My favorite living historian, Victor Davis Hanson, explains the Korean War courtesy of Prager University. Was it worth it? Look at the picture below and judge for yourself:
The Korean War: It Was Worth It
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 41 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
This is an amazing image, juxtaposed with Victor Davis Hanson’s thoughts.
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Someone should do the same with the southern tip of Florida v. Cuba.
I have not served in the Armed Forces. I would not approve of my sons joining the Armed Forces if a schmuck such as Clinton or Obama were to be President. Having said that, one regret is that the North Koreans were not pushed back to China to end the war. It may not have been possible without further escalation. The poor Koreans stuck in the North, like the Cubans, have beencondemned to live under the worst form of government ever since.
We now know [cf. The Fifty Years’ War] that Stalin was planning on starting WW3 (an invasion of Europe) in 1952, and that he stopped Kim from invading South Korea in 1949 because he wanted his own nuclear weapons first. Thanks to our access to Soviet records in the early 1990’s we know that Stalin saw the Korean War as a test of Western resolve, as was surprised when Truman saw it the same way. WW3 got pushed off to 1954 at the earliest, Stalin died in 1953, and the new Soviet leadership then shelved the idea. Was it worth it? You bet it was, though perhaps not every detail was (PF, we successfully pushed back the Communists to Pyongyang. We might have been able to stay there had we negotiated a truce then and there and recognized Red China)
Vietnam would have been worth it also, had not the basic strategy been so flawed and the resulting tactics so ineffectual.
Those lights in the area of South Korea seen in the photo and the darkness of North Korea are due in certain measure to the difference between each country’s nuclear policies. South Korea eschews the use of nuclear weapons, but has an active nuclear energy program. It generates 20.5 GWe from 23 nuclear reactors which supply between 22 and 29% of the country’s total electric consumption, operating at a capacity factor of 95%. Its home-grown pressurized water reactor design by KEPCO – the APR-1400 which is a modified Combustion Engineering System 80+ design – has been marketed around the world. South Korea is now building four of these behemoths at Barakah in the United Arab Emirates. In fact, I was offered a job at Barakah several years ago.
Now North Korea’s nuclear policy is simple: it uses a small modified Russian RBMK (the kind of reactor at Chernobyl – graphite moderated, light water cooled) as a plutonium-239 weapons breeder. Most of its electricity comes from burning dirty brown coal imported from China. That electricity in turn is used in large measure for the military. It has no peaceful nuclear energy program. Its atheist communist leadership would rather the citizens starve to death in the cold and dark than to be prosperous like the south.
Atheists and communists can never be trusted with the power of the atom, nor can their close cousins: liberals, progressives and feminists.