American military capabilities. It drained American economic resources and weakened the Truman administration. While the Soviet Union was still recovering from World War II, the bloody conflict in Korea made it much less likely that America could begin a full-scale war against it. Although the prolongation of the Korean War taxed Soviet industrial capacities, it deepened the dependence of the People's Republic on Soviet military and economic assistance. It thus lessened the danger that Mao Zedong would follow the path of Marshal Tito in Yugoslavia, an eventuality that ranked among Stalin's greatest fears, second only, perhaps, to a premature war with the United States.
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 | 1. For analyses of the Korean War based on the new evidence from China and Russia, see Chen Jian,
China' s Road to the Korean War: The Making of the Sino-American Confrontation
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Sergei N. Goncharov, John W. Lewis, and Xue Litai,
Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao and the Korean War
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993); the article and translated documents by Alexandre Mansourov in
Cold War International History Project ( CWIHP) Bulletin,
6; William Stueck,
The Korean War: An International History
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Shu Guang Zhang,
Mao's Military Romanticism: China and the Korean War, 1950-1953
(Lawrence, Kans.: University of Kansas Press, 1995); articles by this author in
CWIHP Bulletin
3 (Fall 1993): 1, 14-18; 5 (Spring 1995): 1, 2-9; 6-7 (Winter 1995/1996): 30-84;
Journal of American East-Asian Relations
2, no. 4 (Winter 1993): 425-58.
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| 2. James Sheply, "How Dulles Averted War,"
Life
January 16, 1956, 70-2; Dwight D. Eisenhower,
The White House Years: Mandate for Change, 1953-1956
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Co., 1963), 179-80. For scholarly analyses of nuclear threats during the Korean War, see Roger Dingman, "Atomic Diplomacy During the Korean War,"
International Security
13, no. 3 (Winter 1988/1989): 50-91; Rosemary Foot, "Nuclear Coercion and the Ending of the Korean Conflict,"
International Security
13, no. 3 (Winter 1988/1989): 92-112.
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| 3. Information about the Soviet air war in Korea was tightly guarded throughout the remainder of the Soviet period, as was all information about Soviet participation in the war. However, a substantial portion of the records on the Korean War in the archive of the Soviet General Staff has been declassified. For the first scholarly examination of these records, see Mark O'Neill, "The Other Side of the Yalu: Soviet Pilots in the Korean War Phase One, November 1950-April 1951," Ph.D. diss., Florida State University, 1996.
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