The End Is Always Near: Apocalyptic Moments, from the Bronze Age Collapse to Nuclear Near Misses

by Dan Carlin

At one point in the conflict, Truman precipitated a near-constitutional crisis by firing Douglas MacArthur, his military commander. General MacArthur had been accused of insubordination for disagreeing with the way the president was micromanaging the war,* but Truman was worried about more than the war in Korea—he was clearly trying to restrain the use of force to keep things from spiraling out of control and into World War III. Someone who disagreed with this caution was Air Force general Curtis LeMay. LeMay’s attitude was shared among a lot of generals, especially the First and Second World War veterans—men who considered the most damaging aspect of modern war its duration. Because casualties reliably mounted every day, anything that could be done to limit the length of the war was humanitarian by its very nature—even if what it took to do that was a shocking amount of violence in a very short time. LeMay had wanted to unleash his heavy bombers, as he had over Japan in the Second World War, and he testified after the war was over that to do so would have been a more humanitarian approach. This is the philosophy/logic of strategic bombing, as contradictory as it may sound, highlighted by the nomenclature: the new bomber that was slated to carry out any possible nuclear destruction of places like the Soviet Union in 1950 and 1951 was the brand-new B-36, nicknamed the “Peacemaker.”