Season 2, Episode 12: Bruce Cumings, The Korean War: A History

Join Professor Jeffrey Sachs and Professor Bruce Cumings, renowned historian and  expert in East-Asian history, to discuss Cuming’s book, The Korean War. Together, they discuss the factors that led to the Korean War, its brutal trajectory, and its powerful and fateful impacts US foreign policy. 

The Korean War, though little known or understood today, continues to cast a long shadow on geopolitics and US foreign policy up to this day.  Cumings offers a profound and essential look into a war that is widely misunderstood, forgotten, or willfully ignored, but that still deeply shapes our world.   

The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.

Footnotes:

• Korean War
• World War II
• American Military in WWII 
• US Second Amendment 
• NSC68
• 38th Parallel 
• Pro-Japanese Collaborators 
• Five Theories of Korean Unification
• Dean Acheson
• Marshall Plan Speech
• Korean War and Japan’s Recovery
• Cold War
• Declaration of Neutrality 
• George Kennan 
• Guerrilla Operations in North Korea 
• US in the Korean War
• American Armed Forces Statistics
• Nuclear Arms Race
• Yellow River Flood
• Relief of Douglas MacArthur
• Trench Warfare 
• Death Count of Korean War

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, I'm Jeffrey Sachs. Welcome to Book Club, a monthly conversation with world-leading authors who have written scintillating, inspiring, and remarkably important books about history, social justices, and the challenges of building a decent world. Welcome to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs, and I am absolutely thrilled to have today Professor Bruce Cummings of University of Chicago, one of our nation's and the world's leading experts on East Asian history. And on today's topic, a wonderful book that Professor Cummings wrote in 2010, one of several. This one, The Korean War, a History. And I learned so much from this. And given that we are in war again, now a kind of proxy war, but we're pretty deep into it, I thought that talking with you, Bruce, if I may, about the Korean War and your insights would really help us to understand U.S. foreign policy more generally and shed some at least indirect light on the war in Ukraine and the US-Russia competition that is so much part of that. So if that's all right with you, I'd love to talk about the Korean War with you. Sure. Thanks for inviting me. It's great. You have called it, and others have called the Korean War the Forgotten War, but the theme of your book is how incredibly deeply important the war was in shaping modern America. This is a war, 1950 to 1953, that's almost never discussed, but absolutely needs to be understood. So maybe I could ask you just to open with some overall observations. You've spent a lot of your life studying Korea and a lot of it piecing together the truth about a war that often was not presented in very truthful ways. So maybe you could give us an introduction.

SPEAKER_01 2:02

Well, thank you. I think for Americans the most important thing is to move from thinking this is a forgotten or an important war to realizing that it was the fulcrum or lever upon which the U.S. uh became uh a global power with military bases all over the world, hidden in plain sight, usually, I would say. We have more than 900 bases now.

SPEAKER_00 2:24

I didn't realize until I read your book how completely it shaped the modern U.S. archipelago of bases around the world.

SPEAKER_01 2:34

Well, it's hard for Americans, you know, after World War II to understand that the military in this country was not a great, prestigious, important profession, and it was also very small. France had more than 600,000 soldiers before World War II in their standing army, and we had less than a tenth of that, maybe a little more than a tenth of that. The American people did not want a standing army throughout history until 1945. You know, it's an ironic point to make when everybody's always talking about the Second Amendment and the right to own guns and have militias. Those militias were the foundation of the armies that were called up for the Civil War, World War I, to a lesser extent World War II. Roosevelt began mobilizing for World War II a couple of years before the U.S. actually entered it, so we had a pretty good sized army by the time we got in. But it just wasn't part of the American tradition, and most Americans never saw the military because they were out west fighting Indians throughout the nineteenth century. After World War II, the Truman administration started demobilizing the soldiers. There were more than eleven million men and women under arms in World War II. Within a, I think, a year, year and a half, it was down to around five million and kept on dropping. And the defense budget in 1950 was thirteen and a half billion dollars. That's a little bit more in current dollars, but it's a very small defense budget. And the Korean War became the occasion for Dean Atcheson, the Secretary of State, and Paul Nitza, his national security advisor, to push through a document NSC 68, which called for a tripling of American defense expenditures and was really meant to fund a global effort to keep bases in Japan, Germany, France until 1967, England, Spain, Italy, and a whole bunch of other places. NSC 68 is a well-known document. It's the most important document of the American Cold War, but it's constantly misread, including by people who write entirely books about it, I might add. You see for a year before NSC 68 a dialogue and even a dialectic within the Truman administration about whether the U.S. should contain communist expansion or roll it back. And in NSC 68, you see this couplet of containing and where feasible rolling back communism. And it's also in another very important paper from that time, which was NSC 48, a paper for Asia, had a very long genesis of several years, which brought containment to East Asia, even though it was, of course, secret until it came out in the Pentagon Papers. And it also had that couplet of containment, but if possible, roll back. And basically you had people in the State Department who were following George Kennan's advice on containment, and others both in the State Department, John Peyton Davies, for example, and in the Defense Department, who wanted to roll communism back. The victory of the Chinese Revolution just bit off a huge piece of real estate in the world. China's roughly the size of the United States, and it really gave a tremendous impetus to the idea of taking some Chinese territory rather than allowing further expansion or just trying to contain it.

SPEAKER_00 5:53

To bring the listeners into NSC 68, this National Security Council document 68, when you read it, this document, written in 1950 by Paul Nitza, I believe, says that there is a unified worldwide communist effort for global domination. And it's the responsibility of the United States to oppose that, and that we need to oppose it on all fronts. And as you say, it's the basically ideological Bible of the Cold Warriors after that. When I read it first many decades ago and have read it many times since, it seems absolutely hysterical to me. I even wonder whether they believed it or whether this was tactical or, you know, what their view of it. Was it to mobilize resources? Was it to get a big budget, or was it the belief that we were facing the prospect of worldwide domination by the Soviet Union and its allies?

SPEAKER_01 6:53

Your first point is right. It was fundamentally a fundraising document. They were trying to scare the hell out of Congress to get a very conservative Congress, particularly on defense spending, to triple defense spending. It's also true, though, that George Kennan had the idea that there were five industrial bases in the world capable of making major warfare. We had four, the Soviets had one, and containment meant keeping things that way. Which turned out to be uh among the many prescient things that he said because the Soviet Union never got a hold of any other industrial base. And that was a limited form of containment so that you didn't get into what they used to call brush fire wars in countries that don't really count. I went through Kenan's papers, which was a very enjoyable exercise. And at one point he says, you know, some countries get communism and they deserve it, like Afghanistan. And this was before, of course, our war in Afghanistan, a long time before it. And um he was prescient there too because the Soviets tried to impose communism and made a complete mess of things.

SPEAKER_00 7:59

He had, to me, such a mature view of the world, which is don't panic, be responsible, push back against blatant adventurism of the Russians. They'll back off if you push back. But don't be hysterical. The system's not going to work, so give it time and things will collapse, but we're not facing some grand military takeover of the whole world.

SPEAKER_01 8:23

Yeah, in my book I quote him in I think one of his most important statements where he says that we got containment going, we got the Marshall Plan, we uh building up our military, we were doing all these things, and it seemed that we had reached a point where we could reach out to the Soviets for a negotiation, particularly on Europe, in 1950. This was before the Korean War. And he said, I walked into the office and started talking to you know my colleagues, and this was the wildest thing possible. They were going in the exact opposite direction. They were on a roll and they wanted all this money for a huge defense buildup. But I wanted to say the most important thing about the expansion of Kenan's limited doctrine is not that they expanded it to Afghanistan or any other place, but rather they expanded it to countries that were undergoing an anti-colonial revolution, which would be Korea, China, and Vietnam. And when my students say how come communism didn't collapse in East Asia, I always go back to that point, that all those movements grew out of anti-Japanese or anti-French movements from the 1930s and early forties. I've been through Acheson's papers too. He and Kenan had no idea about revolutionaries in the Third World. I mean, they they thought the Third World and colonial countries were basically where they ought to be with the British or the French or the Germans or whatever running them, or the Americans in the case of the Philippines. It was just a complete blockage, they couldn't see it, and then they proceeded to intervene in Korea against uh leadership that had fought the Japanese for a decade in the worst possible conditions in Manchuria in the 1930s. Very hard-bitten, hardened people, and we went in because of Kim Il-sung and his friends. We didn't win. We're still there today, and now his grandson has a full panoply of nuclear weapons and missiles. It's one of the great policy failures in American history that we allowed ourselves to be drawn in without any idea how to get out or how to deal with North Korea so that we don't constantly have the problem of warfare. And in the case of Vietnam, too, is that's a different one. They just kicked us out.

SPEAKER_00 10:34

Trevor Burrus, Jr. Could we go through a little bit of the chronology of the Korean War to understand it? One of the things I learned, I guess it's basic, but I did not know it because I never studied the Korean War. I was never taught about the Korean War, by the way, all through primary and secondary school or university. Never. I don't think I heard one day. I knew that it was a war in between World War II, which I learned about, and Vietnam, which I grew up with and understood as a post-colonial war, just as you've described, even though the government didn't acknowledge it that way. But Korea, I never learned about at all. Indeed, until I read your book, I didn't understand it. And what I didn't understand was a basic point that you emphasized, which is a remarkable point, that the North Koreans were really the anti-colonial force, that they were the ones that had fought the Japanese much more than the South Koreans. And so this was really the civil war, in a way, between two different sides of the colonial experience, with the North having been the freedom fighters. So let's just stipulate that Korea fell under Japanese imperial rule from the 1890s until formally becoming a colony of Japan in 1910. And then with Japan's defeat in 1945, the occupation forces were the Soviets who had entered late in the war, and the Americans, and the line was drawn at the 38th parallel. And what was supposed to happen in 1945 with this temporary occupation? I assume there was supposed to be a eventually, or sooner rather than later, a unified Korea to follow the defeat of the Japanese and some kind of restoration of a national government and a unified Korea.

SPEAKER_01 12:37

Well, it's an ironic thing that a conference of foreign ministers in December 1945 did provide a solution to setting up a provisional government and reuniting the two halves of Korea. And it was pursuing Roosevelt's trusteeship policy. He wanted in both Korea and Vietnam to have a great power trusteeship for a period of time after 1945 so that Koreans and Vietnamese could be prepared for independence. It was a paternalistic idea, it didn't go over very well, but it was Roosevelt's, and the State Department didn't like it, and Roosevelt never liked the State Department. So it it was American policy until he died in April. April 1945. Right. The State Department went forward and uh sent out these trusteeship ideas and plans to the American military occupation in the fall of 1945, and they were non-plussed because Koreans thought this was another form of colonialism and they were having a lot of trouble explaining it to Koreans.

SPEAKER_00 13:43

Yeah, the Koreans had just gotten rid of the Japanese overlords. Now they were supposed to have another power controlling them.

SPEAKER_01 13:50

It's very interesting because Korea had a huge independence movement in 1919, and the uh Japanese prime minister, in responding to this with force first, later with a kind of reformist colonial policy, used a term like trusteeship, trust rule, the idea being to prepare Korea for independence. Nobody really believed him, but it it was very similar to what Roosevelt had had proposed. Anyway, along comes this conference of foreign ministers, and they get a pretty good agreement which reduces the number of years of a trusteeship. I mean, Roosevelt was talking sometimes twenty or thirty years. It reduced it to uh five years and suggested that it may not even be implemented if a provisional government could emerge. Well, this conference of foreign ministers was held in Moscow. It was Moscow's turn for World War II conferences. And so it the Korean right wing in the South said this is the Soviets trying to ram a trusteeship down our throats, and they succeeded because most people had no idea what was going on. And Avril Harriman actually had to fly out to Korea to tell the commander there that this was Roosevelt's baby, as he put it, and had to be implemented. But it never was. And the Soviets and the Americans met in 1946 and 47 trying to get a provisional government, but as the Cold War deepened, uh it just became impossible to get agreement. And so the US turned the Korean problem over to the UN, which was a master stroke because A, the US controlled the UN lock, stock and barrel except for the Security Council, had intelligence officers all over the UN, as Shirley Hazard uh has shown in one of her books. And John Foster Dulles was put in charge of Korea, who later became Secretary of State under Eisenhower, and he shepherded the South Korean government, which was run by a codger named Singman Rhee, who had been in the United States most of his adult life, and was a patriot and anti-Japanese and all of that. But the trouble was his entire regime, the army, the national police, much of the bureaucracy had served the Japanese. And anybody paying attention knew that. So it kind of set up, as you said earlier, a civil war because the North Koreans were not going to put up with these people running things. And they were brutal. Particularly the National Police got a terrible reputation when foreign journalists would see them during the Korean War. But before that, they just you know wiped out entire villages. In the South, you're talking about In the South. From nineteen forty-seven to nineteen fifty, there was just a bloodbath before the Korean War, as we know it, began. And the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Korea has identified upwards of half a million people who were killed for political reasons. Oh my god. It was just awful. That's before and during the Korean War and to some much smaller extent after the Korean War.

SPEAKER_00 16:47

Trevor Burrus, Jr. Of course, I knew nothing of this also until I read your book, but just to emphasize, this is the U.S. Allied side. This is not the communist regime, this is the American occupation-backed regime. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01 16:59

Yeah, most Americans would think we're talking about North Koreans because of North Korea's terrible reputation. But it it was a real bloodbath, and in a sense, the war started in 1947 on a small island, a Cheju Island, off the coast, and spread to the mainland where there were guerrillas and then there was border fighting in 1949, a kind of chain of violence, escalating violence leading up to the North Korean invasion. But fundamentally, the North Koreans at some level decided they were not going to allow pro-Japanese collaborators to continue slaughtering people in the South.

SPEAKER_00 17:34

When did the U.S. take the decision that, okay, we're giving up completely on a unified Korea?

SPEAKER_01 17:41

Probably about January 28, 1947. That is when uh George Marshall was Secretary of State, the great general of World War II had become Secretary of State. He scribbled a note to Dean Acheson, who was the uh often the acting secretary, but the deputy secretary of state. And he said, set up a separate government in South Korea and connect it up to the Japanese economy. Wow. Nobody ever put American policy so succinctly. And it was exactly what Acheson wanted. Acheson had one brilliant policy and and one not so brilliant policy. The brilliant one was to revive the Japanese heavy industry, tie it to hinterland economies that had been former Japanese colonies like South Korea, Taiwan, and countries in Southeast Asia, and then use the newly flooding oil from the Middle East to be a the cheap energy that would power rapid growth in these countries. And Japan had a huge boom in the 50s and 60s. Korea and Taiwan came along in the mid-60s with uh 25 years of being the two most rapidly growing economies. And then Deng Xiaoping and China basically took this up with somewhat, you know, modifications, but export-led development that began during the Korean War, which was sometimes called Japan's Marshall Plan, because there were so many procurements of textiles and tanks and trucks and jeeps. It started in the Korean War and it continued until Xi Jinping took power recently. And what it did is just completely transformed East Asia. The other thing Atchison did was the fundamental rationale for the US intervening in the Korean War was to save Japan, was to make sure Japan is not touched and to re-establish South Korea, which had already developed quite a bit of trade with Japan in 1949. Save Taiwan. The Seventh Fleet was put in the Taiwan Straits, uh dividing China in the very day that the Korean War began. And all of this was fundamentally tied to his Great Crescent strategy from Alexandria to Tokyo to revive the industrial economies and get the uh former colonies involved. Atcheson and Dulles and other leaders at the time didn't think Americans would buy Japanese goods. I mean, I'm old enough to remember toys that were made in Japan that would break, you know, two hours after you started playing with them. And back then the idea was, you know, they they don't know what they're doing industrially, but you know, it's okay for the Indonesians or the Koreans. And that was a very deeply held idea right into the mid-50s until Japan started selling transistor radios and pretty soon cars in our market. And so that was a brilliant policy for reviving that whole region. But what the North Koreans did, and they knew about it, was to attack and try to disrupt it. And they disrupted it for about 15 years in the case of Korea.

unknown 20:40

Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 20:41

But the idea really, of course, in Europe, uh exactly the same way was give up on any chance of not having a Cold War, avoiding a fundamentally divided world. In Europe, at almost exactly the same moment, the U.S. and the Allies, uh, France and Britain, just said, okay, we're going to make the Federal Republic of Germany and give up on a unified Germany. And so the idea was everywhere. We just go off on our own, we'll rebuild our economy, and we'll fight communism, which will be on the other side of the border.

SPEAKER_01 21:13

Yeah, I mean, in the case of Japan, our policy after 1945 was reparations for Japan's neighbors. Japan had a lot of industry in Manchuria and Northern Korea, a lot of other investments, and the idea was these would go to China and Korea as reparations for all the depredations Japan had done. And that policy had the full support of the American government for about two years, and the Cold War just ended it overnight. It was hard to get people to accept reindustrializing West Germany and Japan. Because you or I, if we were there, we would have thought the same thing that if we do that ten years from now they'll have a big army and they'll attack us again.

SPEAKER_00 21:53

One of the things that's so striking for me, and I don't want to divert too much from Korea, but just to say I'm in Vienna. And I'm spending a lot of time thinking about how Austria regained its independence from having been divided by occupying powers. Austria declared neutrality in 1955, and the Soviet Union left, and Austria became a unified country. No bloodshed, no war, no divisions by declaring neutrality. And the thought was, I think, from the Soviet side, was this was to demonstrate that if Germany went the same way as a neutral country, we could end the Cold War already back in the 1950s and stop the divisions. And Kenan, to come back to George Kennan, uh, even though he maybe missed some parts about the post-colonial world, had some deep sense and decency. He said, Yeah, let's have a neutral Germany and then the Cold War can end. But the American policymakers guided by NSC 68 said, no way. We're out to defeat these guys. We don't want unity, and we don't want to give up on our side. And so the Cold War persisted for decades later, and the world divisions, of course, persist until today.

SPEAKER_01 23:17

Well, this is very important because Austria was a model for how to reunite Korea after the Korean War. Senator Mike Mansfield, who was an East Asia expert, I think in 1959 or 60, tabled an idea of neutralizing Korea along the lines of Austria. It didn't go anywhere, but you're right, the Soviets took their troops out of Austria, and they had taken their troops out of Manchuria in 1946 and North Korea in 1948. This is under Stalin, who didn't believe he had an empire if he didn't have troops on the ground. My students are astonished when I tell them there were 365,000 Soviet Red Army troops in East Germany when the wall collapsed in 1989. I mean, 385,000. You can still see the barracks, you know, just blowing in the wind.

SPEAKER_00 24:06

Yeah, the Soviets took the troops out of North Korea in 1948. Right. But that was a political opening that we absolutely refused to countenance.

SPEAKER_01 24:16

Well, we kept our troops in South Korea until six months later, in part because there was a lot of guerrilla activity in the U.S., as long as it had combat troops on the ground, it had operational control of the South Korean military and national police. But finally, at the end of June 1949, American troops came home, but they came really to Japan, to Okinawa mostly, and we had 500 officers and men in a military advisory group until the Korean War. So the US has never really pulled its troops out of Korea. But I wanted to say one thing about your excellent point on Kenan wanting to end the Cold War with a neutralized Germany. The way that Acheson and NHSA uh looked at West Germany and Japan was they can have their steel mills, we can reindustrialize them, you know, they can do what they want industrially. We'll have troops on the ground, and they will be defense dependencies. Semi-sovereign states that do not control their own military, and that's um the way they still are today. There are fifty to fifty-five thousand American troops in Japan. I don't know the number in Germany exactly, but it's tens of thousands still. So that kind of hidden part that Americans pay no attention about unless they're in the military and get sent to a base in Okinawa was a Trump card that could be played if Japan or Germany were to try and do again what they did in the 1930s. And George Cannon, I'm just a brilliant person, in 1949 he said uh if we keep troops in Japan, we can have a veto power over what they do in the way of defense and resources. By that he meant that the U.S. Navy controlled the oil lanes from the Middle East. And, you know, Japan from time to time has kind of chafed at that bit, but they've never done anything about it really. And it's a brilliant policy from the standpoint of American interests because most people have no idea that we have all these troops all over the place. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 26:16

I was going to say, you know, it it is really ingenious and a lot of foresight, except that it built a deeply divided and dangerous world that remains profoundly divided and very dangerous to this day, that didn't have to be we didn't have to have the nuclear arms race the way we did. We didn't have to come close to Armageddon as we did on a number of occasions, most notably the Cuban Missile Crisis. We didn't have to divide the world between us and them. But from the point of view of accepting the division, it was quite clever because it put the U.S. in control and really did revive the economies of these countries.

SPEAKER_01 27:03

That's right. And the fact is, when you have a huge military with all kinds of capabilities, sooner or later somebody thinks that we ought to use them. And I think this is definitely, you know, what was going through Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld's mind when they decided to do something after 9-11 and ended up attacking Iraq. But for Americans, they need really to think very hard about the efficacy of military force, because we've fought five major wars since 1945, and we haven't won but one of them, and that was the Persian Gulf War, which in some ways was a prelude to the Iraq War. So that our military, however well funded and well run, which it is, there's a lot of problems in the world that are not subject to military force.

SPEAKER_00 27:52

So can you describe what happened in Korea militarily, how it ended, and then how things evolved with the North after that?

SPEAKER_01 28:04

Well, it's a fairly uh simple exercise where the North invaded in June 1950 and they they swept through the peninsula very quickly and were down along the Pusan perimeter within about six weeks. Yeah, Pusan is the southeast port city, now a a very great city, and the biggest container port, I think, in Northeast Asia. The U.S. was able to maintain that Pusan perimeter with very heavy fighting. The first Marine Brigade came in, and that was the first time that the U.S. was really able to stiffen the resistance against the North Koreans. One thing I I discovered, and most scholars don't even seem to know this, is that the North Koreans had tens of thousands of soldiers fighting in the Chinese Civil War, and they came back in 1949 and 1950 and they were cracked troops. One of the ironies or funny things about the early stages of the war is people were wondering how come the North Koreans can fight and our Koreans can't. And how come they they're beating our soldiers, Americans? And Dulles speculated they must be on drugs or something. But anyway, they got down to the Pusan perimeter quickly. The U.S. formed an effective resistance in mid-August of 1950, and then a month later, MacArthur executed an amphibious landing at the port of Incheon, which is about thirty miles from Seoul. It's seen in most history books as a brilliant, clairvoyant exercise by MacArthur, but the fact is Pentagon Paper, a couple of weeks before the war, suggested if the North Koreans invade, draw back quickly, and then go around to Incheon for an amphibious landing. So it he was basically following orders. And the North Korean army seemed to collapse. A lot of foot soldiers were captured, tens of thousands of foot soldiers, but their entire officer corps, almost the entire officer corps, uh got up north, and with Chinese uh help and advice, what they did was they kept withdrawing further and further into the north to draw the U.S. in. And the U.S. hit the Yalu River on Thanksgiving of 1950. The Yalu River being the the border with China. Right. And I have a photo from the time of American troops enjoying a full Thanksgiving dinner on the banks of the Yalu River. And about three days later the Chinese intervened with massive force, about two hundred thousand troops, with maybe a hundred thousand North Koreans who had been sequestered up near the Yalu River, and they they cleared North Korea in about two weeks of UN forces. It was seen as the worst defeat since Bull Run by Acheson, and they captured Seoul on the first of January nineteen fifty one, and American forces were down about a third of the way down the Korean peninsula south of Seoul. MacArthur got fired in April. I probably don't have time to go into that, but Truman fired MacArthur in what was an enormous Bruha, because MacArthur was basically arguing for a war with China to go into China and to use nuclear weapons. And Truman was willing to use nuclear weapons in defense of Korea, but not to use them on China. And he didn't use nuclear weapons, but he came very, very close. Ridgway, General Ridgway was given command of the troops in Korea, our troops. He was a fine general. I mean, one of the curious things to me is so many of our officers were heroes of World War II. And there were about ten major generals. LeMay, of course, in the Air Force, Lemnitzer, you can just go on naming them. And Ridgway was one of them. And he got the US back to Seoul in a few weeks. And then the fighting basically stabilized around April or May 1951 and became what we see in Ukraine today. People losing their lives in trench warfare, fighting over some small village that's been bombed to smithereens. And the DMZ that you see today is essentially what could have been achieved in 1951, but it took till July 53 for the armistice to be agreed upon. And that that was just vicious fighting uh for you know Hill 161. Behind it, Seoul was recovering and South Korean society went on more or less as normal. North Korea had no air force to attack the South, but we were constantly pounding North Korea, raising every city and with vast numbers of people being killed. Absolutely. I mean there isn't any good number, although most scholars think about four million people died in the Korean War, million South Koreans, million Chinese, and three million North Koreans. The North Korea has never provided a bona fide accounting of how many people died, but it it was terrible.

SPEAKER_00 32:48

Aaron Powell By the way, I would imagine that all through the war, LeMay was probably arguing for dropping atomic bombs.

SPEAKER_01 32:54

Well, not really, because what he was saying was with our conventional bombing, we're killing everything in sight, bombing everything in sight, nuclear weapons are not needed here. No good targets. MacArthur called for twenty-four to twenty-six atomic weapons to be dropped in December along the Yellow River, and Truman turned him down, and everybody thought that was crazy. It came out in interviews he did just before he died. But then Ridgway renewed his request in May 1951 for these uh couple dozen uh atomic weapons. So, I mean the U.S. not only used conventional bombing, but what LeMay and the Air Force did that was an out and out war crime is in 1953 they bombed big dams in North Korea that the Japanese had built. We're not talking about little things that are ten feet tall. These are three or four hundred feet high, rather like the Hoover Dam on a smaller scale. And they were trying to flood the uh fields and starve out the North Korean people, and they said that. And that at the time was against the laws of warfare and something we had refused to do during World War II. So North Korea is a very embittered country. I first went there in 1981. I've been back two or three times. They always treat me with great respect or dignity, never had an untoward moment. But they have their bitterness, the their mother or their grandfather that was killed in the bombing, and the enormous efforts they had to do to rebuild their country. And we just ended up creating a nuclear North Korea, which we didn't have to do.

SPEAKER_00 34:30

It seems everything we did around the concern of North Korea gaining nuclear weapons failed miserably, terribly, over a long period. What happened? Because we ended up in the worst outcome imaginable, and yet this has been talked about since the 1990s that we have to prevent North Korea from getting nuclear weapons and so forth. We had diplomacy, we had agreements, they broke.

unknown 34:59

What what happened?

SPEAKER_01 35:01

Well, I saw Joseph Nye, a Harvard professor, quoted in the New York Times saying just what you did. Well, you know, we tried this and we tried that, but we failed. And I don't know what we could have done, something like that. The fact is, North Korea froze its reactor in 1994 in return for a promise of diplomatic relations with the U.S. Jimmy Carter was involved. He flew to Pyongyang to meet with Kamel Sung and got this idea of a freeze. And that freeze kept all their plutonium off. They couldn't use any of it, they didn't have access to it. There were inspectors there 24-7, they had cameras, they had alarms, and I think two UN officials on the ground 24 hours a day. So that freeze worked. And I don't have time maybe to defend this, but the Bush administration just kicked it away in 2002. Trevor Burrus, Jr. John Bolton. Exactly. You can look at Bolton's memoirs of his time in the Bush administration. He was dead set to kill that agreement.

SPEAKER_00 36:06

Well I'll say that. I think I could come up with some others, but he's not. No, you're right. Okay. I don't want to say I don't want to I just put him in a category that if he touched it, it went bad. So let me just say that.

SPEAKER_01 36:21

Yeah. He's gotten better since he left the Trump administration, actually. But if you read Mike Chinoy's book, I I don't right now recall the title, but it's on the North Korean nuclear program, and he was actually a reporter in North Korea, and he's very smart, very good. And there are a couple of other books, but that one in particular will show you that by accusing North Korea of having a second program with enriched uranium, which they were fooling around with, but it takes a long time to set that up, and they were no nowhere near setting it up. They accused the North of that one month after Bush tabled his preemptive doctrine, that became the Bush doctrine for invading Iraq and any anybody else we didn't like. And there the North Koreans just said, okay, that's the way you want it. They left the non-proliferation treaty, which they had been in since, I think, nineteen eighty-six, and they began work on nuclear weapons not as bargaining chips, which I think they had been up to that point for better relations with the US, but to develop an arsenal. And in 2006 they they blew up their first atomic bomb. And now they probably have forty or fifty and and it looks like they're miniaturizing them. It's a complete and utter disaster. And it isn't only the Bush administration that's at fault. But if you want to take one administration that has made two absolutely mind-boggling failed decisions, it would be the Bush administration going into Iraq and pushing the North Koreans toward developing their own nuclear weapons.

SPEAKER_00 37:51

And like you said, we could add some other disasters along the way, the unilateral withdrawal from the ABM treaty, which hardened the relations with Russia dramatically. Many things done in those few years. Yes. It was a complete disaster that administration. Is there any way and any will for the two Koreas to somehow find a path forward that maybe isn't so centrally US determined? Is it possible or is it too late for that?

SPEAKER_01 38:20

Well, the previous president, Mun Jaein, did a great deal to try to low lower tensions and have talks with the North Koreans. And it looked like the Trump administration was going along with that. But Donald Trump, being a complete cipher on foreign policy and thinking he's always right and knows everything and everybody else is wrong, managed to uh mess that up, although I give him some credit for meeting directly with Kim Jong-un. But what he did, you know, in the second meeting in Hanoi, when the North Koreans wouldn't agree to denuclearize, they had a lunch table all set up and he and his staff just got up and left. Completely a slap in the face, you know. It's the opposite of diplomacy. They didn't need to do that. And it's just an example of how what the North Koreans think is we are only interested in them to the degree that they get rid of their nuclear weapons, and otherwise we wish they'd go away or collapse or somehow get rid of themselves. So if you had a president with half a you know a bit of knowledge of foreign affairs during that, you might have been able to do something. And Kim De jung was the other South Korean president in 1998 to 2003, who met with Kim Jong il. They had summits, things were looking really really good. The Clinton administration was behind it. Bill Clinton almost went to Pyongyang in December 2000. But Bush came in and he decided he didn't like the South Korean president and brushed him off. And that was the beginning of of their utter failure to uh pursue that momentum. It's a matter of history, but if if there are listeners who question what I'm saying, I I would just send you to uh the Bolton memoir and and to Mike Chanoi's book. Go to my book. I have a book on that too.

SPEAKER_00 39:58

They need to go to your book first. And Bruce, let me thank you for your wisdom. I think if there's one overarching lesson from all of this, if if the United States knew some more history, applied it, showed some more empathy, and operated with respect to counterparts, we might go a lot farther rather than getting enmeshed in a war now 73 years ago and still with our troops there that talk about perpetual conflict.

SPEAKER_01 40:30

If you had told George Kennan that 28,000 American troops would still be in South Korea in 2023, he would have fainted. Anyway, thank you very much, Jeffrey. I've enjoyed it.

SPEAKER_00 40:40

It's so wonderful to talk to you. Thank you for your wisdom. Thank you for being with Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs. We've been speaking with Bruce Cummings, our nation's leading scholar on Korea and the Korean War, and great wisdom, and so much appreciate your being with us. Thank you. Thank you very much. Bye bye. Thank you for joining in the conversation. Please subscribe, rate, and write a review on whatever platform you listen for your podcast.