeMay to Vandenberg, 2 December 1950. Also Richard Rhodes, Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, Touchstone, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1995.

(12) Bruce Cumings, op cit; Charles Willoughby Papers, box 8, interviews by Bob Considine and Jim Lucas in 1954, published in the New York Times, 9 April 1964.

(13) Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time, MacMillan, New York, 1966; Quigley was Bill Clinton's favorite teacher at Georgetown University. See also Bruce Cumings, op cit.

(14) Documents released after the Soviet Union collapsed do not bear this out; scholars who have seen these documents say there was no such major deployment of Soviet air power at the time. However, US intelligence reports believed the deployment happened, perhaps based on effective disinformation by the Chinese.

(15) This does not mean the use of “tactical” nuclear weapons, which were not available in 1951, but the use of the Mark IVs in battlefield tactical strategy, much as heavy conventional bombs dropped by B-29 bombers had been used on battlefields since August 1950.

(16) Samuel Cohen was a childhood friend of Herman Kahn. See Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1983. On Oppenheimer and Project Vista, see Bruce Cumings, op cit; also David Elliot, “Project Vista and Nuclear Weapons in Europe,” International Security 2, n° 1, summer 1986.

(17) Conrad Crane, American Airpower Strategy in Korea, University Press of Kansas, 2000.

(18) Jon Halliday and Bruce Cumings, Korea: The Unknown War, Pantheon Books, New York, 1988.

(19) J F Dulles Papers, Curtis LeMay oral history, 28 April 1966.