Hacker News Reader

Comment by douche | Hacker News Reader

Truman wouldn't let MacArthur win the war, and so we've had this shit sandwich in our laps for the last sixty years.

MacArthur was batshit insane and wanted to use nukes:

    "Of all the campaigns of my life, 20 major ones to be exact, [Korea was] 
    the one I felt most sure of was the one I was deprived of waging. I 
    could have won the war in Korea in a maximum of 10 days.... I would 
    have dropped between 30 and 50 atomic bombs on his air bases and other 
    depots strung across the neck of Manchuria.... It was my plan as our 
    amphibious forces moved south to spread behind us—from the Sea of Japan 
    to the Yellow Sea—a belt of radioactive cobalt. 
 
    It could have been spread from wagons, carts, trucks and planes.... 
    For at least 60 years there could have been no land invasion of 
    Korea from the north. The enemy could not have marched across that 
    radiated belt.[0]"

The only nation to ever use nuclear weapons in warfare then normalizing their use would have created a far worse fate for the US than not winning the war in Korea decisively.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President_Truman%27s_relief_of...

There is a reasonable argument that the use of nukes would haven saved millions of lives, like it did in Japan.

Ulysses S Grant was criticized for the heavy losses his armies took and inflicted, but he ended a stalemated war that was killing hundreds of thousands of people a year.

There is also a reasonable argument that the use of nukes would have demonstrated the US, being the only power to ever use nuclear weapons in combat until that point and having thus proven willing to continue doing so indiscriminately, to be a much greater threat to the world than the Axis powers were, or the Communist powers at the time.

That some might not understand is a poor reason to sentence half the world to slavery and death. Many of the peaceniks of the 50s grew to regret their positions when they found out what was really going on behind the iron curtain.

Remember when Bertrand Russell was advocating a pre-emptive nuclear war to ensure it would be the last nuclear war?

That is, unless NK decides to use some or all of their few dozen(?) nukes. Then, that line of thinking will be laughable.

Of course, we won't know until NK no longer exists as a belligerent country who is correct.

You mean by letting MacArthur nuking Korea and start bombing China? Do you really believe this would have helped making anyone safer?

I'm not wholly convinced that preventing Mao from enacting the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution would be worse than an atomic war with early 1950s technology, in terms of absolute human suffering.

Hindsight is pretty clear that we had a massive nuclear and military advantage over the Soviets and Chinese and didn't use it. Instead hundreds of millions were enslaved and killed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com