Unknown to most Americans, the US ‘totally destroyed’ North Korea once before

In its Korean War bombing campaign, the US ‘burned down every town in North Korea’

…a  “long, leisurely and merciless” US bombing campaign: well over half a million tons of bombs dropped, napalm and chemical weapons deployed, cities levelled [and] although the ferocity of the bombing was recognised as racist and unjustified elsewhere in the world,” for many Americans it was just another conflict in a distant and poorly understood country…Curtis LeMay, head of the strategic air command during the Korean War, estimated that the American campaign killed 20 per cent of the population. “We went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea,” he said. [Meanwhile,] General Douglas MacArthur’s plan to win was a list of targets sent to the Pentagon, requesting 34 atomic bombs to create “a belt of radioactive cobalt across the neck of Manchuria so that there could be no land invasion of Korea from the north for at least 60 years”.

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