Christmas Eve 1950 American GIs were supposed to be home by now.

They weren't.

Instead, on this day, General Douglas MacArthur raised the stakes of the Korean War with a message

to Washington, asking for permission to use nuclear weapons to bomb the Chinese border

with North Korea.

Supposedly fearing a Chinese invasion below the 38th parallel, MacArthur would claim in

his memoirs that his plan had been to drop a modest number, say 30 to 50 atomic bombs.

The American military command successfully got South Korean President Seungmin Ri and

others to evacuate Seoul to prepare for what I have stone called, quote, a phantom battle

with a phantom foe.

What was MacArthur's and the military command's endgame here?

Why evacuate troops from what was supposedly such a critical battle?

MacArthur, like Richard Nixon, believed that what was coming, inevitable and even necessary,

was a direct confrontation with global communism.

Had MacArthur gotten his wish and dropped atomic bombs, direct war with China and Russia

would have been the result.

In that event, I have stone rights, the troops in Korea would be caught in a trap.

If Manchuria was to be bombed, it would be better to get the troops out of Korea first.

So in spite of the fact that less than a month earlier, President Harry Truman had explicitly

declared that it was he and he alone who decided how nuclear weapons were to be used, his

general in the Far East, V-General in the Far East, was acting as if Americans were preparing

to use nuclear weapons regardless.

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