re: How insane were Douglas McArthur and Curtis LeMay?

You mis-state MacArthur’s position and only tell half the story.

His point was that a country should not be willing to commit troops unless it is willing to use every tool at its disposal to win a war (and in Korea, that most likely involved the use of nuclear weapons near the Yalu). Nothing short of that standard is adequate, and a country should either not enter in the first place OR be willing to use everything at its disposal to win if necessary. Limited war is largely fruitless and wasteful, and American military history since 1950 has proven him prescient in that regard.

He was among the first of his generation to grasp (and had re-learned a lesson that Sherman and Grant learned 85 years before him) that the deadliest aspect of modern war is length, not weaponry or brutality. His approach also necessitates that when a country commits to war, it really commits. Not this half-assed imperial boutique army shite that Truman and Kennedy and Johnson and Nixon and Bush Jr. and Obama have loved.

Your counter-factual is absurd on its face. First, nine figures dead - who? With what delivery system? Why?

Second, I propose another, probably more realistic one: that tens of millions would not have died in Mao’s Great Leap Forward and Cultural Wars has we obliterated part of their country along the Yalu and de-stabilized their regime. And tens millions of North Koreans wouldn’t have suffered horridly and died at the hands of the most brutal regime in the modern world.