After President Trump threatened last week to “totally destroy” North Korea, the country’s foreign minister responded by claiming that the president ha…
After President Trump threatened last week to “totally destroy” North Korea, the country’s foreign minister responded by claiming that the president has “declared war” and that North Korea has the right to shoot down American bombers that venture near the country’s airspace. It sounds—and it is—alarming, but it’s worth noting we’ve been here before.
On April 15,1969, North Korean MiG fighter planes shot down an American EC-121 spy plane flying off the coast of the Korean Peninsula (but still over international waters), killing all 31 crew members. President Richard Nixon, National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff spent the next 2½ months pondering what to do.
In 2010, the National Security Archive, a private research outfit at George Washington University, published a trove of once top secret documents —which the group had obtained through the Freedom of Information Act—summarizing the discussions. They are worth a close read. It’s likely that Trump’s advisers have been holding similar discussions; it’s also likely that their conclusions aren’t very different from those reached nearly 50 years ago.
On the first day of the 1969 crisis, the chiefs sent Kissinger a memo outlining the pros and cons of mounting an airstrike on a small number of North Korean air bases. On the one hand, a “positive and deliberate response” would show America’s “resolve” to punish an act of aggression, they wrote. On the other hand, the attack would be “a deliberate act of war,” to which “North Korea may respond by launching attacks upon [U. S. and South Korean] forces.”
The chiefs came up with more nuanced or, in some cases, more extravagant options in the ensuing weeks, but the obstacle remained the same. Any attack that didn’t obliterate North Korea’s military power would almost certainly spark a retaliatory attack against South Korea, Japan, and American forces in the region. Yet it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to obliterate North Korea’s military assets. If such an attack were attempted, it would be so large—probably involving nuclear weapons—that China or Russia might be drawn into the war; or even if they weren’t, the moral and political blowback against the United States would be enormous.
After a few days of deliberation, the central dilemma became clear to Kissinger, the chiefs, and all the other advisers mulling the problem. If the U. S. responded to the shoot-down with a limited attack, it would neither deter the North Koreans from further aggression nor prevent them from retaliating. Yet if the U. S. responded with a massive attack, it probably still wouldn’t knock out the entire North Korean military, and Pyongyang would almost certainly respond with its own devastating counterpunch. (Then, as now, North Korea had thousands of artillery shells well within range of Seoul, the capital of South Korea, just 35 miles from the border.)
On May 21, the Joint Chiefs came up with a medium-size approach—sending three B-52 bombers, armed with conventional weapons, to destroy a North Korean airfield or two. Gen. Earle Wheeler, the JCS chairman, wrote in a memo to Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird that, if this attack were mounted “quickly” and “in response to another hostile act,” we would have “a reasonable chance of not provoking the North Koreans into retaliatory action of such magnitude as to involve a major conflict.” Laird sent the note to Kissinger, adding that this plan struck him as “more sensible than any yet postulated.
