Thus the options for America and its Asia-Pacific allies in the confrontation with Pyongyang are severely limited. The United States, in particular, has to take care not to undercut its alliance partners by dealing directly with the North—or with the North and China. Given North Korea’s consistent violation of every commitment it has ever made, there is no credible reason to believe that any further negotiations will bear fruit. The true significance of diplomatic talks is symbolic. Western countries that break off talks risk alienating portions of their publics. Rogue states cheerfully will use international media outlets to blame the West for rising tensions and gain traction with the idealistic and credulous.
The failure to stop North Korea risks encouraging nuclear proliferation by America’s increasingly nervous allies. South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and Australia each could go nuclear in less than a year, having stocks of nuclear fuel and all the technical expertise needed to rapidly weaponize.
Yesterday’s Korea: The Hermit Gets a Bomb
AT THE beginning of 1950, the normally astute and far-sighted Dean Acheson, the U.S. secretary of state, made a speech in which he excluded South Korea from the reach of America’s vital geostrategic interests—issuing, albeit unintentionally, an invitation for conquest. Stalin, the wrong person to whom to send such an invitation, accepted the offer. He gave his puppet, Kim Il-Sung—a former Red Army sniper who would fill his starving country with 34,000 monuments to himself—his express consent to start a war. Another interpretation of events is offered by Henry Kissinger. Because he found no Russian reference to Acheson’s speech as the reason Stalin consented to the war option, Kissinger concludes that the culprit was National Security Council memorandum 48/2,[21] adopted December 30, 1949. It excluded Taiwan and South Korea from the sphere of vital American security interests in Asia—those over which America would go to war. Soviet-era files showed references to this document in assessing whether to invade the South.
Less than six months after America’s all-but-engraved invitation, on June 25, 1950, Kim Il-Sung’s Soviet-equipped troops crossed the 38th parallel and invaded South Korea. The attack caught the United States flat-footed.
Acheson alerted President Truman, at home in Missouri, and the UN Secretary-General, Trygvye Lie, who immediately convened the Security Council. Charged at the end of World War II with the ambitious goal of maintaining international peace, the Security Council faced a major test. Of its five permanent members with the power of veto—the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Nationalist China, and the USSR—one had encouraged North Korea’s aggression and would likely veto any effort to help South Korea. Meanwhile, Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalist China, the loser of China’s quarter century of intermittent civil war, had retreated to the island of Taiwan the year before. This left the mainland—and the Korean border—to Mao Zedong’s Chinese Communist Party.
Less than 24 hours after the North Korean attack, the Security Council met in New York City to discuss the crisis. In a diplomatic blunder they did not repeat until 2011 (as to intervention in Libya), the Russians boycotted the meeting and lost their chance to veto. President Truman assembled a 16-nation coalition under the auspices of the United Nations, and American soldiers soon were fighting what became officially known as a “police action” under the UN aegis.
General Douglas MacArthur—who himself had publicly excluded South Korea from the sphere of vital American interests on March 14, 1949—took back the southern half of the peninsula and decided to press onward, crossing the 38th parallel and eventually reaching the North Korea–China border. MacArthur, who viewed nuclear weapons as a legitimate military option, calculated that a nuclear-armed United States need not fear Chinese intervention. Paul Nitze, then President Truman’s national security adviser, saw cable traffic indicating that Mac-Arthur’s goal was to invade China, overthrow Mao Zedong, and restore Chiang Kai-Shek to power. Nitze noted that MacArthur had no idea how small the U.S. nuclear arsenal was in 1950.[22]
On October 7 the UN authorized combat operations inside North Korea, as the Truman administration adopted reunification of North and South as a war aim. But catching MacArthur by surprise, the People’s Republic of China (like North Korea, neither a true people’s government nor a republic) entered the war on October 23. Its confrontation with the UN-led army was the first direct military engagement between American and Communist troops, an initially disastrous one for the Americans. China had 4 million men under arms, dwarfing the UN forces.
It is a common misperception that MacArthur’s decision to go to the Yalu River was the reason that China entered the war. In fact, Henry Kissinger writes, the triggers were American forces becoming engaged in combat on July 5, plus the Seventh Fleet’s “neutralizing” the Taiwan Strait, a move designed to preclude a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. For Mao, any American presence in the Korean Peninsula was an intolerable provocation, engendering Chinese historical fears of encirclement.
In Chinese dictator Mao Zedong, MacArthur faced a ruthless adversary utterly indifferent to massive loss of life. In discussing the prospect of a nuclear war, Mao remarked: “We may lose more than 300 million people. So what? War is war.” Although America’s nuclear weapons status did not deter Chinese aggression, the existence of nuclear weapons was not without strategic weight during the conflict. On August 5, after only six weeks of war, Truman had approved sending 10 B-29s armed with A-bombs to Guam for possible use in Korea. (Only nine planes made it, one having crashed.)
Chinese leaders knew of the American cache of atomic weapons stored on Okinawa. On November 30, 1950—a month after American forces were attacked by Chinese “volunteers” and shortly before the American retreat began—President Truman refused to rule out use of the atomic bomb in Korea. Yet Truman announced just eight days later that he would not use atomic weapons without first consulting with Great Britain, a key partner in the Korean War coalition. Then on April 6, 1951, Truman authorized General Hoyt Vandenberg to be his deputy, and at his discretion to order release of the A-bombs for use in Korea.
In 1951 MacArthur, invited to address Congress after President Truman had fired him, explained: “But once war is forced upon us, there is no other alternative than to apply every available means to bring it to a swift end. War’s very object is victory, not prolonged indecision. In war there is no substitute for victory.” The Korean War ended two years later, on July 27, 1953, with an armistice but no formal peace treaty. Thus, a technical legal state of war persists to this day.
Kissinger argues that in 1950 the U.S. missed a potentially great strategic opportunity. Had MacArthur not advanced all the way to the Chinese border, but only 100 miles into North Korea, he would have taken the North’s capital, Pyongyang, and also its prime port, Wonsan; and the South would have had a 100-mile wide front to defend against Mao’s troops, instead of 400 miles along the Yalu River; the current front along the 38th parallel is 151 miles. Had that line been held it would have placed Seoul out of range of the North’s artillery, and thus made South Korea far more secure than it is today. Had the boundary been drawn there in 1945, war would have been less likely.
21
Established in 1947, the National Security Council is an advisory body that is part of the White House staff. The NSC advises the president and coordinates foreign and defense policy matters within the White House.
22
The Natural Resources Council Database (accessed August 21, 2011) estimates that the U.S. stockpile of nuclear weapons was 369 in 1950 and 640 in 1951. These are year-end totals. Only a small fraction of stockpiled weapons was actually deployed and thus ready for use.
In his centennial history of AT&T,