WI: Gore's Korea Plan is Adopted

Israel

Israel

What if, on the off-chance, Senator Al Gore (Sr)'s proposal to establish a radioactive demilitarized zone?
 

Petros >Peter Fergus<

fjihr said:
No nuclear taboo, for one. Which would be bad. Very bad.
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A different nuclear taboo. Radiological weapons used as area denial, it wouldn't be the use of weapons that use radioactive material to create fission or fusion, so I don't think it would break the taboo on nuclear explosives.

Alias said:
How exactly would you do that? How would you create this RDZ?
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One assumes that radioactive waste would be used to make the area hazardous to movement. Using nuclear weapons on the DMZ itself could be tricky, there are nuclear weapons on the other side too, and if you take a chunk out of North Korea, they might decide to take a chunk out of South Korea too.
 
Osakadave

Osakadave

It wasn't just nukes, but cobalt seeded nukes. And both MacArthur and Ridgeway liked the idea...
Before Ike’s Threats: MacArthur’s Lunacy?

On December 9, 1950, after China entered the war, MacArthur requested commander’s discretion to use atomic weapons in Korea. Two weeks later he submitted “a list of retardation targets” for which he needed twenty-six atomic bombs. In interviews published posthumously, he said he had a plan that would have won the war in ten days: “I would have dropped between 30 and 50 atomic bombs... strung across the neck of Manchuria;” then he would have introduced half a million Nationalist troops at the Yalu, and “spread behind us—from the Sea of Japan to the Yellow Sea—a belt of radioactive cobalt... it has an active life of between 60 and 120 years. For at least 60 years there could have been no land invasion of Korea from the North.” He expressed certainty that the Russians would have done nothing: “my plan was a cinch.”

If this was lunacy, MacArthur was hardly alone. Before China came into the war, a committee of the JCS had said that atomic bombs might be the “decisive factor” in cutting off a Chinese advance into Korea; initially they could be useful in “a ‘cordon sanitaire’ [that] might be established by the UN in a strip in Manchuria immediately north of the Manchurian border.” A few months later Congressman Albert Gore complained “Korea has become a meat grinder of American manhood,” and suggested “something cataclysmic” to end the war: a radiation belt dividing the Korean peninsula. Although Gen. Ridgway said nothing about cobalt bombs, in May 1951 he renewed MacArthur’s request of December 24, this time for thirty-eight atomic bombs. (The request was denied.)
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http://www.jpri.org/publications/workingpapers/wp120.html
 
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