ide to ignore this build-up toward war on the side of the North. Stone's argument is that had the Americans known, and they certainly had to have known, all they would have had to do was to publicly warn the North against such a war.
Perhaps Stone is naive in believing that such a simple step could have stopped the war, but he goes on to suggest that the South actually provoked the war, and that in any case the outcome of the war starting was good for the Americans and South Korea, and bad for the North:
Whether on June 25 the North attacked without provocation or went over to the offensive after an attack from the South, the attempt to pick that tempting plum solved many political problems on the anti-Communist side (43).
Stone seems to give much credence to the declaration from the North that the South had provoked the war with incursions over
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