The Rogue State that is the United States of America

Seven years ago Pepe Escobar had a very interesting series of articles on the DPRK in Asia Times (Pyongyang Journal, part 1,2,3,4). Here’s a short excerpt from part 3 …
The US air war on North Korea was an incredibly vicious bloodbath. Washington bombed the DPRK with more napalm than it used on Vietnam – with even more devastating effects, because the DPRK had many more large urban centers (18 out of 22 were almost completely wiped out) and urban industrial infrastructure than Vietnam. In only four months, from June 1950 to October, B-29s discharged more than 860,000 gallons of napalm over North Korea.
Not surprisingly, and as in Iraq and AfPak decades later, the Pentagon hailed its “precision bombing”. When China stepped into the war, Washington’s air war went on overdrive, not only destroying most North Korean towns and cities but at the end of the war smashing huge dams that supplied water for no less than 75% of the DPRK’s food production.
With the Chinese allied to the DPRK in the battlefield, America’s General Douglas MacArthur dictated that the whole area between the front and the Chinese border would become a wasteland; that meant in practice the destruction of every “installation, factory, city and village”. MacArthur wanted to use tactical nuclear weapons (“The only passages leading from Manchuria and Vladivostok have many tunnels and bridges. I see here a unique use for the atomic bomb … Sweeten up my B-29 force”). President Harry S Truman also threatened to use nuclear weapons, and almost did in April 1951.
Later, in an interview to the New York Times on April 9, 1964, MacArthur said, “I would have dropped between 30 and 50 atomic bombs … strung across the neck of Manchuria”; then, “spread behind us – from the Sea of Japan to the Yellow Sea – a belt of radioactive cobalt.” In pure Dr Strangelove fashion, MacArthur was referring to cobalt 60 – which is more than 300 times more radioactive than radium.
And that was not all. The Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency were busy exploring new avenues for the weapons of mass destruction of the time, via what was called “Operation Hudson Harbor”, by dropping dummy atomic bombs in simulated runs. Civilian North Koreans feeling the thunder down there obviously didn’t know if that was a real atomic bomb or not. The Pentagon also considered employing a barrage of chemical weapons.
As Bruce Cumings, arguably the best American scholar on North Korea, observed, even “without the use of ‘novel weapons’ – although napalm was very new at the time – the air war nonetheless leveled North Korea and killed millions of civilians before the war ended. North Koreans will tell you that for three years they faced a daily threat of being burned with napalm … By 1952, just about everything in northern and central Korea was completely leveled. What was left of the population survived in caves.”