North Korea: Cold War History with US Justifies Nuclear Program

Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the U.N. forces commander, and his successor, Gen. Matthew Ridgway, both asked for authority to use atomic bombs against the North. After his 1953 inauguration, President Dwight Eisenhower "began dropping hints that the United States would use the atom bomb if the deadlock persisted in the negotiations to conclude an armistice ending the war," former Washington Post reporter Don Oberdorfer writes in his history "The Two Koreas."