Woulda coulda shoulda.
I don't think the will existed later, or the prudence prior, to make that possible.
The world would look different today, certainly. A very different cold war. All by having the border more near the 39th parallel than the 38th. Seoul would be safer, sure.
"Truman shoulda let MacArthur nuke the Chinese!"
Nuke what? What target destruction would have deterred Mao?
3 comments:
I don't think "nuking the Chinese" was a realistic choice for Pr. Truman. He saw enough of the world situation to recognize how it would lead to a wider war. It is even possible, having been the only person to order the use of nuclear weapons, that he was strongly disinclined to do it again.
However, the Chinese military tactics involved massing troops in large formations and driving into the enemy lines to overwhelm the defenses. Smaller tactical nuclear weapons would have been very effective if deployed over massed Chinese formations prior to contact.
This was the same planning the U.S. Army had in Europe during the Cold War in the event of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. The Soviet Army had the same massed attack planning and we were prepared to meet it with nuclear weapons, even down to nuclear artillery to break up the salient formations.
I don't think nuking the Chinese, if undertaken, would have moved the needle in any positive-for-us direction is my thing.
Not to mention the fact that genuinely tactical nuclear weapons (something that could be used on a battlefield as opposed to strategic bombardment) didn't even exist until 1953, with the introduction of the Mk 7 bomb and M65 atomic cannon.
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