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  • BimothyX2 : Unfunny, uninteresting and unrelated to drama

:marseyhesright:

https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/douglas-macarthur-atomic-bombs-will-win-the-korean-war/

								

								
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I could have won the war in Korea in a maximum of 10 days

:#marseysurejan:

I would have dropped between 30 to 50 tactical atomic bombs on his air bases and other depots strung across the neck of Manchuria from just across the Yalu at Antung

We had about 300 nukes at that point, so he's proposing using 10% of our stockpile just to knock out airbases in just this one sector in Asia.

I would then have called upon a half million of Chiang Kai-shek's troops

The Nationalist Chinese were a lot better than they usually get credit for. But let's be honest with ourselves. They fought ChiComs before and they got beaten. You can't assume they would win this time.

[various ideas about doing multiple more amphibious landings]

Incheon was brilliant but then he did another landing at Wonsan. Only problem was, when they got there the ROKs had already liberated Wonsan. It just caused a lot of logistical problems. MacArthur had a great record in WW2 of amphibious landings but that doesn't always work. You can end up with a situation like Anzio where there's a bunch of guys you have to try hard to just keep from getting overrun.

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. It is not an expensive material.

This is absolutely fricking ludicrous. If you want to make breast cancer rates go up by 12% there, sure. But the idea that you would make an area so radioactive that people couldn't walk through it is lunacy.

Here's a big secret that Big Anti-Nuclear doesn't want you to know: It is extremely hard to kill a person with radiation from outside their body. Extreme fallout in the first few days of a nuclear war maybe. Otherwise you have to be really close to a nuclear weapon exploding, so close that you would get vaporized anyway if you weren't protected. Like look at the "neutron bomb" that whiny leftoids cried about so much. This was designed to kill guys in tanks. The only way you would get killed by the radiation is if you were inside a tank, because if you weren't inside a tank you would get burned alive. You don't get killed by gamma rays. Gamma rays are so scary because omg they theoretically penetrate so much concrete or whatever. You know what else they do? They penetrate you. Most of them just go right through and keep going. I'd encourage you to check out this series of lectures if you want to know how this stuff works.

The real danger is from alpha and beta rays. "But Papa Redactor" you may be asking "if alpha particles can't penetrate a sheet of paper, how are they a threat to me?" Because you ingest alpha emitters, you r-slur. You're getting irradiated from inside your own body. So you can't use radioactive waste to create this buffer zone because if it's so persistent that it stays for years it must be stuck in the ground where you don't breathe it in and it must be not very radioactive because then it would decay. You would need to a huge industry of making vast amounts of radioactive waste to keep constantly refreshing it.

It was in our power to destroy the Red Chinese Army and Chinese military power—and probably for all time

Lunacy. This would have meant another Chinese civil war lasting years where we would need a million guys over there to tip the balance. And then the Russians would get involved. It's the same basic problem as Vietnam. How far are you willing to take this? Because in order to get a truly decisive victory that ends this war you might have to go all the way to Moscow.

MacArthur is being a lying self-serving b-word (as usual) but there is one real question hinted at here: He wanted more air power, the same level we had in WW2. The Air Force said that they can't keep a war going in Asia with all the stress on airplanes, men, spare parts while at the same time being ready for a full-scale war in Europe. MacArthur said "well frick Europe, they're over, Asia is the next big thing". But he was overruled. I think for good reason, because Asia did become more important but it was until at least the 1980s.

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