American Secretary of State John Foster Dulles often bragged about how nuclear brinkmanship by the United States finally brought the other side to agree to a negotiated settlement of the Korean War in July 1953. It proved that the threat of massive retaliation could work. Communist bullies who understood the language of force, if no other, could be rendered reasonable by threat of an atomic attack. No attempt has been made to reconcile the tone of this tale of mighty America dictating terms to frightened China with the discordant and well-known reality of such US military unhappiness with the war’s outcome that there formed a veritable &dquo; never again&dquo; club in the US military, while the Chinese army celebrated the exhilarating success of having pushed mighty America from the Yalu River down to the 38th parallel and held the line there. Dulles’s view is self-serving and unconvincing. Yet it gained wide and active acceptance. His argument claims that events prove that his policies of &dquo; a bigger bang for a buck&dquo; work. However, a bit of skepticism is a proper response to a politician praising his own alleged successes. After all, in the extensive debates over theories of deterrence it has often been pointed out that no more than one’s own side will the other side readily permit itself to be seen as conceding to a gun pointed at its head. The obvious and disastrous consequence of surrendering