It’s Not So Easy to End a War: The Korean Conflict & Its Bomb Building Aftermath

3,377 words

It is not easy to end a war. The frustration, hatreds, and objectives only half-achieved at the expense of so many lives make the negotiations very difficult. One war, which was ended despite the objectives of the belligerents only being half-achieved, was in Korea. How that war ended, and how the conflict’s rival sponsors, the United States and the Soviet Union, interacted afterwards is important to look at, especially since the Ukraine War seems to be trending towards a tangled peace settlement as this article goes to print, and there are parallels between Ukraine in 2025 and Korea in the early 1950s.

The Korean War came as a surprise in mid-1950. The strategic environment which led to the conflict started when the peninsula was divided between the communists and the Americans at the 38th parallel in 1945. China fell to the communists in 1949. The geopolitical shift in power towards the communists continued after Jewish scientists snuck the critical technical secrets of the American atomic bomb to the Soviets. Stalin got the atomic bomb in 1949, earlier than he would have with just his own scientists. The stolen bomb gave the Soviets the ability to deter the Americans from using atomic weapons. On January 12, 1950, U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson gave a speech to the National Press Club which outlined America’s defensive perimeter in the Pacific that did not include South Korea. After reading the speech, Stalin decided to back his North Korean ally to reunify the Korean ethnostate politically by conquest.

The Korean War has come to be called the Forgotten War since it happened between World War II and Vietnam, which were more storied conflicts. However, the world we live in is really shaped by the fight in Korea. American deindustrialization is partially due to the conflict. The American government has purchased continued South Korean compliance by allowing the Asian country to capture low-end manufacturing and expand from there. As Seoul rose, Detroit fell.

America’s domestic political alignments shifted due to the war also. Isolationism became an untenable policy since the Soviets had an exportable ideology and had a record of expansion. Many American activists shifted their focus to fighting communism rather than holding the line on important racial issues. The US President at the start of the conflict, Harry Truman, was an unreconstructed Southerner, but his party had changed enough that many within its ranks supported desegregation and “civil rights.” Truman also had a Jewish racial integrationist as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Manpower and Personnel. Truman also diplomatically recognized the so-called state of Israel. While Truman was not personally “woke,” but his administration’s policies paved the way for the problems of black rioting, immigration, and Zionism. A genuine far right appeared in response to the Korean War, but it was in the margins, only partially achieving any power during the Reagan administration.

Within months after the start of hostilities it became clear that the situation in Korea would either continue as a stalemate or grow into another world war. With the stakes so high and the reward for pressing on to the Yalu River so low, peace negotiations started.

On June 30, 1951, the commander of the anti-communist United Nations Forces (i.e. South Korean, American, and other allied militaries), General Matthew Ridgeway, radioed the following message to the commander of the Communist Forces in Korea saying:

I am informed that you may wish a meeting to discuss an armistice providing for the cessation of hostilities and all acts of armed forces in Korea, with adequate guarantees for the maintenance of such armistice.

In his definitive history of the Korean War, T.R. Fehrenbach wrote:

It was a remarkable statement for an American commander, triumphant in the field, to make to an as yet unhumbled enemy. It occurred less than a decade after an American pronouncement of a goal of unconditional surrender of its enemies, but it revealed an aeon of diplomatic and political change in American thinking on the matter of war. And here, on 30 June, a certain amount of love between the United States and the [South Korean Government] ended. For the Republic of Korea saw no honor in the proposed cease-fire, which left its people ravaged and still divided. A settlement along the 38th parallel, for all the American and UN protestations of continuance of the goal of uniting Korea by peaceful means, meant the separation of Korea into two blocs for a long as man could count, possibly for centuries. Syngman Rhee was spurred not only by economic and national reasons to oppose peace now but also by those same reasons that bound Europe’s leaders into an emotional straitjacket in 1916-1917, when the Great War stalemated and it seemed sensible to end it. The [South Korean government] had gone into the war with its whole heart; it had been devastated, and one in twenty of its people killed or injured. Millions of orphans and homeless wandered its ruins [1]

The next day, North Korea’s Supreme Leader, Kim Il Sung, and the commander of the Chinese Communist Forces (CCF) in Korea, Peng The-huai, agreed to a meeting in Kaesong, a town situated on the main north-south corridor of travel and three miles below the 38th parallel but several miles behind the communist lines.

The communists took advantage of the situation to the fullest. They commissioned senior communist politicians into their respective militaries and sent them to the truce talks. The UN command sent fighting men, who were in over their heads in such a situation. The initial location for the talks meant the United Nations delegation had to pass through communist lines with white flags as thought they were surrendering. Once at the conference venue, the American negotiator, Vice Admiral Turner Joy, was given a shorter chair than his communist counterpart. The peace talks became an extension of the war itself.

Panmunjom

The United Nations negotiators negotiated a shift in the conference location to Panmunjom, which was in no-man’s land and both sides could enter the area without suffering the indignity of holding a white flag. The talks boiled down to fixing the borders of the two Koreas along the front lines, arranging the details for a lasting cease fire, and exchanging prisoners.

Stalin was happy to see his Free World rivals mired in Korea rather than at the gates of Moscow, so he encouraged maximum non-cooperation. Everything became a contentious issue. There were even angry, lengthy negotiations over the size of the table flags. The biggest problem during the negotiations was the exchange of prisoners. By 1950, it was clear to both sides of the Cold War that given the opportunity, people would leave the communist world. Additionally, anti-communist activists in Europe and America had been stung early by the policy of returning Soviet POWs captured by the Germans even if those POWs didn’t want to go back to the USSR. The anti-communists didn’t wish to repeat that mistake. On October 8, 1952, the talks completely stalled.

Meanwhile, the fact that most of the members of the United Nations were on the anti-communist side was a two-edged sword. On the one hand, the anti-communist Americans and South Koreans had the putative backing of most of the world. On the other hand, American policymakers were distracted by allies who had wildly different agendas. When Winston Churchill returned for a second shot as the British Prime Minister in 1951, he felt that British interests were better served by a Europe-first focus and he spent much of his time fretting over Iran, where the British had considerable oil investments.

Although nothing was going on in Panmunjom, talk continued outside Korea, and this is when the many voices on the side of the United Nations and South Korea became an advantage again. The Mexicans suggested that communist prisoners who didn’t wish to be repatriated be sent to a different country so they couldn’t be enlisted in the South Korean military. Mexico’s proposal wasn’t adopted, but it served as the start point for a policy which was agreed upon. POWs not wishing to return to a communist country would be sent to a neutral country where the communist governments could make a direct appeal for their return.

The peace talks in Korea were center stage in the 1952 election, and the incumbent president, Harry Truman, decided to not run. The problems in Korea swallowed up his electoral chances. Meanwhile, although the issue was still a cloud the size of a man’s hand, the Democratic Party (and the rest of America) was headed for trouble over “civil rights.” Because of “civil rights” pressures, delegates from the Deep South had left the convention in 1948, an act which was the start of a major political re-alignment. Dwight Eisenhower, the popular commander of US Forces in Europe during the Second World War won, partially on the promise that he would, “Go to Korea” and end the conflict.

Eisenhower didn’t need to go to Korea to see the hills upon which small American infantry companies backed by battalions of American field artillery fought. He went to carry out a symbolic show to win the election. Eisenhower also backed the development of a railway gun which could fire an atomic artillery shell, and he hinted that he would use it. The communists viewed Eisenhower’s threat as genuine, and the atomic cannon’s deployment to Korea meant that the mass attacks that the Chinese used against the Americans could quickly be stopped with a single 280mm atomic shell.

Eisenhower was sworn in on January 20, 1953. The de facto leader of the communist world, Joseph Stalin, died on March 5, 1953. Stalin’s death started a power struggle within the Soviet Union. Nikita Khrushchev ultimately emerged triumphant, but this was not clear for some time. Meanwhile, economic conditions across the communist world — from the Elbe River to the front lines in Korea declined. The North Koreans got the worst of it — suffering from famine and an outbreak of disease. East Germans revolted in June. The communists started to get serious about ending the war. On March 28, 1953, they sent a message to the United Nations wishing to restart the talks.

The South Koreans were not happy. They wanted to unite their country. The Republic of Korea’s President, Syngman Rhee, organized massive protests. Schoolgirls descended upon the grounds of American installations and wept and shrieked. The Chinese responded to Rhee’s intransigence. Fehrenbach writes:

[…]the Chinese, angered, threw vicious pressure against the line, at a cost to the UN of nine hundred casualties per day. A massive offensive crashed against the [Republic of Korea] ROK zones, rendering two ROK divisions unfit for further combat, though the fixed position of Chinese artillery, buried underground, and the quick maneuver of American divisions stopped any hope of a CCF breakthrough…[however,] the CCF had proved its point, and perhaps taught the ROK’s a lasting lesson – without outside aid, the Republic of Korea could not only not mount an offensive; it could not hold its own frontier. [2]

Rhee’s final act protesting the division of his country involved organizing a massive prison break. Thousands of North Korean POWs were released. Many joined the South Korean Army, others scattered. The Eisenhower administration was alarmed by this and feared an end to the negotiations, but communist propaganda blamed Rhee, not the Americans. This indicated the communists continued to want to negotiate. For their part, the Americans involved in guarding the POWS did nothing to stop the mass escape. They decimated the stocks of alcohol at the NCO club during the event.

On July 27, 1953, the belligerents signed an armistice. The end to the fighting in Korea was part of a larger, communist-initiated mellowing trend after Stalin’s passing. Soviet authorities also amnestied guerilla fighters in the Baltics, released German POWs, and pardoned Ukrainian ethnonationalist Banderites.

Should We Have Liked Ike?

The war in Korea became a frozen conflict while the conditions which created the conflict, a divided Korea and the wider Cold War, still existed. President Eisenhower’s personal philosophy about the nature of warfare drove what happened next. Eisenhower had read Carl von Clausewitz’s classic On War, which postulated that war was an uncontainable event. Clausewitz reasoned that small wars usually become big wars. This matched Eisenhower’s experience. A Serbian anarchist in Sarajevo had shot a prince and his wife and two massive wars grew out of it. Eisenhower was in the Army during both events. He was also influenced by an interpretation of Pickett’s Charge which held that Robert E. Lee had issued vague orders to an overeager division commander to attack the center of the Union lines if possible and that overeager general attacked with disastrous results. Eisenhower’s view was to only attack with overwhelming force and then only if victory was possible.

The idea that atomic weapons were unusable once belligerents on opposing sides of a war had them was still yet to be realized. Eisenhower, and his Pentagon war-planners, thought that atomic weapons would one day be seen as merely another way to wage war, and such a war was winnable. After the Korean War, and in light of Eisenhower’s “all in” military philosophy, the Department of Defense shifted to a strategy of delivering atomic weapons directly to targets in the interior of Russia.

The purpose of delivering atomic bombs to the middle of the USSR was to deter any trouble, but there was a catch. To be effective, the Americans needed to have at least an even military capability – be it aircraft, howitzers, or rockets – with the Soviets. It was better to have total overmatch. When the Soviets premiered the M-4 Bison bomber at a Moscow military parade the press and the Democratic Party declared a “bomber gap” which resulted in a panic. The American military responded, building more than a thousand long-range heavy bombers. Cold War calculations started to center upon “gaps” which needed to be filled to contain the spread of communism.

Eisenhower’s all-in strategy had an impact on American culture. A sense of horror and doom seeped into everything. Americans built bomb shelters, local municipalities staged atomic warfare drills, and the government organized the emergency broadcast system. Children were directed to hide under their desks should there be an atomic attack. Every diplomatic incident took place on the edge of a nuclear cliff.

To pay for these weapons and their associated infrastructure and long-range delivery systems, the Eisenhower administration cut the army. David Hackworth, a Silent Generation career soldier, wrote about the cuts saying:

As bad as [the reduction in force] was for the guys getting axed, some of its worst casualties were in outstanding young officers…and many, many good men, who might otherwise have made a career out of the military, saw the writing on the wall and got out. And it wasn’t just the Regular officers shagging ass for the door. A lot were enlisted and draftee studs with high IQs who’d been trained, at enormous expense to the government, to operate and maintain the new high-tech military equipment. Instead of settling for an uncertain career in the Army, these men eagerly snapped up the bait of civilian defense contractors, who offered ten times the Army salary for the same skills and frequently the same jobs…How much money was actually saved through the RIF program would be hard to estimate, but if one stopped to consider the quality lost and the damage done to the Army institution, it probably wasn’t much. [3]

Other than the fear of nuclear destruction, the 1950s became a time of enormous prosperity and overall good feelings. It turned out that the long-term problems, were “civil rights” and increasing black radicalism. Eisenhower also broke the contract between North and South where the North agreed to not interfere in the South’s difficult racial issues by sending paratroopers to support integration. The North-South contract that emerged after the Civil War had allowed American society and industry to flourish.

As the Cold War continued under the threat of atomic annihilation, military and government thinkers started to revisit the assumptions behind the atomic warfare policy. Maxwell Taylor, the retired Army Chief of Staff wrote a book called The Uncertain Trumpet which argued against Eisenhower’s war policy and for a “flexible response” in 1960. George Kennan, the State Department Diplomat who wrote the Long Telegram which described the Soviet Union’s aggressive intentions at the start of the Cold War argued for a spiritual and metapolitical response to communism, to put it simply. Major General Edwin Walker and his information officer Major Archibald Roberts carried out a program of anti-communist metapolitical actions which, in the long run, were incredibly effective, but the Kennedy administration, which had recently come into office after beating Richard Nixon in a fraud-ridden election, fired both Walker and Roberts to appease Kennedy’s anti-anti-communist political base.

The first real test of the flexible response idea came during the Berlin Crisis of 1961. Nikita Khrushchev sought to end the allied occupation of West Berlin to eliminate a place from which people could easily get to flee communism. East Germany was hemorrhaging its best and brightest through West Berlin. From West Berlin, a refugee could travel via a special road or train to West Germany or fly out of the city. Therefore, all that an East German needed to do to leave was get to East Berlin and walk to West Berlin. The Kennedy administration reacted to the crisis by sending reinforcements from West Germany to Berlin, increasing the draft call, and activating the reserves, one of whom was 1LT Richard Kelly Hoskins, a white advocate from Virginia, who served in the 100th Infantry Division during the call up. The Berlin Crisis ended with West Berlin surrounded by a wall, the purpose of which was not to keep the West Berliners out of East Berlin, but to keep East Germans from fleeing communist rule. All Leftist “utopias” end in such a way when applied to the real world.

The Korean War ended as it had begun, with a nation divided into two mutually antagonistic states. While the conflict in Korea stabilized, the Cold War continued on leading to two different American administrations creating two different military policies. Eisenhower’s bomb-building New Look kept the peace, but every diplomatic incident had the possibility for a nuclear war. Kennedy’s Flexible Response worked during the Berlin Crisis, but it led to increasing involvement in South Vietnam. What was a small war for America in 1959 became a big war a decade later.

Is Ukraine 2025 like Korea 1953?

The situation in Korea has many obvious parallels to the ongoing peace talks in Ukraine. It is clear that the Ukrainians are displeased with part of their country going to the Russians. Ukraine’s president will certainly antagonize America’s president in the same way South Korea’s Rhee antagonized Eisenhower with his POW release stunt. The ugly scene between Ukraine’s Zelensky and America’s Trump in the Oval Office might be but one of several frustrating events. There could also be a flurry of Russian military activity just before the final cease fire which is carried out to make a political point.

Most ominously, the end of the war in Ukraine will not lead to world peace and a new, more enlightened humanity. It is now painfully obvious that Russia is not some sort of pro-white, Jew-wise paradise whose benevolent ruler will end Pride Parades and other perversions. There will likely be a future crisis whose roots are tied up with Russian ambitions like that of the Berlin Crisis of 1961.

Notes

[1] T. R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1963), p. 340

[2] Fehrenbach, This Kind of War, p. 447

[3] David H. Hackworth, About Face: The Odyssey of an American Warrior (New York: Touchstone, 1990), p. 314

Bibliography

T.R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1963)

Rosemary Foot, A Substitute for Victory: The Politics of Peacemaking at the Korean Armistice Talks (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1990)

David H. Hackworth, About Face: The Odyssey of an American Warrior (New York: Touchstone, 1990)

Frederick Kempe, Berlin 1961: Kennedy Khrushchev & the Most Dangerous Place on Earth (New York, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2011)

Graeme S. Mount, The Diplomacy of War: The Case of Korea (Montreal, Canada: Black Rock Books, 2004)

Evan Thomas, Ike’s Bluff: President Eisenhower’s Secret Battle to Save the World (New York: Little, Brown & Company, 2012)