what was president truman view on nuclear war?

Question

compared to President Kennedy, Ronald Regan.

Answer 1

Truman’s Other War:
The Battle for the American Homefront, 1950-1953
Paul G. Pierpaoli Jr.
For decades after the guns fell silent, the Korean War remained a faintly distant conflict in popular memory. Even scholars largely ignored the war until the 1980s rekindled interest in this crucial episode in American and world history. Sandwiched as it was between World War II (the “Good War”) and the agony of Vietnam (the “Bad War”) Korea became known simply as the Forgotten War. When the Korean conflict ended in an armistice in July 1953, most Americans wanted nothing more than a return to normalcy. They wanted to like Ike and focus on the American Dream. So they bought television sets, went to college in record numbers, ogled Detroit’s big-finned behemoths, moved en masse to suburbia, and gyrated themselves into the era of rock and roll. But they also forgot the sacrifice and slaughter that had taken place on the Korean Peninsula, and quickly pushed aside the scourge of McCarthyism, which the war had unleashed.
To be sure, the Korean War was an unpopular war here at home. It was the first war that the United States did not win; thus, our nation’s collective amnesia is not at all surprising. But the scholarship of the war, generated mostly since the early 1980s, paints a very different picture. Korea was a pivotal turning point in modern American history. Indeed, it unleashed far greater consequences than its better-known successor of Vietnam, and in fact it laid much of the groundwork for America’s struggle in Indochina. Remembering Korea, especially the changes it wrought on the homefront, is the principle endeavor of this article (1).

Prior to 25 June 1950, President Harry S. Truman had no notion of fighting a major land war in Asia or, for that matter, engaging the nation in a vast and exorbitant Cold War rearmament program. In his January 1949 inaugural address, the president—always a rather staunch fiscal conservative—had promised to balance the budget, decrease the national debt, keep inflation at bay, and implement his Fair Deal program, an ambitious social welfare plan that sought to address an array of problems from public housing and health care to civil rights. To accomplish this, Truman cast his lot with those who sought to keep national security and defense spending to a bare minimum. He also sought to provide America’s allies with protection from the perceived Russian threat by using the strength of the U.S. economy as a bulwark against Communism. Thus, initiatives such as the Marshall Plan, the International Monetary Fund, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) would emphasize economic—rather than military—containment of the Soviet Union.

In other words, Truman’s hope was to focus on domestic issues by building upon New Deal-style reform, focusing on modest civil rights initiatives such as his 1948 order to desegregate the armed forces, and combating the growing perception of a Communist menace at home. However, beginning in 1949 a convergence of domestic and international events conspired against Truman’s best intentions. Even before the sudden outbreak of war in Korea, the president had begun to realize that more would have to be done to defend against Communist advances abroad. Nevertheless, it took the blunt force of Korea to push the Truman administration into action (2).

Between the winter of 1949 and 1950, the domestic and international atmosphere changed dramatically, and not necessarily for the better. Early in 1949 Dean Acheson replaced retiring Secretary of State George C. Marshall. More hawkish and less willing to capitulate to Truman’s domestic priorities than his predecessor, Acheson began an almost immediate and sustained effort to build up U.S. military forces at home and abroad, arguing that the United States was incapable of defending itself and its allies against an all-out Soviet offensive. By mid 1949, in fact, Truman was coming under increased pressure even from within his own administration to spend more on defense.

Then, coming in rapid and relentless procession beginning in September 1949 was a series of events that shook the nation and the Truman administration. In September the Soviets surprised the world and obliterated the U.S. atomic monopoly by exploding their first A-bomb. Then came the October Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War, which was quickly followed by the permanent division of Germany.

January 1950 brought more setbacks. First, the Soviet Union began a boycott of the United Nations to protest its nonrecognition of the new People’s Republic of China (PRC). Next came the February 1950 alliance of friendship and mutual assistance between the Soviet Union and China. At about the same time, Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury in the infamous Whittaker Chambers-Alger Hiss Spy Case; Ethel and Julius Rosenberg awaited execution for espionage; and Senator Joseph R. McCarthy began his four-year-long anti-Communist witch hunt at a speaking engagement in Wheeling, West Virginia.

Thus, by early spring 1950 two things had become clear. First, President Truman’s Fair Deal was on the ropes, for the deteriorating international and domestic political scenes were going to require a further de-emphasis of domestic imperatives. Second, Senator McCarthy’s groundless and vituperative accusations of internal Communist subversion were about to poison the well of foreign policy bipartisanship and, in the process, make Truman’s job of governing ever more difficult.

In April 1950 President Truman first viewed the seminal blueprint for waging the Cold War: NSC-68, a joint effort of the Departments of State and Defense, as well as the National Security Council. Using particularly baleful and alarming language, NSC-68 argued that the United States was losing the initiative in the Cold War, that the nation was woefully ill-prepared to defend itself and its allies against Communist advances, and that the administration must embark upon and complete a massive conventional and nuclear build-up by 1954, which it described as the year of maximum danger. Taken aback by its conclusions and prescriptions—not to mention its likely astronomical costs—Truman demurred and insisted that the actual costs of the plan be calculated before he took any action on it. In the meantime NSC-68 was shelved, until hell broke loose on the Korean peninsula that June (3).

When North Korea unexpectedly lashed out and attacked South Korea on 25 June 1950, the Truman administration wasted little time in deciding to respond, with force, to the Communist aggression. Fearing a larger Communist conspiracy, which might have included a simultaneous attack against Western Europe, Japan, or other U.S. strongholds, and determined that there would be “no more Munichs,” Truman committed American troops to the Korean struggle. He also began, quite fatefully perhaps, to rearm the nation along the lines prescribed in NSC-68. Thus, America’s new military rearmament program would be targeted not so much at Korea, but at the long haul and massive build-up envisioned in NSC-68. What America was to witness during the three years of the war was actually a mobilization within a mobilization: rearmament for the immediate needs of the Korean War and, more critically, a long-term rearmament earmarked to contain Communism in every corner of the world. The United States was now on its way to constructing a permanent national security state and defense economy, if not an incipient “garrison state.” With this construction, of course, came the destruction of Truman’s Fair Deal.

The monetary and psychological costs of this massive military defense effort would prove to be enormous. By the end of 1951, the annual defense budget had nearly quadrupled to $50 billion from a pre-war low of $13.5 billion. As a result, the economy began to overheat, and Americans began to chafe under mounting government controls on everything from prices and wages to raw materials. During the first five months of the war, high inflation and growing shortages periodically lashed at the United States economy. Budget deficits began to pile up ominously, and the Truman administration tried its best to provide for the troops and allay Americans’ concerns by encouraging voluntary controls on prices, wages, production, and hoarding. The administration also raised corporate and income taxes and tightened credit. For a time these methods worked, and Truman enjoyed the support of a majority of Americans—including many Republicans—until disaster struck in late November 1950 (4).

The unexpected and vicious Chinese intervention in Korea caused military as well as economic havoc. Just as inflation and shortages had begun to ease in the mid fall of 1950, a new round of panic-buying and hoarding stoked the flames of inflation after the military reversals in the Korean theater. The Truman administration, fearing a far wider war, dramatically accelerated the rearmament effort, which further fanned the inflation firestorm. Republicans and even some Democrats began to question and publicly criticize the president’s handling of the war and the homefront. Americans began to panic and as Christmas 1950 approached a pall of defeatism and doom descended. An editorial in Life magazine, surrounded by a giddy blitz of Christmas ads, warned darkly that “the news is of disaster; World War III moves ever closer...our leaders are frightened, befuddled, and caught in a great and inexcusable failure to marshal the strength of America” (5).

The Chinese intervention resulted in Truman’s decision to augment significantly U.S. military aid to NATO countries, including the placement of large troop deployments in Europe. This move raised the eyebrows and ire of his political and ideological foes, most notably the conservative and isolationist wings of the Republican party. It also provided Senator McCarthy with more cannon fodder, which he aimed with deadly accuracy at the Truman administration. McCarthyism was now fully unleashed on an American populace that felt quantifiably more vulnerable and frightened than ever before. Quite naturally, as McCarthy’s star rose, Truman’s popularity sank (6).

Yet Truman’s political afflictions were perhaps the least of his problems in December 1950. He now faced the dangerous prospect of a full-scale war with China and, perhaps, a confrontation with the Soviet Union. In addition, he had to search for a way to rally the American people around an unpopular, undeclared, and limited war; stabilize an economy poised at a meltdown; and mobilize even faster an industrial and defense establishment that was already near the breaking point. Such were the challenges and vicissitudes of limited war in the nuclear age. By December, the Korean War had become “Truman’s War,” and he alone would come to shoulder the enormous burden of governing a people and political process that had become breathless with fear and rife with criticism and chicanery.

On 16 December 1950, President Truman declared a state of national emergency and began to set in place a series of powerful mobilization agencies. Using the presidential war powers granted to him by Congress in the Defense Production Act of September 1950, Truman sought to mobilize the nation for war and control the economy in a fashion not seen since World War II. To help him in this herculean task, he named Charles E. Wilson, president of General Electric and former World War II mobilization executive, to head the new Office of Defense Mobilization, a “super mobilization agency” to oversee every aspect of civilian and military mobilization during the Korean War. In these circumstances, Wilson’s authority was powerful indeed; he became a virtual mobilization czar, and the press was quick to dub his position as a “co-presidency” (7).

By late January 1951, with American-led United Nations troops still fighting desperately to wrest away the military gains made by the Chinese and North Koreans, the Truman administration had created some nineteen separate mobilization agencies to control virtually every aspect of the economy. Included among these were the Office of Price Stabilization, which administered prices for almost all consumer products, and the Wage Stabilization Board, which controlled wages for all hourly employees and which some months later would create a Salary Stabilization Board to control all salaries as well. This level of economic control, designed principally to lower inflation and spur industrial production, was an unprecedented foray into government regulation of the economy at a time in which no war had been officially declared. The Korean mobilization thus challenged America’s age-old devotion to antimilitarism and antistatism. Throughout the remainder of his term in office, Truman would contend with growing criticism of his handling of the economy and homefront, some of which went so far as to accuse him of socialism and outright despotism.

Although mobilizing people and resources for this unpopular war with vague and changing goals was never simple or easy, two periods stand out as true tests of Truman’s resolve and ability as a leader: the winter and spring of 1951, and the spring and summer of 1952. In February 1951 organized labor precipitated a long-running feud with Truman’s chief mobilizer Charles E. Wilson. Angered at what they believed to be their exclusion from the decision-making process on mobilization issues, and dissatisfied with the controls placed upon workers’ wages, labor leaders walked out of wage negotiation sessions, resigned their positions on the Wage Stabilization Board, and effectively boycotted the entire mobilization program until late April. Labor’s boycott frustrated and angered the Truman administration, heretofore considered labor’s ally, and threatened to disrupt defense production and economic stabilization just as mobilization efforts were moving into high gear. After weeks of tense negotiation and bitter repudiation and criticism from its critics, the Truman administration finally resolved the crisis in late April, but not before the president had lost even more support for his handling of the war effort.

Then, of course, came what was surely one of the biggest crises of the entire war: Truman’s decision to fire General Douglas MacArthur on 11 April 1951. Although MacArthur had clearly undermined his commander-in-chief, had engaged in essentially insubordinate behavior, and had made repeated strategic and tactical blunders in prosecuting the war, Truman was mercilessly lambasted by the press and excoriated by his opponents for dismissing the vainglorious war hero. McCarthyites, conservative Republicans, and other foes of Truman used the MacArthur dismissal to launch a fresh barrage of abuse at the president, who nonetheless stood firm by his decision. Be that as it may, the crisis further crippled Truman’s ability to respond to changing circumstances on and off the battlefield and, of course, his approval ratings were by then in a virtual free-fall.

The Korean War engendered yet another major crisis in the spring of 1952, when some 600,000 steel workers threatened to strike. In an attempt to avert a work stoppage, which he believed would imperil the nation’s war and rearmament effort, Truman ordered a government take-over of the affected steel companies. Amidst cries of dictatorship from Truman’s detractors, and a stony silence even from many of his supporters, the Supreme Court deliberated on the constitutionality of the president’s seizure order. In June, the Court dealt Truman a crippling blow by ruling his action unconstitutional. Truman then reversed his order, which marked the beginning of a fifty-three-day steel strike. Although the strike was not as devastating as Truman had feared, the entire incident led many to believe that the exigencies of the war were damaging the American system, empowering the executive branch with too much authority, and leading to the imposition of a spartan garrison state. The steel crisis also resulted in the resignation of head mobilizer Charles E. Wilson. From that point on, the best Truman could do was to fight a rearguard battle on the mobilization and stabilization fronts.

Clearly, America’s homefront during the Korean War reflected a house divided. It engendered bitter rhetoric and partisan infighting, encouraged the continued antics of Senator McCarthy and his minions, fostered a poisonous atmosphere of paranoia and fear, and created two separate constitutional crises: the MacArthur Affair and the Steel Crisis. Despite the turbulence of these three years, however, it must be said that the Truman administration did an admirable job of keeping the ship of state on a relatively straight course, especially when one considers that the ship was navigating in completely uncharted waters.

So what, then, were the important legacies of this ferocious and bloody war? Why is it important to study this period? First, the Korean War provided the foundation upon which the entire Cold War military and defense apparatus was built. The nation girded itself to fight a protracted—perhaps indefinite—war to contain Communism around the world, an effort that would last for forty years. Second, the Korea conflict institutionalized permanently large defense budgets, which had been hitherto anathema. In the process, the federal government was granted sweeping power as it controlled more and more of the nation’s resources and as its bureaucracies ballooned ever larger. At the same time, cyclical and growing budget deficits and mounting debt became the norm rather than the exception. Third, as a result of all of this government-sponsored economic activity, America’s industrial base became badly skewed. The older industrial areas of the Northeast and Midwest suffered a decades-long decline as new areas of industrialization sprang up in the South and West, which came to be dominated by defense-related firms. The nation’s population and economic power bases thus began to shift further south and west, which in turn resulted in a realignment of political power. Finally, the Korean War unseated the Democratic party’s nearly uninterrupted hold on power in Washington, one that went all the way back to 1932. In 1952 Americans elected a Republican president for the first time since 1928, and turned over control of the House and Senate to the Republicans as well. In an important, if ironic way, Korea helped to rehabilitate a Republican party that had been forced to carry the heavy cross of the Great Depression on its back for nearly a generation (8).

To be sure, the Korean War was devastating for the Korean people, both in the North and the South. Both nations’ villages, cities, infrastructure, and agriculture were left in utter ruin. Casualties for all Koreans were estimated at 3 million. The United States lost upwards of 34,000 of its soldiers in the struggle in just three years—a fatality rate far greater in relative terms than that of the Vietnam War. Moreover and tragically, Korea set the stage for another bloody war on another artificially divided Asian peninsula, this time in Indochina. Remembering this conflict is important, not only because of the many lives it cut short, but because our nation today, fifty years after the war began, still bears the deep scars of the Korean War.


atp

Answer 2

I doubt Truman understood the enormity of what he had permitted when he authorized the use of the first atom bombs. No one had ever used the bomb on human beings before...and the desert tests conducted prior to Nagasaki and Hiroshima could not possible have shown the devastation that followed.

Still, Truman was not considering 'nuclear war.' The US was the only country at that time to have an atomic bomb that was ready for use. He used the bombs to show the Russians....whom he knew would be our 'enemy' after the war, that we were able to take them on. Nuclear war, everyone with any understading knows, means the end of the world as we know it. Truman was a very brilliant man. He surely knew that as well.

Answer 3

Since Truman authorized the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki one must assume that he did not view nuclear war favorably but felt that it would save lives. Having said that I believe that "Regan" and Kennedy would have acted the same under similar circumstances.

Answer 4

Truman is the man who dropped the bomb.
Kennedy was too tied up in the Mob to care.
Reagan defeated Communist Russia at a time when a nuclear attack was considered imminent.

Reagan is the best President our generation has seen and the best we ever will. Rest his soul.

Answer 5

Because Truman dropped the "bomb" we have never had to do it again. Because we have it, people stop short & think before a full attack on the us . 9/11 was a terrible attack but it did not envolve the whole country.NO other president has had to make a decission like that & I hope none ever does.