The Agreements: 1950–2

Abstract

At a press conference on 30 November 1950, President Truman had been asked questions about the situation in Korea, which had taken a turn for the worse with the Chinese intervention. One reporter asked, ‘Will we take whatever steps are necessary to meet the military situation? Will that include the A-bomb?’ The President replied that this would include ‘every weapon that we have’. There then followed the ambiguous exchange that was thought to imply active consideration of a nuclear strike in the Far East:

[Question]: Mr. President, you said ‘every weapon that we have.’ Does that mean that there is active consideration of the use of the bomb?

[The President]: There has always been active consideration of its use.¹

Aware that ambiguity existed, the President, later on that day, instructed Charles Ross of the White House Press Office to issue a clarificatory statement saying that ‘consideration of the use of any weapon is always implicit in the very possession of the weapon’.² The President made it clear that by law only he, as Commander-in-Chief, could authorise the bomb’s use and that ‘he had not authorised its use’.³