The National Security Archive, an academic, non-government research group, has acquired and released documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act concerning Nixon administration contingency plans to use nuclear weapons against North Korea in 1969.
For those familiar with Nixon’s early schemes to deliver what he called a “knockout blow” to independence and revolutionary forces in Vietnam, plans to use tactical nuclear weapon to destroy North Vietnam’s dike system to create huge floods, the sinister bombing plan to destroy the entire transportation infrastructure and urban society of North Korea through massive bombing (code named “Duck Hook”), should be of no great surprise either.
Nixon ultimately carried forward aspects of these schemes in bombing attacks in Vietnam, which eventually were greater than all the bombs dropped in World War II and the Korean War combined. But, similar plans for Korea, which fortunately were never initiated, provide insight into both the arrogance and the limitations of those who see military force and both the threat and use of nuclear weapons as the solution to diplomatic and political questions.
According to documents released this week by the National Security archive, the plans initially were drawn up in response to North Korean forces shooting down a U.S. reconnaissance plane in April, 1969, in which 31 Americans were killed. As background, one should remember that the U.S. had occupied South Korea from 1945-1949, set up a government in the South as the Soviets had in the North when Cold War conflicts prevented what in 1945 was the planned unification. The U.S. then entered the Korean Civil War which began in June 1950.
The war, which lasted three years, brought about major Chinese intervention, cost millions of lives, including 37,000 U.S. military personnel, and ended where it had begun in terms of the geography of the two Koreas. Since 1953 there has been a bitter armed truce along the demilitarized buffer zone of the 38th parallel, and many bloody incidents, as North Korea has gone its own, largely isolationist way, and South Korea has become both a significant industrial nation and the most important center for U.S. military bases on the Asian mainland.
The documents released by the National Security Archive were military contingency plans that Nixon and Kissinger ordered a somewhat reluctant Pentagon to draw up. They included attacks on North Korean military installations with “tactical nuclear weapons” codenamed Operation Freedom Storm. It should be said that the casualties estimated by the Pentagon from such attacks, ranging from hundreds to a few thousand, are simply unbelievable and reflect in my opinion the military’s desire to continue to both develop and support as a viable option “tactical nuclear weapons.”
But the Pentagon feared quite rightly that such actions could easily escalate into a new general Korean war. Given the ongoing Vietnam War at the time, a renewed attack on the Koreas would have been an extreme example of what the late C. Wright Mills called in the 1950s, “crackpot realism,” that is an open-ended commitment to the use of military force as the only “realistic policy,” regardless of the circumstances, a policy which led only wars without end and the eventual destruction of the crackpot leadership which pursued such policies.
Nixon eventually did not launch a general attack on North Korea and start a new major war. And while Obama is clearly not Nixon and Hillary Clinton far from a Kissinger, on what is the 60th anniversary of the beginning of the Korean Civil War, the conflict between the two Koreas continues, intensified last march by a new disputed incident in which a South Korean ship was sunk.
In spite of all the changes in world politics, the possibility of a new Korean war with U.S. involvement is still there, given a fifty year old situation that one might call permanent instability.
The Obama administration can and should begin to act as a peacemaker between the North and the South and both state and seek to implement a policy that would see the demilitarization of the Korean peninsula. Even a serious commitment to this sort of policy, which of course is will be very difficult to implement, as against one based on threats and sanctions, would be a huge victory for the administration in international affairs.
It would a signal to the world that the Obama administration had really broken with a foreign policy that Charles Beard, a founding father of the progressive school of U.S. historical scholarship, once called “perpetual war for perpetual peace.” It would also of course, save many billions in U.S. dollars, which the U.S. military presence in South Korea costs. The alternative, threats and the ultimate use of military force, is of course a simple policy. But it is one that almost always has negative, if not disastrous consequences.
