I’d love to hear some stories from that era myself, I did learn many years ago that one of the reasons that Truman would not authorize MacArthur to ‘go nuke’ on the North Koreans and Red Chinese during the Korean War, was that Truman knew something MacArthur didn’t, and that was that the entire U.S. nuclear arsenal consisted of 13 and only 13 ‘Fat Man’ Nagasaki-style atomic bombs, and they were needed in the event that Stalin decided to try and push the Western powers to the sea and occupy Western Europe.
And those 13 Nagasaki-style atomic bombs had to be assembled and then carefully transferred to their aircraft, either B-50 (hopped up B-29’s) or the new and trouble-prone B-36 Peacemakers. It was a damn difficult time.
RE Truman:
That may indeed be a correct assumption. Democrat Truman was nothing like today’s communist-riddled democrats.
But... he DID inherit all of FDR’s leftover moles and Soviet spies, so who knows what was in his head.
I’d wager, though, that one Fat Man dropped on the heads of 300 thousand Red Army “People’s Volunteers” crossing the Yalu would have ended the Korean War REAL soon and saved a lot of American and Korean lives.