China was already sending troops and material to the front lines when MacArthur was ordered to stand down. Pushing further would have meant a hot war with China.

A hot war with China in 1950 was going to end quickly with the firepower USA had on-hand.

In what way?

The US nearly lost the Korean war.

The US army was nearly overrun at least once.

The US airforce never achieved air superiority, and Soviet aircraft were better in most ways.

The only undisputed advantage the US had was nukes, which is why MacArthur wanted to use them tactically (!)

The subsequent Vietnam war reinforced this even more.

The only path that America had to win in Vietnam was to destroy it, including the population they were allegedly there to protect. Hence they lost.

There is no way we could match them in numbers on the ground. Such a conflict would have inevitably led to us nuking them as a result. Which is probably the reason decision makers chose not to.

Wow, just half a dozen comments from why we're not saving North Koreans to "we could've nuked China and solved a lot of problems."

Some Hacker News threads are on their own level.

Well we know what happened to North Korea after China "won". And it's pretty fucking god-awful for 10s of millions of people for 80+ years.

USA dropping nukes probably would have been the better outcome for humanity.

Wait - you think the solution to some people having a lower standard of living and others being persecuted is to kill them all?

How is nuking Japan different from nuking Korea? Everybody agrees that forcing Japan to surrender with nukes was much better for everyone involved than a ground invasion.

When Japan was bombed, nobody else in the world had nuclear weapons, the US only had 2, and there were only a handful of people outside of the US seriously researching nuclear weapons and were still years away from a test. By 1950 the USSR had working nuclear bombs, had proven so with a nuclear test, and a dozen other countries had started their own nuclear weapons programs.

It's different almost by definition?

Because it was a once (twice!) off the impact and significance of it is amplified.

Maybe the real humanitarian failure is that the US didn't nuke everybody and start over from the stone age. Can't any societal problems if no societies exist, right?

wtf

Think how many tens of millions could have been saved if we had ended the Soviet Union as Churchill advocated, before the world got nukes.

Think how many tens of millions would have died in such a war. Just for some other evil to pop up anyway.

Does any serious historian believe that fully defeating the Soviet Union after WWII would have been possible? Even with the advantage of nuclear weapons, I doubt the US would have made it very far.

It was way too late, look up Operation Unthinkable.

You mean when Churchill wanted to hire 100,000 "former" Nazis to invade the Soviet Union?

Or how about us not blowing them to bits in the first place? South Korea was on the very edge of capitulation before the US came in full force and even most South Korean citizens were in support of Korean unification at that time. The current state of North Korea would have never come to reality if they hadn't been blown to bits by the US because of big ol' scary "communism".

So, piecemeal cede every bit of land to the evil? Like Trump wants with Ukraine now?

If you exclude the outliers like Campuchia and Nazi Germany, even the most benign commies are always way more deadly than the most ferocious fascists.

What makes 1950s Korea evil? You are equating North Korea today with Korea of 75 years ago, they aren't even remotely similar. You don't think your nation getting bombed to literal fields of rubble wouldn't change views and political stances afterwards?

Unification was supported by both sides among the people, most South Koreans supported communism and 70% of them supported unification with the North. South Koreans didn't even support their own government, they were dealing with internal insurrection from their own people. The North was an industrialized nation and the South was a poor farming country and their unification would of been hugely beneficial to both. The war would have been over in another 2 weeks without intervention and a minimal amount of casualties, and it had only been 3 months from the start of the invasion. The only people not in support of it at the time was the political leaders of SK at the time because it meant they personally as individuals would lose power and wealth, and the US who was on a crusade to crush and kill anybody who dared support communism. Korea never should have been split in the first place, but the US and USSR had to be little bitches and force their will upon these people.

Killing 5 million people, most of which were innocent civilians, in the name of "fighting communism" is evil, not the idea of a unified nation of people supported by those same people.

Worth pointing out that South Korea had very limited democracy until the late 1980s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_South_Korea

> What makes 1950s Korea evil?

Soviet occupation. Korea was supposed to be unified and elect a government back in 1950, Soviets made sure it didn't happen because they had no chance of winning.

That and, you know, the whole invasion thing.

You know the US destroyed nearly 75 percent of all buildings in North Korea during the Korean War, right?

NK is paranoid for very valid reasons.