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

by Dan Carlin

Eventually the US/UN forces commanded by the legendary Second World War general Douglas MacArthur conducted an amphibious landing behind enemy lines at Inchon, only to trigger a Chinese response soon afterward that sent a ton of Chinese “volunteers” unofficially into the fighting. It was at this point that it became apparent that, to keep the Korean War from becoming World War III, all the major powers had to create some plausible deniability so that nobody had to admit this was World War III. There is a theory that says that even without nuclear weapons there was a decent chance Korea would have turned into World War III. But it appeared to some that Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union, Mao in Red China, and Harry Truman in the United States all bent over backward to claim that all the air strikes and amphibious naval operations and the millions of soldiers shooting at one another wasn’t “war.” When the fighting broke out—the worst since the Second World War—a news reporter asked the American president, “President Truman, is this war? Are we at war?” Truman answered, “No, we are not at war.” “So what is this? Is this like a police action?” the reporter asked, and Truman said, “Yes. That is exactly what it amounts to.” And forever after, it was called a “police action”—as though wars might call for nuclear weapons, but police actions would not. (Also, if the situation in Korea wasn’t a “war,” Truman could argue that he didn’t have to go to Congress and ask it to declare it s...