When assessing the sources, I found that source E supports the interpretation that the USSR was mainly to blame for the outbreak of the Korean War. However, sources A, B, C and D all support a different view. The Korean War inevitably started with the soviets establishing their dominance over the North by halting hail traffic across the 38th parallel. From then onwards, other countries became instrumental in the Korean War, especially America due to fears of the ideological divide between capitalism and communism.
Source E completely blames the Soviets for the outbreak of the Korean War. This is evident when it states that the ‘North Korean attack had been mounted, supplied, and instigated by the Soviet Union’. The source disagrees with the interpretation as it’s written by Dean Acheson, the US secretary of State who was involved in Asia; he proposed the defensive club speech which was to set up military bases along the java islands. He mostly did this to protect other countries in Asia from falling into communism (known as the domino effect), just like North Korea had after the soviets had given them a backing hand during this period. Therefore, the source does support the view immensely that the soviets were to blame.
In terms of its reliability, there are positive points such as ‘if South Korean forces proved unequal to the job, only American military intervention could do it. This is indeed true as the South Korean had a corrupt government, run by Rhee and they had insufficient weapons to defeat the North with. However, it’s provenance and the time of which the source was written reduces its reliability. For instance, Acheson states how America was ‘internationally accepted position as the protector of south Korea’. After Acheson mistakenly excludes South Korea from the defensive perimeter scheme, as he saw it as a desire to remove responsibility in the region, it only makes sense 19 years later to justify him and wanting history to blame the soviets.
Overall, the source is deemed unreliable as it consists of bias information and especially because Dean Acheson is in a position to lie due to the defensive scheme chaos. We cannot completely trust