A dense column of smoke rises more than 60,000 feet into the air over the Japanese port of Nagasaki, the result of an atomic bomb, the second ever used in warfare, dropped on the industrial center August 8, 1945, from a U.S. B-29 Superfortress. Credit: U.S. National Archives More than 70 years after the first atomic bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, historians still debate whether or not the atomic bombs played a major role in convincing Imperial Japan to surrender in 1945. But what's clear is that U.S. faith in the atomic bomb as a super weapon nearly proved disastrous just five years after World War II ended. When the Korean War broke out in June 1950, the U.S. discovered that its reliance on the atomic bomb had left it without strong conventional military forces. That belief in the power of nuclear weapons technology almost led to catastrophe when U.S. soldiers went into battle against Soviet-backed North Korean troops and tanks invading South Korea. The awesome U.S. military might that had helped the Allies win World War II had vanished by the time of the Korean War, according to David Halberstam, journalist and historian, in his book "The Coldest Winter." Instead of maintaining larger armed forces, the U.S. trusted its initial monopoly on nuclear power and Air Force bombers as a counterbalance to the large Soviet armies at the start of the Cold War. There were many reasons why President Truman's administration, Congress and the U.S. public all wanted to believe that the atomic bomb alone could provide national security without spending taxpayer dollars on a modernized military capable of fighting equally well on ground, sea and air. The atomic bomb myth meant the understrength, poorly-trained and badly-equipped U.S. Army units would pay a high price in blood during the early months of the Korean War. T.R. Fehrenbach, a U.S. Army officer who commanded at the platoon, company and battalion levels during the Korean War, described the problem in his book "This Kind of War" as follows:
There just hadn't been enough money for long-range bombers, nuclear bombs, aircraft carriers, and bazookas too. Now, painfully, at the cost of blood, the United States found that while long-range bombers and aircraft carriers are absolutely vital to its security, it had not understood in 1945 the shape of future warfare. To remain a great power, the United States had to provide the best in nuclear delivery systems. But to properly exercise that power with any effect in the world—short of blowing it up—the United States had also to provide the bread-and-butter weapons that would permit her ground troops to live in battle.
A powerful U.S. military force of 12 million men and women in uniform at the end of World War II had shrunk to just 1.5 million members by early 1947. The annual military budget stood at just $10.3 billion from a wartime high of $90.9 billion. Much of that military budget went to the U.S. Air Force with its fleet of strategic bombers designed to deliver the atomic bomb to enemy targets. Very little went to modernizing or even maintaining the U.S. Army's basic infantry weapons, tanks and artillery. The Army was forced to cut corners on military training because of ammunition shortages. Soldiers bought surplus military equipment with money out of their own pockets to obtain spare parts for vehicles. No Army division had its wartime requirement of weapons and equipment. When the Korean War began in 1950, the U.S.-trained South Korean military soon collapsed under the onslaught of the veteran, well-equipped North Korean army. The first U.S. troops to arrive in the Korean peninsula would fare no better. Because the U.S. had bet so heavily on the atomic bomb eliminating the need for traditional ground warfare, it faced a desperate struggle to stop the ground assault of a developing Asian country with a total population of nine million people.
