Oh agreed, MacArthur was all bravado, which is why need to always be careful throwing generals into the public eye, they start thinking they're Napoleon or Alexander. However, intelligence mistakes are a given regardless, once the excrement hit the proverbial fan, deploying nuclear ordinance would have won, and the backlash wouldn't have been as big then, people hadn't demonized nuclear weapons as much yet. Speaking as a physicist, tactical nuclear weaponry deployed away from cities isn't that big a deal, the world doesn't end, the ground isn't ruined for centuries in a hundred mile radius or something, and fallout was never the cataclysmic thing it was portrayed as. I'm not a big fan of nukes, but a weapon is a weapon, and dead is dead, better them than us, etc.