HISTORY : Unburied Treasures Lure Researchers to National Archives : The White House has declassified millions of documents from World War II and after. Included are 1954 proposals to nuke China.

In April, 1954, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff--acting at the request of President Dwight D. Eisenhower--devised a strategic plan to drop atomic bombs on military targets in China if the Chinese Communists resumed the Korean War, invaded French Indochina or tried both at the same time.

The significance of this information, revealed by a sheaf of papers in a box of U.S. Air Force documents that have been recently declassified, has not yet been evaluated by historians.

Nor is it altogether shocking. Adm. Arthur W. Radford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs at that time, was a well-known advocate of nuking China, and John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s secretary of state, liked to threaten “massive retaliation” against those who crossed America. But Eisenhower always vetoed their proposals to use the atomic bomb.

The documents, however, are sure evidence that the Clinton Administration has handed the world myriad tantalizing bits of information by declassifying 44 million pages of military papers--21 million from World War II and 23 million from the post-World War II period--in one swoop, releasing them last month to anyone who wants to peer into the boxes in the stacks of the National Archives.

So far, mostly journalists have rushed to the archives. But the archivists expect large numbers of historians and other specialists to pore over the documents in the new year.

“The onslaught is going to come . . . ,” said Richard W. Peuser, an archivist in the military reference branch of the National Archives. That does not trouble him. “I wish more people would use these archives.”

Peuser, who has a master’s degree in American history, likened his work amid the stacks and boxes to the joy of “a kid in a candy shop.” Pointing to a shelf of boxes from World War II that were declassified and available to the public before the latest presidential order, he said: “Some of these documents report Japanese feelers for peace as far back as 1943. It’s all here. But not enough people know about it.”

What makes the latest release of documents so unusual is the decision by President Clinton to let them out in bulk. Under the usual rules, officials known as declassifiers go over the secret documents page by page and decide separately whether each page should be shown to the public or kept secret. But that has caused an enormous backlog, especially since the 1980s, when budget cuts reduced the archives’ staff.

In his executive order, Clinton announced that the 44 million pages would be released even though they had not been cleared page by page. Even that number represented only 14% of the backlog of 325 million pages in the archives awaiting declassification. Much of this may be released in future bulk declassifications. But, at the request of intelligence agencies, some material will still have to be declassified page by page.

To offer a sample of the wares and whet appetites for more, archivists pulled several documents out of the newly declassified boxes and distributed photocopies to the first reporters who showed up at the National Archives. Among the most exciting:

* The top-secret naval orders for Operation Neptune--the armada of 4,000 vessels that transported the Allied invasion forces to Normandy Beach on D-day, June 6, 1944.

British Adm. Bertram Ramsay, the Allied naval commander in chief, signed the orders. Calling it “probably the largest and most complicated operation ever undertaken,” Ramsay wrote that “the object of Operation Neptune is to carry out an operation from the United Kingdom to secure a lodgement on the continent from which further offensive operations can be developed.”

* An account of the Battle of the Bulge in December , 1944 , from reports of the 254th Engineer Combat Battalion of the U.S. Army.

In this famous battle, the Allied troops, ready to plunge into Germany, suddenly found themselves caught in a surprise German counteroffensive across the Ardennes forest in southeastern Belgium. The materials include a secret overall report by Lt. Col. Loren W. Jenkins, the commanding officer of the battalion, and some handwritten accounts of the action by his unnamed junior officers.

In one of these tense accounts, the officer describes how his company withstood a German attack. “Then tanks and infantry came at us together. The tanks spread out and overran our positions, crushing two machine guns under their tracks. In spite of the fact the men had not had the time to properly dig in, they stayed in their holes and only three men were injured from the tanks passing over them. After the tanks passed over us the infantry was unable to overrun us due to our intense fire. After twelve tanks had passed us and the German infantry was going around our left flanks, I withdrew the front line under protecting fire of the reserve platoon.”

* A 1954 top-secret memorandum from the Joint Chiefs about the possible use of atomic weapons against China.

In this memorandum, Brig. Gen. Edwin H. J. Carns, secretary of the Joint Chiefs, said the military Establishment “does not contemplate a massive atomic strike against Communist territory and its population; rather it is intended that conventional as well as atomic weapons, as appropriate, will be employed against military targets in Korea and against those military targets in Manchuria and China which are being used by the Communists in direct support of their operations in Korea.”

This memorandum came out of Box 900 of the U.S. Air Force headquarters files, and Peuser pulled the box off the stacks to demonstrate the possibilities of the declassified material. Examination of the couple of hundred pages in this box revealed that the Joint Chiefs in 1954 expanded their assessment of the provocative actions that the Chinese Communists might take, triggering possible atomic retaliation.

First, the Joint Chiefs thought the Chinese might defy the United States by breaking the truce in Korea. Then, they conceived of the Chinese intervening in French Indochina, where the French garrison was about to fall to the Communist Vietnamese at Dien Bien Phu. Finally, they speculated that the Chinese might break the Korean truce and invade Indochina at the same time. When an Air Force officer received the final memorandum with its speculation about a double-barreled threat, he noted in the margin, “Realistic!”

In addition to contemplating the use of the atomic bomb, the Joint Chiefs proposed blockading the coast of China and allowing Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist troops on Taiwan to invade China. The Joint Chiefs described their proposals as “planning for a limited war,” but many scholars believe that the actions would have meant the start of World War III.

There is no detailed index to the boxes in the stacks; they are arranged by date, agency or organization and general subject matter. Once a scholar ferrets out an important paper, however, the archivists like to hear about it so they can guide future researchers to the right box.

John E. Taylor, a 73-year-old archivist who first came to the National Archives in 1946, is acknowledged as the master at guiding researchers to boxes. “Mr. Taylor can often tell you exactly where a document is--in what box and on what stack,” Peuser said. “It’s all in his head.”

“No one else in this building has worked here as long as I have,” Taylor said. “Yet I still see something new every day.”

He expresses disappointment at the relatively small number of researchers--almost all journalists--who so far have come to look at the new materials. But he adds: “As the word gets around, there will be more.”

The newly declassified documents are at three sites: the main National Archives building--where tourists can view the original Declaration of Independence--on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, a second building in Suitland, Md., and a new building in College Park, Md.