A set of newly declassified documents from the U.S. National Security Archive at George Washington University show that the U.S. considered, but ultimately rejected, a range of military responses to the downing of a reconnaissance aircraft by North Korea in the late-1960s.
On Kim Il Sung’s birthday, April 15th, 1969, two North Korean Mig-17 fighter aircraft intercepted and shot down the U.S. Navy EC-121 reconnaissance aircraft somewhere over the East Sea in the vicinity of Chongjin.
North Korea claimed the aircraft had entered the North’s sovereign airspace, while the U.S. government maintained that the aircraft had been under strict orders not to get any closer than 50 nautical miles from the coast of North Korea, and deemed the action provocative.
Following the shooting, the Nixon administration reviewed a range of possible responses.
The set of 16 documents, entitled “How Do You Solve A Problem Like Korea?” show that the Nixon national defense team took into consideration one option of performing between 12 and 47 tactical nuclear strikes against a range of targets in the North.
However, the documents, which were released yesterday, show that the U.S. concluded that while a “positive and deliberate response by the United States to an act of aggression will indicate the resolve of the United States to take measured punitive action against an aggressor,” even non-nuclear air strikes against military targets in North Korea “will be a deliberate act of war” and, as a result, “North Korea may respond by launching air strikes against US/ROK forces.”
In the end, therefore, Nixon chose to restart the reconnaissance missions in short order to show its strength of will, and ordered a show of naval power in the East Sea, a response then-National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger later termed “weak, indecisive and disorganized.”
