hankyoreh

Suh Jae-jung

By Suh Jae-jung, professor of political science and international relations at the International Christian University in Tokyo

“We will take whatever steps are necessary to meet the military situation, just as we always have.”

“Will that include the atomic bomb?”

“That includes every weapon we have.”

“Mr. President, you said ‘every weapon that we have.’ Does that mean that there is active consideration of the use of the atomic bomb?”

“There has always been active consideration of its use. I don’t want to see it used. It is a terrible weapon and it should not be used on innocent men, women, and children who have nothing whatever to do with this military aggression.”

The day after this exchange, the headline on the New York Times on Dec. 1, 1950, read, “President Warns We Would Use Atom Bomb in Korea, If Necessary.” Seventy years ago, the Korean Peninsula was facing a dire situation. After the breakout of the Korean War, then US President Harry Truman’s allusion to the possibility of using atomic weapons was enough to astonish the world. The US had become the first and only country to use atomic weapons by dropping bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki just five years earlier.

China and North Korea, which were then at war with the US, were not the only ones stunned at Truman’s remarks about potentially using that fearsome weapon again. Prime Minister Clement Attlee of the UK, a US ally, immediately flew to Washington for a summit with Truman in which he attempted to dissuade him from using the atomic bomb.

Truman’s press conference remarks were no mere rhetoric. On Dec. 1, US Far East Air Forces Commander Lt. Gen. George Stratemeyer, who was then serving under Gen. Douglas MacArthur, recorded the military’s activities in his personal diary. “Dr. Ellis A. Johnson, Director ORO, DA [Operations Research Office, Department of the Army], has proposed to provide GHQ within next week a critical evaluation of the pos use and effectiveness of atomic bombs in close spt of ground forces in Korea,” he wrote.

On the following Dec. 4, the Joint Chiefs of Staff submitted a memo to the Secretary of Defense stating that a situation could arise in Korea where the only substantive means of preventing a catastrophe for the US military would be for the US to use atomic weapons.

Indeed, some US politicians had already been advocating the use of atomic weapons before that. Lloyd Bentsen, a Democratic Party senator who would later be the vice presidential running mate of Democratic Party candidate Michael Dukakis in 1988, called for the use of the atomic bomb from the early stages of the Korean War. He argued in favor of threatening major North Korean cities with atomic strikes within the week if the North Korean military did not withdraw. Republican Senator Owen Brewster recommended that the president cede his authority to use atomic weapons to MacArthur, allowing him to employ them in response to the battlefield situation.

Why did Truman say the things he did on Nov. 30?

The situation had to do with what was going on with the war at the time. Having been deployed into combat in the Korean War, China’s Ninth Army Group launched a full-scale attack on the US’ 1st Marine Division on Nov. 27. Twenty-five thousand US troops found their retreat completely blocked off. They were left facing 130,000 Chinese troops encircling them multiple times over. They also had to battle unimaginable cold. Even with their thick anti-cold gear, one soldier after another developed frostbite; their M1 rifles malfunctioned because of the lubricant freezing up.

In Washington, things were tense. Major losses had been suffered in the initial Chinese onslaught. A further blow occurred on the western front, where over 600 out of 800 troops with the 3rd Battalion of the Republic of Korea’s 1st Division were killed or went missing. The 3rd Battalion of the US 1st Cavalry Division’s 8th Cavalry had been surrounded by the Chinese forces and taken prisoner en masse. The 1st Cavalry Division’s commander, Gen. Hobart Gay, ordered its withdrawal, knowing at the time that the unit had been surrounded by the enemy. It was a humiliation without precedent in US military history. Yet the situation faced by the 1st Marine Division was even worse.

The crisis demanded extreme measures. It was just as US Army Chief of Staff Gen. J. Lawton Collins had predicted in a Nov. 20 memo, when he wrote that the clear possibility of Chinese Communist Army intervention in the Korean War and the deployment of additional troops against the UN Command’s commander was once again raising the possibility of the UN forces using atomic weapons.

Word that the UN might use the atomic bomb rapidly reached the Korean Peninsula. There was a growing sense of fear that everyone might end up dying if the bomb were dropped. More and more people took refuge to avoid the threat of the mushroom cloud. It was a terror that weighed over the refugees gathered on the piers at Hungnam exactly 70 years ago. An even more intense fear gripped the North Korean leadership, which had declared its intent to battle to the death. People quaked in terror every time a US plane flew overhead. That sense of fear is what ultimately led to the development of nuclear weapons. And the Korean Peninsula remains even now unable to escape the nightmare of 1950.

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