Prisoners of Cold War: Soviet and United States exploitation of American Korean War prisoners, 1950--1956

American authors, citizens, and scholars have been absorbed in a fifty-year quest for the location of missing American Korean War prisoners. Since the fall of the USSR in 1991, observers of the Prisoner of War/Missing in Action (POW/MIA) issue have accused the Soviet Union of abducting American POWs during the Korean War and the Eisenhower administration for dismissing this episode. This only exacerbated the POW/MIA controversy in the United States, which had become more contentious since the Vietnam War. This dissertation illustrates, conversely, that the Soviets, not desirous of confronting the United States militarily over Korea, did not kidnap large numbers of American POWs, nor did the United States ignore alleged Soviet actions.; This dissertation introduces an alternative interpretation to the Korean War POW/MIA debate, arguing that both the United States and the Soviet Union employed American POWs as propaganda weapons to wage the early battles of the Cold War. At the end of the Second World War, both superpowers utilized German and Japanese POWs in propaganda ventures. The Soviets, having learned this lesson, exploited American POWs during the Korean War to enhance their propaganda assaults against the United States, most notably in their "Peace Offensive" of the early 1950s. The United States, also having learned the lessons of POW utilization immediately after World War II, exploited repatriated American Korean War prisoners in an attempt to counter Soviet atrocity charges and germ warfare allegations. This dissertation further demonstrates that the Eisenhower administration actively sought the return of all of its Korean War prisoners, believed to be unrepatriated and in Communist custody, immediately after the cessation of hostilities. The Eisenhower administration never "covered-up" the issue of unrepatriated American Korean War POWs and MIAs, but rather exploited it as a means of leverage over America's Cold War adversaries.