As Cumings eloquently explains, for the Asian world the Korean War was a generations-long fight filled with untold stories of bloody insurgencies and rebellions, massacres and atrocities. He incisively ties America's current foreign policy back to this remarkably violent war that killed as many as four million Koreans, two thirds of whom were civilians.

Television has come to play an ever more decisive role in the preparation and planning of war, as well as in its execution. In War and Television Bruce Cumings carefully explores the history of television's relationship to US warmaking since World War II, up to and including its presentation of the carnage in Kuwait and Iraq. Cumings examines Vietnam, long thought to have been the first television war, but finds that characterization more apt for the Gulf conflict which was fought through, packaged by, and sold to the public on television. At the centre of the book is the extraordinary tale of Cumings's own experience as historical consultant to a Thames Television production, Korea: The Unknown War, and his subsequent trials with the Public Broadcasting System when the film was released for North American distribution.

"The 'Unknown War' in Korea was very important indeed: as a crucial 'hot' episode in the early Cold War, as a dress rehearsal for Bietnam and as a savage civil war complicated by outside intervention. It left a divided country (35,000 American soldiers and over 3 million Koreans dead), as well as hollow claims of victory from both sides and a legacy of bitterness and controversy. John Halliday and Bruce Cumings have assembled hundreds of photographs to provide a grim picture of everyday life in Korea under 'the heaviest and most sustained bombing ever known'. THey have also talked to a wide range of journalists, observers and participants in many countries, lifted the lid of the 'opaque Never-never-land' of North Korea and cut through the dense propaganda on both sides. The result is a full and unpartisan account of an extraordinary conflict"--back cover.