WI: Korean War w/out threat of a-bombs?

If the Manhattan Project hadn't gone through for whatever reason would the U.S. have still been able to claim part of the Korean Peninsula as a capitalist democracy or would they have been too distracted with Operation Downfall to care one way or the other? If South Korea had still been proclaimed a capitalist democracy then how would the Korean War have turned out differently?
 

Yun-shuno

Banned
If the Manhattan Project hadn't gone through for whatever reason would the U.S. have still been able to claim part of the Korean Peninsula as a capitalist democracy or would they have been too distracted with Operation Downfall to care one way or the other? If South Korea had still been proclaimed a capitalist democracy then how would the Korean War have turned out differently?
MacArthur wouldn't have been able to defy Truman publicly for one. Just a ground war I imagine I don't think the lack of nuclear weapons will change anything on the battlefield 1950-1953. Also I can imagine with the US having to pacify Japan all of Korea might go commie or at least left wing.
 
would the U.S. have still been able to claim part of the Korean Peninsula as a capitalist democracy

Point of order, but South Korea didn't manage to transition to a proper democracy until the 1980s. Until then, it was basically a nationalist-military dictatorship with a thin democratic veneer.
 
The problem with this POD is that it all depends on the Pacific plays out since the bomb led to an expedited war, and this not an easy thing to just handwave. Downfall or starvation look to be the only ways for Japan to surrender baring allied invasions in Korea or Manchuria, and what do the Soviets do. If a divided Korea was stipulated regardless of who occupied anything then the possible of a north-south conflict is still there.

Would this still result in MacArthur as head of the Japanese Occupation, or could someone else take over and consequently have to deal it? If it's not MacArthur, then you would at see a counterattack but not an outright invasion since this general won't have either MacArthur's ego and selective interpretation of facts. On the other hand, depending on what the Japanese do in China if then the Chinese Civil War could be altered greatly, that Mao may not win out or at least be kept in longer lasting civil war, that means if China is even weaker than OTL there may not even be a Korean War at all because Mao promising to commit troops even when the PLC was very weak, was the only Stalin gave Kim the green light, Stalin was not going to do the heavy lifting for a war against the U.S.
 
The biggest difference is the West would have kept a much bigger land and Air Force around if no atomic trump card and Japan for some reason surrendered near on schedule as OTL.

Still once China enters the war in Korea you might see Europe go hot as well. Much easier to push the button in the pre-nukes era.
 
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