Worst Cases and Reality

Based mainly on official documents and scholarly writings, fearing the Worst reviews the Korean War mainly from the perspective of governments. Ghost Flames views the war as experienced by twenty individuals. It is based on interviews and private papers as well as archival documents and reports by the South Korean Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Taken together, these two books provide a top-down and bottom-up picture of terrible events that still haunt and ricochet in world affairs.

Actions derive from perceptions and hopes that produce beliefs or, at least, working assumptions. Sometimes reality intrudes to challenge or reinforce those assumptions. All the major powers from the late 1940s to the early 1950s were like blind people bumping into one another in a forest. The Truman administration believed that Stalin and Mao Zedong were close partners determined to spread communism. Not until war began did Washington see North Korea as a threat to peace and stability. American leaders in 1949 and 1950 said that the US defense perimeter excluded Taiwan and the Republic of Korea (ROK). The United States provided few heavy arms to its South Korean protectorate and pulled out most of its occupation forces in 1948. Stalin withdrew most Soviet troops from the North earlier in 1948 but equipped the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) for war. An economic recession in the United States in 1949 led President Harry Truman to cut defense spending and to withdraw a proposed tax increase.

When DPRK forces crossed into the South in June 1950, the Truman administration believed that Stalin and Mao inspired this action, and key people in the administration accepted the worst case as a real possibility. Believing that Stalin was preparing to start World War III, the Truman administration reluctantly funded massive increases in nuclear weapons, strategic bombers, and nuclear submarines. The Americans did not know that Stalin sought to avoid a major war and tried to minimize any combat role for Soviet personnel. Nor did Americans know that Stalin and Mao had disliked and distrusted each other for decades. Kim Il-sung had to cajole Stalin to convince him that the North could quickly subdue the South in a low-cost victory. As part of the package, Kim got Stalin to pressure Mao to help the North if needed.

Meanwhile, Washington underestimated the Soviet nuclear weapons and missile programs while overestimating the Soviet long-range bomber capacity. One of the strongest features of Fearing the Worst is its analysis of the troubled history of Soviet efforts to build a credible strategic bomber. Soviet military ambitions and programs, according to Wells, were easily as advanced as the worst-case scenarios that the Truman administration envisioned to justify its response to the Korean conflict. Wells devotes little attention to US and Soviet offers to negotiate differences, which were usually out of sync.

Much of Fearing the Worst is based on Soviet and East European documents accessed by outsiders after the fall of the Soviet Union, many of them recording interactions between Soviet bloc officials and DPRK political and military leaders. Much of this material has been published or posted by the Wilson Center and analyzed by other scholars (for example, Clemens 2010). What Wells says about Chinese thinking comes not from direct access to once-classified documents but from writings and speeches by Chinese scholars with some access to official sources. Thus, Wells cites four books by Shen Zhihua (for example, 2018) sometimes in collaboration with others (as in 2015).

Wells brings insights from these materials together with information from declassified US government documents to buttress the big picture as he now sees it. He declares up front (p. 7) that Stalin decided in January 1950 to provide limited support for a North Korean invasion of South Korea. However, subsequent pages show that Kim Il-sung had to plea long and hard to obtain Stalin’s go...