Was MacArthur Right?

                              "Old soldiers never die, they just fade away ..."

Back in 1950 after North Korea had invaded South Korea ... and the ROK/UN forces with the considerable help of the United  States under General Douglas MacArthur had, within the year,  pushed the Norks back to the Yalu river, the Chinese Communists entered the war with massive hoards of soldiers ... some not even armed. MacArthur felt that this aggression required that the U.S. respond with tactical nuclear weapons against these massive Chinese armies. For his outspokenness on this issue, he was fired by President Harry Truman.

The question now poses itself ... was MacArthur right? The real decision point was whether MacArthur's action would have started a world-wide nuclear conflagration? I think that this is a difficult question. But my best guess is no ... because the U.S. was so far ahead of every other country that China and Russia would not dared to respond in kind. China was 14 years away from having an atomic weapon and Russia only had had them for four years ... and was three years away from the H-bomb.

So, what might have been the result if Truman had given MacArthur his leash? One, we would now have a unified Korean peninsula with no Kim Jong Un and his atomic madness. Number two, China might well feel more reticent to challenge the West militarily. And three, China might even have followed Japan's path toward demilitarizing as a result of the trauma it experienced at the Yalu river.

Yes, there were risks involved under MacArthur's strategy ... but were they any larger than what we face today?