80% of buildings north of the 38th parallel were flattened. Curtis Lemay famously reported that they had to stop bombing because they ran out of targets (military or otherwise). The North had resorted to moving their whole society underground, and in many of the population centers that had been targeted by US attacks the only remaining people who needed to hold the terrain were literally living in caves and surviving off of scraps.
Absurd. And didn’t they want to nuke China to get the victory in the Korean war aswell? Korea may damn well have been nuked with that ordinance they got hit with
MacArthur wanted to nuke China and to irradiate the DPRK-China border to prevent crossing it.
Of all the campaigns of my life, 20 major ones to be exact, [Korea was] the one I felt most sure of was the one I was deprived of waging. I could have won the war in Korea in a maximum of 10 days… I would have dropped between 30 and 50 atomic bombs on his air bases and other depots strung across the neck of Manchuria… It was my plan as our amphibious forces moved south to spread behind us—from the Sea of Japan to the Yellow Sea—a belt of radioactive cobalt. It could have been spread from wagons, carts, trucks and planes… For at least 60 years there could have been no land invasion of Korea from the north. The enemy could not have marched across that radiated belt.
Yeah, outside of radiation, the effects were the same as carpet nuke bombing, plus inconcievable amounts of unexploded ordnance that killed way more people than radiation did in Japan, and all kinds of other primary and secondary destruction consequences happening when you literally flaten a country into the ground.
80% of buildings north of the 38th parallel were flattened. Curtis Lemay famously reported that they had to stop bombing because they ran out of targets (military or otherwise). The North had resorted to moving their whole society underground, and in many of the population centers that had been targeted by US attacks the only remaining people who needed to hold the terrain were literally living in caves and surviving off of scraps.
Absurd. And didn’t they want to nuke China to get the victory in the Korean war aswell? Korea may damn well have been nuked with that ordinance they got hit with
MacArthur wanted to nuke China and to irradiate the DPRK-China border to prevent crossing it.
Yeah, outside of radiation, the effects were the same as carpet nuke bombing, plus inconcievable amounts of unexploded ordnance that killed way more people than radiation did in Japan, and all kinds of other primary and secondary destruction consequences happening when you literally flaten a country into the ground.