ABSTRACT
The Korean War was one of the important triggers for the expansion of the Cold War, and it embraced the continuing Vietnamese War into that conflagration, which marked the anti-colonial and anti-communist wars of the 1950s. The Korean War also marked the return to the heavy industrial warfare of the Pacific and European Wars, with large investments in air power, armour and heavy artillery. The rise of the People’s Republic of China brought American attention back from Europe to Asia, leading to the allocation of a multi-million dollar defense expenditure to the ‘general area of China’. The American losses in Korea amounted to 144,000 people lost in deaths, casualties, MIA and POW, whereas the North Koreans and their Chinese allies together lost over 1.2 million people. The Soviet Union remained the main existential threat to America, and US squadrons of jetpowered B-52 bombers capable of bombing the Soviet Union were readied while the H-bomb tests were concluded in late October 1952. But the stockpile of ordinary atomic bombs expanded from 300 in 1950 to more than 1,300 by late in 1953. During the fiscal year of 1950, the military budget amounted to nearly 30 percent of federal expenditure and approximately 5 percent of gross national product. By 1953 the defense budget had increased to 60 percent of federal expenditure and 14 percent of GNP.1 Proportionally equal armament expenditures were made by the governments in the Soviet Union and the PRC. Rearmament continued at an increasing pace, and the French in Indochina were to share in this increasing military expenditure. The continuing increase in US defense expenditure in comparison to a limited selection of Western nations can be seen in the following table, prepared in the Office of the Secretary of Defense for the Mutual Defense Assistance.
