Are They Useless? XI-How About Korea? And Cuba?
We thought about it.
We made detailed operational plans for doing it.
But we never used nuclear weapons on the Soviet Union to prevent or preempt anything. Even in the 1940’s and 50’s when we might have done so without suffering retaliation.
Maybe some after 1949 when they tested their first atomic bomb. Hard to be sure.
Have we used them since 1945 in our actual wars? If not, why not? Especially in the ones we ended up losing, or at least not winning. Which is all of them, actually, since World War II. Except a few times when we invaded small countries to our south—the Dominican Republic, Grenada and Panama. We did win those, you could say.
Korea
What about the Korean War?
This wasn’t a war, actually, because our Congress never declared it. Our Constitution says our Congress must declare our wars. The United Nations had declared this one at our request. The UN called it a “police action.” Other countries helped us with troops but it was mostly us the whole time.
Whatever it was, it was hard. For us, and maybe even more for the Koreans. Twice it had looked like the we, South Korea, and the United Nations might lose it, whatever it was.
It had started when North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950. At the time, we had nuclear weapons and North Korea didn’t. China had come into the war later in 1950, when we had nuclear weapons and China didn’t. Clearly neither North Korea nor China had been deterred by our atomic bombs.
True, the Soviet Union had successfully tested an atomic bomb of their own in August 1949, a few months before North Korea invaded South Korea. Mao Tse Tung (as it was spelled then) had proclaimed the existence of the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949. In 1950, the Soviet Union had signed a mutual defense and assistance pact with Mao’s China.
By June 1950, when North Korea invaded South Korea, the Soviets had the atomic bomb but surely not many yet. For the same reason we hadn’t had many at first. We just hadn’t been able to produce enough highly enriched uranium and plutonium, the fissile fuels that are the sine qua non.
By 1950, however, when the Korean War started, we in the U.S. were mass producing atomic bombs and had hundreds.
But we seem not to have considered using our nuclear weapons in Korea. Not at first. Soon after the war started in June 1950, we had bombed North Korea, massively, with conventional bombs. And, starting in November 1950, with firebombs.
In May 1951, an international fact finding team from East Germany, West Germany, China and the Netherlands came to North Korea to examine the results. "The members, in the whole course of their journey,” their report said, “did not see one town that had not been destroyed, and there were very few undamaged villages.”
China had come into the war in October 1950 when General MacArthur taken UN forces up close to the border between North Korea and China. MacArthur had been suggesting that he might not stop there.
China came in hard and United Nations and South Korean forces were quickly driven back into South Korea. They were still being pushed south when General MacArthur asked the Joint Chiefs of Staff for permission to use nuclear weapons “to prevent ultimate fallback,” he said.
Permission hadn’t been granted.
The tide was turned anyway by our regular forces under the command of General Matthew Ridgeway. The Chinese and North Koreans were driven back north to the 38th parallel. A stalemate set in. Lots of fighting and killing but nobody making what you would want to call progress.
The Soviets hadn’t come into the war. Soviet pilots were thought to be flying the MIG jet fighters that were defending against our bombing sorties in North Korea. Later, when the Soviets seemed to be massing forces in Manchuria, our leaders gave some thought (and actual preparations were made) to use atomic weapons if the Soviets came in. But they didn’t. And we didn’t.
In July of 1953, President Eisenhower’s first year in office, North Korea, South Korea, China and the United States signed an armistice that ended the fighting, though not the war, or whatever it was. Armistices end fighting, not wars.
When Eisenhower became president in January of 1953, he had hinted he was thinking about using nuclear weapons, not just in North Korea, which had been destroyed already, but also in China. Maybe those hints had made the Chinese agree to the armistice, but I don’t see why we should think so. If that was it, why did we get only an armistice out of the deal instead of a surrender?
Cuba
Here’s another big one to think about.
Late in 1962, the second year of JFK’s administration, our CIA discovered that the Soviets had sneaked into Cuba some of their Intermediate and Medium Range Ballistic Missiles, missiles we were pretty sure would be able to carry thermonuclear warheads to almost any city in the U.S. Maybe not Seattle up in the far northwest. But New York City and Washington, D.C. for sure.
One of the thernomuclear warheads we both had now, if it landed on Washington, D.C., would destroy the whole city.
When our CIA finally discovered the Soviets had pulled this off, the question was what we should do about it. President Kennedy had been urged by the Chief of Staff of the Air Force he had appointed, Curtis LeMay, to use nuclear weapons on Cuba. That was the only way, JFK was told by LeMay and the other Joint Chiefs, we could be sure of “finding” and rendering unusable all of the missiles and nuclear warheads the Soviets might have gotten into the country by now.
A conventional invasion would succeed but might not get the job done in time. Even one thermonuclear warhead exploding in the United States would be unacceptable, wouldn’t it? I would say so.
So just use our nuclear weapons to lay waste to all of Cuba.
We could do this, lay waste to all of Cuba, there was no doubt about that. Cuba wouldn’t be able to stop us. The Soviets wouldn’t be able to stop us. We didn’t know exactly how many missiles they had in there already or if the missiles had warheads on them ready to go. (We later learned that they did.) But we did know we had a whole lot more of both nuclear weapons and the means of delivering them than the Soviets did. In their whole stockpile, let alone in Cuba.
For another thing, in the 1960’s, we had put on alert in Great Britain, Italy, and Turkey Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles of our own carrying megaton-range nuclear warheads that were capable of reaching Moscow. The Soviets hadn’t been able to do anything about it. Unless maybe they wanted to do a pre-emptive attack. But if they did that on our British, Italian and Turkish allies, the NATO treaty said we’d have to treat that as an attack on us.
Even so, we sure weren’t going to let the Soviets put the same kind of missiles in Cuba. Which would put them within reach of Washington D.C.
The Soviets also didn’t have us surrounded with airbases the way we had them surrounded with ours. As of 1957, we’d had reason to think the Soviet Union had Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles that could reach us. But as of 1960, we got an ICBM too, and now had more than they did.
Instead of attacking Cuba with our conventional or our nuclear forces, JFK ordered a naval blockade of Cuba and told the Soviets they needed to take those missiles and nuclear warheads out of there. Later he told them we’d take our missiles out of Turkey if the Soviets would take theirs out of Cuba. That was cagey of JFK since we’d already decided to bring ours home from Turkey. And from the rest of Europe. With our new Atlas ICBMs on alert in our own country since 1960, we didn’t think we needed to run the risk of putting missiles with thermonuclear warheads on them on alert in foreign countries.
Neither we nor the Soviets used nuclear weapons during this crisis. We learned later, though, how close we’d come to having it happen by accident. On both sides.
For one thing, the Soviets had used a Surface-to-Air missile they had developed to shoot down a U-2 photoreconnaissance airplane our CIA had sent over Cuba. The pilot, Major Rudolph Anderson, was killed. The U-2 flight had been undertaken without Kennedy’s approval. The shoot-down hadn’t been approved by Khrushchev.
You could say we “won” this confrontation, or crisis, or whatever you want to call it, won it doubly since we had gotten those missiles removed from Cuba and also hadn’t lost any soldiers in making that happen (except Major Anderson, the U-2 pilot).
Some of our military leaders were inclined to think that the reason we had “won” was because we had so many more nuclear weapons and delivery systems than they did, which meant there was a large “strategic imbalance” in our favor. In the long run, though, maybe not. Up until this crisis, the Soviets hadn’t been trying for “strategic balance.” After this, they decided to go all out for “stratetgic superiority.”
It took them a while but in the 70’s they finally did it. They had more nuclear warheads and ICBMs than we did. Bigger ones too.
Now what?
Next: Are They Useless? XII-Vietnam? Israel? Afghanistan?