Dodging Armageddon, the Third World War That Almost Was, 1950 (2000) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Dodging Armageddon, the Third World War That Almost Was, 1950 (2000) [pdf]

nsa.gov

30 pointsPLenz9 comments

> "With the comfort and hindsight of a half-century, President Harry Truman's decision to commit American power to save South Korea from Communist aggression in late June 1950 stands as perhaps America's finest moment of the Cold War. [...] By dispatching the 24th Infantry and 1st Cavalry Divisions from comfortable occupation duty in Japan to death and destruction in Korea in mid-summer 1950, the United States actually did nothing less than save the world from a global conflagration."

I spent two-thirds of the article waiting to find out how, exactly, the Korean War prevented Armageddon. TL;DR: A squabble between Communist states was looking likely to come to open war, and my countrymen planned to respond by nuking the Soviets and starting World War III for some fucking reason. Fortunately, our strong defense of South Korea convinced Stalin that we actually were crazy enough to start WW3 over Yugoslavia, so he backed down.

Further TL;DR: Fifty thousand red-blooded American soldiers nobly laid down their lives to protect the world from the psychopathic nuclear aggression of...America. This was clearly one of America's finest moments.

> my countrymen planned to respond by nuking the Soviets and starting World War III for some fucking reason

That there was such kind of thinking is supported by other sources, not as the response to the situation in Yugoslavia but to Korea, at the same time, here's from RAND:

"when the Korean War began in June 1950, the question of whether to launch an atomic offensive against the Soviet Union resurfaced within the Truman administration. Seeing the North Korean aggression as an act prompted by Moscow, U.S. officials met with their British counterparts in July and discussed whether, if the Chinese intervened, the United States should respond with an attack on the Soviet Union.28 Receiving no support for such a move from their principal ally, they quickly dismissed the notion; yet when the Chinese did cross the Yalu in November, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director Walter Bedell Smith asked his NSC colleagues “to what point will the U.S. be driven [before it will] attack the problem at its heart, namely Moscow, instead of handling it on the periphery as at present,” and on January 3, 1951, the JCS issued a paper arguing that it was “militarily foolhardy” to fight a land war against China while the “heart of aggressive COMMIE power remained untouched.”29""

But you are right that the claims in the article appear unbalanced, writing just about Yugoslavia and then claiming something like "but the US actions in Korea changed everything."

On downloading a pdf from nsa.gov - what could possibly go wrong?

Let's hope we can dodge it again in the middle east.

Originally published in 2000 in Cryptologic Quarterly, the NSA in-house (and classified) journal. Declassified 2010.

I had no idea this was even a thing. It already looks interesting, unclassified archives:

https://www.nsa.gov/public_info/declass/cryptologic_quarterl...

fuck man, wish you'd upload this to a website or dropbox, now NSA is all up in my bugger. I feel violated just by visiting the domain

hopefully you were ipv6 enabled that way they can track it to your individual device.

...and there's still long blocks of text censored. What could've happened in 1950 that's still "top secret" in 2000?

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