Stunned by North Korea’s invasion of the South in June 1950, President Harry S. Truman hastily ordered what he officially called a “police action,” but everyone else called a war.
It didn’t take long, as the shock sunk in of the Communists’ military successes, for some American officials to urge the use of atomic weapons in the escalating conflict.
Among them was Representative Lloyd Bentsen, a Texas Democrat who would one day be his party’s vice-presidential candidate. Mr. Bentsen called on Mr. Truman to issue an ultimatum: that North Korea withdraw its troops within a week or “use that week to evacuate a named list of principal cities which would be subjected to atomic attack by our Air Force.”
Only five years had passed since President Truman had ordered the dropping of atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with catastrophic casualties but a hastened end to World War II.
Mr. Bentsen was not alone in advocating nuclear force. Senator Owen Brewster, Republican of Maine, called on President Truman to relinquish his sole authority over atomic weaponry so that Gen. Douglas MacArthur, as commander of the United Nations forces in Korea, might use A-bombs at his own discretion in the battlefield.
At the same time, there were many dissenters. One of the most prominent was Hanson W. Baldwin (1903-1991), the Pulitzer Prize-winning military affairs correspondent of The New York Times, who may have been the first journalist to use the term “ground zero,” William Safire wrote in 2001.
Mr. Baldwin was scarcely a pacifist. But he considered himself, from a strategic point of view, a realist.
“Under no circumstances should the atomic bomb be used in Korea,” he wrote on July 16, 1950. “Our whole aim should be to avoid an atomic strategy, if possible, in any war.”
“The moral arguments against such use are self evident: ‘What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?’”“The political and psychological reasons for a policy of atomic abstention should also be self-evident. Politically, an atomic strategy would tend to spread what already has far exceeded the limits of a ‘police action.’ Use of the atomic bomb against Northern Korea might well extend the war to the world.”“Psychologically, the use of the atomic bomb would be almost certain to consolidate North Korea and most of Asia, even those few peoples of Asia who are still our friends, against us.”
Mr. Baldwin, who went so far in the article as to raise the possibility of using napalm against the enemy, said that America did not have enough bombs in its arsenal to use them as tactical weapons; that the bombs were most effectively used against cities or large industrial complexes, which were then few and far between in the North; and that the bombs would not dissuade the Communist troops from fighting.
“There is another point, which those few Americans who so carelessly advocate the use of the atomic bomb should remember,” he concluded. “We no longer have an atomic monopoly.”
Five months later, after Communist Chinese forces had entered the war, President Truman alarmed the world when he said that the United States would use the atomic bomb, if necessary, to assure victory in Korea.
Mr. Baldwin continued to demur. And when the Korean War was close to ending in 1953, and he contemplated the perils of the atomic age, Mr. Baldwin wrote presciently:
“There is no such thing as absolute security in the world of man — least of all today in the midst of a technological revolution in warfare which has foreshortened distance, eliminated American geographical isolation, and exposed us to attack.”
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