aspasia wrote:
On Sun, 17 Jun 2007 12:04:02 -0500, "HeyBub"
wrote:

aemeijers wrote:
"Ted" wrote in message
ups.com...
On Jun 16, 6:16 pm, "R.S." wrote:
Why should we accept the Amnesty Bill, It has No Enforced
Security, No Real Penalties, and therefore it is not
Comprehensive!
[...]

A relatively modest strip along the border, seeded with
Colbalthorium-G, would at least make the border-crossers glow in the
dark.

Interesting, General McArthur proposed something similar on the
dividing line between North and South Korea.


Are you serious???!!

I knew he was a crazed egomaniac, but THAT crazy?
Where can I look this up?

He (McArthur) actually wanted to use Cobalt across the neck of Manchuria.

Stanley Weintraub, "MacArthur's War: Korea and the Undoing of an American
Hero" (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), pp. 263-264; Bruce Cumings, "The
Origins of the Korean War: Volume II, The Roaring of the Cataract 1947-1950"
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 750; Peter Hayes, "Pacific
Powderkeg: American Nuclear Dilemmas in Korea" (Lexington: Lexington Books,
1991), pp. 9-10.

=== begin quote http://www.theava.com/04/1229-korea.html

In interviews published posthumously, MacArthur said he had a plan that
would have won the war in 10 days: "I would have dropped 30 or so atomic
bombs . . . strung across the neck of Manchuria." Then he would have
introduced half a million Chinese Nationalist troops at the Yalu and then
"spread behind us - from the Sea of Japan to the Yellow Sea - a belt of
radioactive cobalt . . . it has an active life of between 60 and 120 years.
For at least 60 years there could have been no land invasion of Korea from
the North." He was certain that the Russians would have done nothing about
this extreme strategy: "My plan was a cinch."

A Second Request

Cobalt 60 has 320 times the radioactivity of radium. One 400-ton cobalt
H-bomb, historian Carroll Quigley has written, could wipe out all animal
life on earth. MacArthur sounds like a warmongering lunatic, but he was not
alone. Before the Sino-Korean offensive, a committee of the JCS had said
that atomic bombs might be the decisive factor in cutting off a Chinese
advance into Korea; initially they could be useful in "a cordon sanitaire
[that] might be established by the UN in a strip in Manchuria immediately
north of the Korean border."
A few months later Congressman Albert Gore (2000 Democratic candidate Al
Gore's father, subsequently a strong opponent of the Vietnam war) complained
that "Korea has become a meat grinder of American manhood" and suggested
"something cataclysmic" to end the war: a radiation belt dividing the Korean
peninsula permanently into two.
=== end quote

McArthur wasn't the only one with this solution. Matthew Ridgeway proposed a
similar solution after McArthur's firing, as did the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

In sum, the most knowledgeble political and military leaders we've produced
have considered the idea.