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American Involvement In The Korean War

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On July 16, 1945, a massive fireball erupted over the desert of northern New Mexico. Not long after, on August 6, and again on August 15, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ending World War Two (WWII) and presumably changing the face of war forever. The destructive power of atomic weapons stunned the world and ushered in a new era of defense strategy based on an entirely new paradigm. That paradigm depended on numerous assumptions about the nature of war and conflict in the new nuclear age. After WWI, prevailing assumptions about the viability of nuclear deterrence, the possibility of limited warfare, and the nature of communist expansion, defined US defense policy. However, the Korean War, which began just five …show more content…

Even as General MacArthur was preparing to depart Japan with his forces, Curtis LeMay, the commander of US Strategic Air Command, was advocating a nuclear strike on North Korea as a way to put a rapid end to the invasion. However, LeMay’s request was denied and in spite of his continued advocacy, Truman never truly considered employing the weapons in the Korean conflict. That the Soviet Union did not resort to their use either, even after a devastating US area bombing campaign destroyed much of North Korea, effectively put an end to assumptions about conventional war necessarily leading to unrestrained nuclear war. The absence of nuclear weapons in the Korean War also seriously challenged the role of nuclear weapons as a conventional deterrent. As LeMay would later say, the only lesson learned in Korea was, “how not to use a strategic air weapon.” That for the remainder of the Cold War, the US and the Soviet Union engaged in proxy wars all over the world, speaks to the ineffectiveness of nuclear weapons as a conventional deterrent. Land war, it turned out, was not obsolete. Following the conflict in Korea, nuclear deterrence was forced to evolve to a concept solely aimed at preventing a preemptive nuclear attack by the Soviet Union. By changing the role of nuclear weapons, the conflict in Korea was also able to change the calculus regarding soviet expansion and the viability of limited

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