It he signature of the been linked to the Eisenhower administration's threats, during the final stages of the negotiations, to launch nuclear war against the People's Republic of China (PRC), should there be a continuing failure to agree to terms. For two years, communist negotiators and the United Nations Command (UNC) team had been locked in acrimonious debate over such issues as establishing the ceasefire line, rehabilitation of airfields in the post-armistice period, Soviet membership on the neutral nations supervisory commission, and whether prisoners of war (POWs) should be forcibly repatriated. When the Eisenhower administration was inaugurated in January 1953, the talks had been recessed since October 1952 with this one issue concerning the POWs still outstanding. Several prominent members of the Eisenhower administration, most notably the president and his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, subsequently claimed that the eventual breakthrough on the POW question finally came because the United States, as part of a carefully worked-out plan, had" dropped the word discreetly" of the US intention to use atomic weapons in a future expanded war. Eisenhower asserted this in his memoirs;'and in conversation with his special assistant, Sherman Adams, when asked how an armistice had at last been reached in Korea, he unhesitatingly replied:" Danger of an atomic war.... We told them we could not hold it to a limited war any longer if the communists welched on a treaty of truce. They didn't

An earlier version of this paper was presented at a conference on the study of nuclear weapons and nuclear threats organized by Professor Robert Jervis, Columbia University, New York, May 1987, with the support of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. I am most grateful for the comments of the participants at that conference. Professor Christopher Thome of Sussex University and Professor Steven I. Levine of Duke University also read a complete early draft, and I have valued their suggestions.