In the months after China’s intervention in the Korean War, General of the Army Douglas MacArthur made increasingly strident calls for dropping atomic bombs on Beijing and other Chinese cities and even suggested sowing a permanent radioactive zone, a kind of nuclear fence, along the Manchurian border. In April of 1951, he was relieved of his command by President Truman. “I didn’t fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was,” Truman later said. “I fired him because he wouldn’t respect the authority of the president.”
