Like the Korean war, perhaps the Cold War has never ended

First exposed more than 70 years ago, the same terrible problems and mortal dangers face us today, including the possibility of nuclear annihilation

Alex Lo

Published: 9:00pm, 27 Jul 2023

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In January 2018, The New York Times ran a story titled, “Korean war, a forgotten conflict that shaped the modern world”. The US Navy’s Naval History and Heritage Command has a lengthy archive that is titled, “Remembering the Forgotten War: Korea”.

It seems strange that Americans would “forget” a conflict as seminal in the last century as the Korean war, which marked the first salvo of the Cold War. The Koreans themselves never forget, especially those in the North.

After all, it was the most horrendous event that ever happened to their country. This week marks the 70th anniversary of the armistice, and the war is forgotten no more. For one thing, it actually never ended. And given the escalating tensions, the worst between the two Koreas in so many years, a resumption of the war is not entirely out of the question. This, and the fact that their respective backers, China and the United States, are at loggerheads, should scare everyone.

The Korean war (1950-53) - a visual explainer

How could the Koreans forget? As US historian Charles Armstrong wrote, “The US Air Force estimated that North Korea’s destruction was proportionately greater than that of Japan in the second world war, where the US had turned 64 major cities to rubble and used the atomic bomb to destroy two others. American planes dropped 635,000 tons of bombs on Korea – that is, essentially on North Korea – including 32,557 tons of napalm, compared to 503,000 tons of bombs dropped in the entire Pacific theatre of World War II.

“The number of Korean dead, injured or missing by war’s end approached 3 million, 10 per cent of the overall population. The majority of those killed were in the North, which had half of the population of the South; although the DPRK [the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] does not have official figures, possibly 12 to 15 per cent of the population was killed in the war, a figure close to or surpassing the proportion of Soviet citizens killed in World War II.”

Note that it’s the US military’s own assessment that the bombing of Korea was worse than that of Japan, even including the dropping of two atomic bombs. Here, I think we have a pretty obvious answer as to why Americans would want to forget and Koreans never would.

Why the devastation? The US Air Force called it “Bringing the war to the people.” That’s what most of us would call deliberately targeting the civilian population. It’s a war crime, and Air Force General Curtis LeMay subsequently admitted as much on record. After practically every urban target was blown to smithereens, the US started bombing dams to flood farms and destroy crops to induce food shortages, if not a famine.

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The bombing strategy would be carried over into the Vietnam war, making Laos and Vietnam, along with Korea, three of the most bombed countries in the history of the world.

Here’s one key but still unlearned lesson for Americans. Despite their unparalleled military might which they used to bear on every major conflict, they have failed to achieve their political objective. If war is an instrument of policy, Washington has been using it very badly.

But the Korean war brought with it a much worse legacy for the world. As historian Warren Cohen wrote, Korea was “outside the defensive perimeter of the United States”, at least as it was initially defined by the Harry Truman administration. In theory, Washington could decide not to get involved. But his entire national security team decided that America’s credibility was on the line.

The Korean war essentially gave birth to the US Cold War doctrine that it must intervene everywhere and anywhere, by whatever means, around the world to stop the spread of communism.

This was established long before John F. Kennedy delivered his famous inaugural address in January 1961: “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty. This much we pledge – and more.”

Nato is clearly trying to start a cold war with China

Much of the horrors of the Cold War for the rest of the century can be traced back to the realities of American anti-communism that were masked by Kennedy’s soaring rhetoric.

The real winners of the Korean war, Cohen wrote, “were the likes of Syngman Rhee, Chiang Kai-shek, and all the other merciless dictators who, professing anti-communism, could count on American support. In the United States the winners were the advocates of rollback, of rolling back the communists abroad and programmes of social justice at home”.

Those same terrible problems and mortal dangers face us today, including the possibility of nuclear annihilation. Perhaps like the Korean war, the Cold War never ended; it just took a long break. Now it has returned with a vengeance.