ABSTRACT
Korea was the first limited war. The United States confined her response to the Korean peninsula and did not employ atomic bombs, even after the Chinese had intervened in November 1950. At the time, however, these restrictions seemed neither obvious nor inevitable. As General Matthew Ridgway, then Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations at the Pentagon, later recalled, before the North Korean attack the concept of limited warfare had ‘never entered our counsels’.1 As a result there were those, both civilian and military, who wanted to respond by a pre-emptive strike against the Soviet Union.2 Others expected the United States to seek a decisive outcome in Korea by using the atomic bomb even at the risk of initiating World War Three. On 28 June 1950, General Dwight D.Eisenhower, who had recently retired as Chief of Staff of the US army, visited the Pentagon where he urged his former subordinates ‘in most vigorous language and with great emphasis’ to remove all restrictions on military action north of the 38th parallel and consider the use of one or two atomic bombs if suitable targets could be found.3 Although the United States adopted neither course in the next three years of fighting, atomic weapons played a key role in the diplomacy of the conflict and the circumstances in which they might actually be employed were also kept under continuous review. As recent research has revealed, in this respect there was no dramatic firebreak between the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. Indeed it was under Harry S.Truman and not his successor that the United States came closest to the atomic brink.
