Vor fünfzig Jahren hätte die Weltgeschichte anders geschrieben werden können. Nach erst jetzt freigegebenen US-Dokumenten plante die US-Armee 1958 einen Nuklearschlag gegen China. Eine bis zu 15.000 Tonnen schwere Atombombe hätte im Falle einer Blockade Taiwans abgeworfen werden sollen. Dass das Militär seine Pläne nicht verwirklichen konnte, liegt an dem damaligen US-Präsidenten Eisenhower, wie die Dokumente belegen. Er machte den Militärs einen Strich durch die Rechnung.

[Eisenhower stellte sich gegen Militärs]

Eine 15 Kilotonnen Atombombe wiegt keine 15 Kilotonnen - das ist der Sinn des Ganzen ... [Wurde inzwischen korrigiert]

Aber etwas ernster: Das ist nicht sehr verwunderlich. Die USA haben einige Jahre davor während des Koreakrieges immer wieder erwogen, Atomwaffen gegen China (an overall atomic campaign against Red China) und/oder Nordkorea einzusetzen, einmal sogar öffentlich:

At a famous news conference on 30 November President Harry Truman threatened use of the atomic bomb, saying the US might use any weapon in its arsenal. (10) The threat was not the faux pas many assumed it to be, but was based on contingency planning to use the bomb. On that same day, Air Force General George Stratemeyer sent an order to General Hoyt Vandenberg that the Strategic Air Command should be put on warning, "to be prepared to dispatch without delay medium bomb groups to the Far East . . . this augmentation should include atomic capabilities."

[Bruce Cumings, Why Did Truman Really Fire MacArthur? ... The Obscure History of Nuclear Weapons and the Korean War Provides the Answer, History News Network, 10. Jänner 2005]

[Nachsatz:]

Without even using such "novel weapons" -- although napalm was very new -- the air war levelled North Korea and killed millions of civilians. North Koreans tell you that for three years they faced a daily threat of being burned with napalm: "You couldn't escape it," one told me in 1981. By 1952 just about everything in northern and central Korea had been completely levelled. What was left of the population survived in caves.

Over the course of the war, Conrad Crane wrote, the US air force "had wreaked terrible destruction all across North Korea. Bomb damage assessment at the armistice revealed that 18 of 22 major cities had been at least half obliterated." A table he provided showed that the big industrial cities of Hamhung and Hungnam were 80-85% destroyed, Sariwon 95%, Sinanju 100%, the port of Chinnampo 80% and Pyongyang 75%. A British reporter described one of the thousands of obliterated villages as "a low, wide mound of violet ashes." General William Dean, who was captured after the battle of Taejon in July 1950 and taken to the North, later said that most of the towns and villages he saw were just "rubble or snowy open spaces." Just about every Korean he met, Dean wrote, had had a relative killed in a bombing raid. (17) Even Winston Churchill, late in the war, was moved to tell Washington that when napalm was invented, no one contemplated that it would be "splashed" all over a civilian population. (18)

This was Korea, "the limited war." The views of its architect, Curtis LeMay, serve as its epitaph. After it started, he said: "We slipped a note kind of under the door into the Pentagon and said let us go up there . . . and burn down five of the biggest towns in North Korea -- and they're not very big -- and that ought to stop it. Well, the answer to that was four or five screams -- 'You'll kill a lot of non-combatants' and 'It's too horrible.' Yet over a period of three years or so . . . we burned down every town in North Korea and South Korea, too . . . Now, over a period of three years this is palatable, but to kill a few people to stop this from happening -- a lot of people can't stomach it." (19)