Presidential Predicaments: Truman VI (of VIII) - Who Gets Custody of Them?
The Soviets had joined the war against Japan only at the very end of it. But soon after the end of World War II, the Korean peninsula had been divided into a north part, which would be occupied by the Soviets and Communist, and a south part, which the United States would occupy. In 1948, two Korean nations were established and the Soviet and American occupying forces withdrew. It was hardly a settled situation. In South Korea, Communist insurgents conducted frequent attacks. South Korea seemed to be dealing with them pretty effectively. But bad behavior, massacres, were taking place on both sides.
In February of 1950, about six months after the Soviets successfully tested their first atomic bomb, the Soviet Union signed a mutual defense and assistance pact with China. Communists led by Mao Zedong had just driven the Chinese Nationalists, whom we had been supporting, out of the Chinese mainland and taken control of it.
Four months later, on June 25, 1950, North Korea, a Communist country now, launched an invasion of non-Communist South Korea over the dividing line that had been drawn between the two countries, the 38th parallel. On June 28, the capital of South Korea, Seoul, which was not far south of the 38th parallel, fell.
The North Korean forces continued their advance.
On June 27, the Security Council of United Nations, which was less than five years old, passed a resolution that declared the invasion illegal. It called upon member states to oppose the invasion in a “police action.” The Soviet Union, which could have vetoed the resolution, was boycotting the Security Council meetings because Nationalist China still had a seat on it and Communist China didn’t.
On July 8, President Truman appointed as commander of the United Nations forces that would be opposing the invasion—which of course would be mostly forces from the United States—General Douglas MacArthur. MacArthur was the general who had accepted the Japanese surrender in September 1945 and was now overseeing the occupation of Japan.
By August, two months after North Korea had invaded, its forces had driven United Nations and South Korean troops down into a small area around Pusan, at the bottom of the Korean peninsula. The next step back for our forces would have been into the Sea of Japan.
On September 15, General MacArthur, conducted an improbable amphibious invasion of North Korea at Inchon on the west coast of Korea just north of the 38th parallel. Very heavy bombing campaigns were now being conducted in the north. The North Korean forces were soon retreating in disarray from Pusan. Before long they had retreated back above the 38th parallel.
In October 1950, UN forces began to advance quickly from the 38th parallel north toward the Yalu River on North Korea’s border with China. MacArthur made it clear he intended to keep going after them all the way to the border with China. Maybe not stopping there.
On October 15, 1950, President Truman had a meeting with MacArthur on Wake Island. President Truman was concerned that if our forces approached North Korea’s northern border, China would come into the war. General MacArthur told him he was sure China wouldn’t come in.
On October 19, four days after Truman’s meeting with MacArthur on Wake Island, troops from China came across the border into North Korea in massive numbers. U.S. and South Korean troops were driven south. By late December, two months after the Chinese forces had crossed the border, they crossed the 38th parallel and entered South Korea.
In November, the UN forces were still falling back south. In a news conference, President Truman was asked about the use of nuclear weapons.
Q. Mr. President,… Did we understand you clearly that the use of the atomic bomb is under active consideration?
Truman: Always has been. It is one of our weapons.
Q. Does that mean, Mr. President, use against military objectives, or civilian—
Truman: It's a matter that the military people will have to decide. I'm not a military authority that passes on those things….
Q. Mr. President, you said this depends on United Nations action. Does that mean that we wouldn't use the atomic bomb except on a United Nations authorization?
Truman: No, it doesn't mean that at all. The action against Communist China depends on the action of the United Nations. The military commander in the field will have charge of the use of the weapons, as he always has.[88]
It was noticed that in this statement President Truman seemed to be ceding the authority to order the use of nuclear weapons to the military. A correction was shortly issued by the White House: “[O]nly the President can authorize the use of the atom bomb, and no such authorization has been given.”
So where were we?
At the moment, the military did not have custody of any nuclear weapons. The Atomic Energy Act of 1946 had given custody of the weapons to the civilian Atomic Energy Commission.
On December 9, with the Chinese forces still moving south, General MacArthur asked that field commanders be given discretion to employ nuclear weapons. The weapons would be used, he said, only to prevent “ultimate fallback,” that is, to keep our forces from being driven out of the Korean peninsula.
In February of 1951, however, General Matthew Ridgeway was put in command of the U. S. Eighth Army, and the tide began to turn. Again. The Chinese fell back. On March 14, the UN forces recaptured Seoul, the fourth time the city had changed hands during the war. It was, of courses, in ruins. Just about every city on the Korean peninsula was in ruins now.
In April of 1951, General MacArthur and the UN forces became alarmed at a buildup of Soviet forces in Manchuria across the border with North Korea. On April 6, President Truman met with Gordon Dean, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, and they agreed to transfer nine complete Mark 4 nuclear bombs to the custody of the military on Guam. The Mark 4s, our first mass produced atomic bombs, were a significant step up from the bombs used upon Japan. They could be set to different yields, for one thing. The top yield was half again more than the Nagasaki bomb’s had been.
Chairman of the AEC Gordon Dean was concerned that General MacArthur might not understand the nature these weapons as well as he needed to. Official custody of the nine Mark 4’s was given not to MacArthur but to the Strategic Air Command.
Five days later, on April 11, in a decision President Truman knew would be deeply unpopular here at home, he relieved General MacArthur of command, not for “insubordination” exactly, but for what were said to be policy differences.
When MacArthur returned to the United States later in April, he was widely and wildly celebrated by the American public. With parades and the like. In May-June, a closed Congressional inquiry was conducted on President Truman’s action. The panel supported the President. The transcripts from the hearing were not made available to the American public until 1973, more than twenty years later. The public criticism of President Truman continued unabated.
In July of 1951, what was called a “stalemate” set in around the the 38th parallel, the original dividing line between North and South Korea. Plenty of fighting and killing but no real progress being made by either side. This state of affairs lasted for a couple of years, through the end of President Truman’s administration.
In an interview Macarthur gave to Jim Lucas and Bob Considine on 25 January 1954, after he was relieved of command that was not released until after his death in 1964, MacArthur set out what his plan would have been for the use of nuclear weapons.
Of all the campaigns of my life, 20 major ones to be exact, 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.
In 1950, the physicist Leo Szilard had imagined building a bomb that would make use of the radioactive isotope Cobalt 60. Cobalt 60 emits gamma radiation, the most penetrating and deadly kind. The Cobalt 60 would be produced by placing ordinary cobalt around a thermonuclear bomb. Detonation of the bomb or bombs would eventually spread the Cobalt 60 around the world. Cobalt 60 has a half-life of 5.7 years, which meant that it could not be outlasted in a shelter. The gamma radiation from it would be deadly for more than a human lifetime. A cobalt bomb would be able to kill everyone on earth.
Leaving aside the question of what would have been the physical aftermath of MacArthur dropping 30-50 atomic bombs on Soviet and Chinese targets and what the Soviet response would have been to our use of those bombs on their territory, we may ask how General MacArthur imagined Cobalt 60 could be safely distributed behind our forces by people in “wagons, carts, trucks and planes.” And how one could think the Soviet and Chinese forces would not have found a way around the barrier if they’d wanted to.
MacArthur seems never to have presented his sure-fire plan to the Joint Chiefs of Staff so we can’t be sure what they would have thought of it. He did not get to see if this particular campaign would have “won the war in ten days.” Or what would have unfolded.
After MacArthur was relieved of command, the use of atomic weapons in Korea seems not to have been seriously contemplated. During President Truman’s time in office at least.
In relieving MacArthur of command, President Truman had, however, actuated and reinforced the principle of civilian control of the military that is set out in the U.S. Constitution. Along the way, he had also affirmed the notion that, unlike “conventional” weapons, atomic weapons were to remain under civilian, that is, the President’s, control.
All this could have gone in a different direction.