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TRUMAN PUT NUKES IN GUAM AND GAVE THE ORDER TO NUKE NORTH KOREA

August 20, 2017 – 4:10 am

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To understand why North Korea targeted Guam, you’ll have to go back to the Korean War in the 1950s. The US president at the time was Harry S Truman who also gave the order to nuke Japan. By Robert Barsocchini of Washington’s Blog.

In 1951, the US placed nuclear weapons in Guam, and Truman gave the order to use them on North Korea. That order was not sent - literally, by accident. The reason: Truman was in the process of removing General MacArthur “because he wanted a reliable commander on the scene” in case he “decide[d] to use nuclear weapons”. …”In the confusion attendant upon General MacArthur’s removal”, “the order [to nuke North Korea] was never sent.” (1)

Yet Washington still managed to kill millions of Koreans, many, if not most, with “oceans” of napalm produced largely by the Dow Chemical Company, which the US air-force “loved”, referring to it as the “wonder weapon” for its ability to wipe out whole cities of people.

One day Pfc James Ransome, Jr’s unit suffered a “friendly” hit of this wonder weapon: his men rolled in the snow in agony and begged him to shoot them, as their skin burned to a crisp and peeled back “like fried potato chips.” Reporters saw case after case of civilians drenched in napalm - the whole body “covered with a hard, black crust sprinkled with yellow pus.”

US “intent was to destroy Korean society down to the individual constituent”. Cities were destroyed, civilians burned to death and blown to bits with zero “tactical or strategic value”. Killing was an “end in itself”. “[T]he United States Air Force was inflicting genocide”, Professor Bruce Cumings notes, “on the citizens of North Korea.”

The US soon began bombing the North’s major dams (which were “akin to many large dams in the United States”) to release hundreds of millions of tons of water and “destroy 250,000 tons of rice that would soon be harvested.”

A stunned anti-Communist reporter noted, ‘”Everything which moved in North Korea was a military target, peasants in the fields often were machine gunned by pilots who, this was my impression, amused themselves to shoot the targets which moved.” There were simply “no more cities in North Korea.”‘

The US ultimately refrained from using nuclear weapons, Cumings notes, ‘”for purely technical reasons: “timely identification of large masses of enemy troops was extremely rare.” (2)

Note: Robert J Barsocchini is a graduate student in American Studies and a journalist. Years working as a cross-cultural intermediary for corporations in the film and Television industry sparked his interest in the discrepancy between Western self-image and reality. His work has been cited, published, or followed by numerous professors, economists, lawyers, military and intelligence veterans, and journalists. The above article was posted at Washington’s Blog.

‘No other nation’ has made its past a ‘construct of the imagination’ to the extent done by the US. - Professor David H. Murdoch

References:
1) Prof. Bruce Cumings; The Korean War; pp 149
2) ibid. pp 146-154; refers to quotes other than (1)

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REVIEW: BRUCE CUMINGS’S THE KOREAN WAR: A HISTORY

For Americans, it was a discrete conflict lasting from 1950 to 1953 that has long been overshadowed by World War II, Vietnam, and the War on Terror. But as Bruce Cumings eloquently explains, for the Asian world the Korean War was a generations-long fight that still haunts contemporary events. And in a very real way, although its true roots and repercussions continue to be either misunderstood, forgotten, or willfully ignored, it is the war that helped form modern America’s relationship to the world.

With access to new evidence and secret materials from both here and abroad, including an archive of captured North Korean documents, Cumings reveals the war as it was actually fought. He describes its start as a civil war, preordained long before the first shots were fired in June 1950 by lingering fury over Japan’s occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945.

Cumings then shares the neglected history of America’s post-World War II occupation of Korea, the untold stories of bloody insurgencies and rebellions, and the powerful militaries organized and equipped by America and the Soviet Union in that divided land. He tells of the United States officially entering the action on the side of the South, and exposes as never before the appalling massacres and atrocities committed on all sides and the “oceans of napalm” dropped on the North by US forces in a remarkably violent war that killed as many as four million Koreans, two thirds of whom were civilians.

In sobering detail, The Korean War chronicles a US home front agitated by Joseph McCarthy, where absolutist conformity discouraged open inquiry and citizen dissent. Cumings incisively ties our current foreign policy back to Korea: an America with hundreds of permanent military bases abroad, a large standing army, and a permanent national security state at home, the ultimate result of a judicious and limited policy of containment evolving into an ongoing and seemingly endless global crusade.

Elegantly written and blisteringly honest, The Korean War: A History is, like the war it illuminates, brief, devastating, and essential. - Good Reads (click here)

The Korean War: A History was first published in January 2010.

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