"According to cold war historian John Lewis Gaddis who was interviewed about the Korean War for a 1999 PBS documentary “American Experience: Race for the Superbomb,” the role of the atomic bomb was undefined. “It’s one of the biggest dogs that did not bark in the entire cold war,” says Gaddis. “There was no clear strategy worked out ahead of time for what the role of nuclear weapons in the limited war would be. You’re talking about a war, particularly after the Chinese intervene, with peasants coming down mountain trails carrying everything on their backs. And this was simply not what the atomic bomb had been built for. The only way that you can make the atomic bomb credible is precisely by not using—by keeping it out there as a kind of mysterious, awesome force. That to use it would actually cheapen it somehow.” Conventional bombing had, however, taken a toll on North Korea’s civilian population. In The United States Air Force in Korea 1950 –1953 by historian Robert F. Futrell, he includes a description of the town of Huichon written by General William F. Dean, who was held prisoner in North Korea: “The city I’d seen before—two-storied buildings, a prominent main street—wasn’t there anymore. I think no important bridge between Pyongyang and Kanggye had been missed, and most of the towns were just rubble or snowy open spaces where buildings had been. The little towns, once full of people, were unoccupied shells. The villagers lived in entirely new temporary villages, hidden in canyons or in such positions that only a major bombing effort could reach them.”"