North Korea, Nukes ... Existential Threats

I responded to a "What's on your mind, Richard" — though if they knew me well enough to call me by my first name, they'd know I go by "Rich" — I responded to one of those "What's on your mind prompts on Facebook with this. Caution: It's depressing.

What's on my mind is the 4th of July fireworks offered by North Korea, leading to thinking about Tom Lehrer's song, "Who's Next," on nuclear proliferation, leading to a line by Sergeant Yanek, the teacher of the course I took in the early 1960s in CBR: Chemical, Biological, and Radiological warfare.

Another student in the course tried to waste some time and/or was really interested and asked Sergeant Yanek about concerns publicized on the upcoming test by the USSR of some 50 megaton or 100 megaton or whatever really big "device" and Yanek said that there was some worry that an explosion that large might crack the crust of the Earth or get the planet wobbling a bit on its axis, which in turn could crack the crust .... And the student said, "You don't sound too concerned," and Yanek paused a beat and said, "Well, I probably shouldn't say this since the motto of the course is 'Survive, Struggle, and Prevail,' but the way I figure it, by the time the Russians set off their bombs and we set off ours, and the English and French and Chinese and maybe Israelis and God-knows-who-else set off theirs, WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!! So, no, I'm not worried about no 50- or 100-megaton Russian superbomb."

A North Korean bomb that can go on an ICBM is an issue, but I live next to a US West Coast deep-water port with container-ship traffic, and if the DPRK or anyone else can make a bomb small enough to fit into a shipping container and not be too obvious, well, "they" can take out a lot of Americans, including, even in California, a lot of Republicans.

In terms of existential threats, the North Koreans aren't an issue. The Americans and Russians are: between us we have enough warheads to risk nuclear winter or at least put big parts of human culture back to the late Medieval. And our leaders really need to keep working on that (things were worse during the Cold War).

It would make me very unhappy — more exactly, very dead — if Port Hueneme, CA, and a big part of Ventura County got reduced to a rapidly expanding ball of white-hot plasma; but H. sapiens and the USA could take the loss. A serious thermonuclear exchange, and "WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!!" or at least risk species death. And we came close to that in my lifetime: not just the Cuban Missile crisis, but on the quiet day of 28 September 1983, when the balloon almost went up, and a whole lot else, because of a computer glitch.

Whoops. Messrs. Trump and Putin et al. need to stop messing around.

Military Options in North Korea (7 March 2013)

      According to an opinion piece by Henry M. Seggerman in The Korea Times back in December of 2010, "North Korea has 11,000 heavy artillery pieces pointed at Seoul and could kill one million Seoul residents in a few hours. North Korea can continue with provocations without any fear of heavy South Korean retaliation." This is a bit hyped. Although estimates go up to 13,000 artillery pieces, the formulation I recall for effective fire was "5,000 artillery tubes," and, as Popular Mechanics — of all publications! — points out, North Korea is incapable of rendering Seoul "flattened," nor would Seoul be consumed in, in one translation, "a sea of flames" in a North Korean attack.

            However, Seoul is only 35 miles from the border with North Korea; North Korea has mobile artillery and rockets; North Korea does have an air force and a large army; and North Korea has had time to infiltrate the Demilitarized Zone with the South with, well, God knows what weapons. After noting serious problems for the North Koreans with their military, a subdued report by The International Institute for Strategic Studies states that"In any conflict, North Korean artillery, firing from fortified positions near the DMZ, could initially deliver a heavy bombardment on the South Korean capital. Allied counter-battery fire and air strikes would eventually reduce North Korea’s artillery capability, but not before significant damage and high casualties had been inflicted on Seoul. Similarly, the North Korean air force could launch surprise attacks against military and civilian targets throughout South Korea before allied air superiority was established. The potential delivery of chemical or biological weapons by artillery, short-range missiles and aerial bombs is an additional threat – especially to unprotected civilians."

            At any given time, the US has some 30,000 troops in South Korea as what even respectable sorts used to call "trip-wires," and my friends and I more cynically called "hostages": A North Korean attack would bring in the US, and we do have the firepower to reduce North Korea to a wasteland.
            But not without a lot of fallout — starting with nuclear fallout — on South Korea, and problems with the Chinese, North Korea's neighbors, and the main US creditor.

            Short-form: There really are no military options on the Korean Peninsula. Not sane ones, not for the US of A.

            The non-military option I suggest is to give the North Koreans what, for the last couple decades or so, they've said they've wanted: direct negotiations with the United States and a peace treaty ending the Korean War (or "Police Action" for the pedants who note that the US Congress never declared war).

            But, you might well say, the North Koreans have developed and are deploying nuclear weapons and delivery systems.

            Okay, I respond, that is a dangerous thing for them to do but understandable.

            Consider this. China invaded Tibet and remains in Tibet, and the United States and "the International Community" viewed that aggression with alarm and sent strong notes of protest … and that was that. Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, and got hit with the Gulf War (Iraq War 1.0) and what we call "The Iraq War" (Gulf 2.0 and following), upon the tenth anniversary of which I am writing this essay. What were the differences between Iraq and China prompting different responses to aggression?

                        (1) There are reasons to believe that Kuwait actually is a country with historical existence. Still, its most immediate existence comes from the drawing of lines on imperial maps. Many of those lines don’t make sense in terms of tribal geography, ethnic and linguistic groups' territories, and other matters of practical concern (like a port for Iraq) — and in a rational world such political lines would've been drawn differently to start with and, again, in a rational world, be peaceably readjusted today. But trying to redraw lines in our world leads to trouble, and it is an important rule among the countries that emerged from the old European empires, "Successor states to the European empires shall not attempt to change their borders by force." Saddam broke that rule.

                        (2) There are a whole lot more Chinese than Iraqis.

                        (3) Iraq and Kuwait have a lot of oil, with them and their oil near Europe and not all that far from the USA; China has coal and is close to the US only by container ship.

                        (4) China has nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them.

            George H. W. Bush pushed the Iraqis out of Kuwait; George W. Bush defeated Iraq in war and overthrew the regime of Saddam Hussein. And George W. Bush included in "an Axis of Evil" Iraq, Iran, and North Korea.

            Iran and, relevantly here, North Korea, can't change much about their differences with China — they're not going to change geography or geology —with one exception: they can get atomic bombs.

            And North Korea is getting a deliverable bomb, and, however loony much of the North Korean leadership might be, that is a rational decision.

            Fortunately, the North Koreans don't have much capacity to deliver nuclear bombs, plural, and we have over-kill. North Korea can cause a whole lot of damage in its region now, with conventional weapons, and may be able eventually to nuke a USA city or two, which would probably end republican government in the USA but otherwise not represent "an existential threat": as World War II and its aftermath demonstrated convincingly, countries can lose a number of cities and survive.

            However, as World War II demonstrated even more convincingly, destroying cities is very unpleasant for the former inhabitants thereof, and, if les so, for their surviving families, friends, and many fellow citizens.

            So we have a stand-off with North Korea, and a very dangerous one, and not one that won't be resolved just with sanctions: the minute North Korean elite will not be hurt much by the sanctions, and they don't have to worry about being turned out of power by their suffering subjects in a 2014 (or 2016) election.

            So let's do what we have to do: cut a deal.

            The North Koreans want a peace treaty; let's negotiate one and as much as possible get the hell out of Korean politics. South Korea is a major economic power, and China is a major power every which way. Let us be an honest broker and good Pacific-rim neighbor — but let the Koreans deal with Korean problems, with quiet help from the Chinese.

            And we can continue quiet efforts to encourage the Chinese to be a bit more decent to the people of Tibet. 

Russia, Ukraine, Crimea: Think of It as an Opportunity (29 March 2014)

You never let a serious crisis go to waste.

And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things

you think you could not do before. — Hon. Rahm Emanuel

 

           

           The diplomatic community seems to have rejected my suggestion that part of the bargaining over Russia's desire to maintain warm water ports on a peninsula should include a US offer of the State of Florida. Well, so be it; it was a long-shot suggestion and not entirely in earnest (I had family in Florida and still have friends living in Florida, and I think they think it better to have Russians around as "snowbird" guests in American Florida rather than living as American expatriates in a Russian Florida).

            Still, the very dangerousness of the confrontation over Crimea and Ukraine can offer opportunities to get some things done which should be done anyway; and there are historical precedents or at least historically-stated hopes that can be significant here, precedents from John F. Kennedy and Ronald W. Reagan.

            The upshot of the missile portion of Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 was that the Russians noisily withdrew their missiles from Cuba, and the United States quietly removed our missiles from Italy and Turkey. One possibility of the Crimea/Ukrainian crisis is that the Russian Federation should withdraw their military away from the border of Ukraine "with all deliberate speed" — in the old sense of the term, before resistance to the US Supreme Court desegregation rulings made the phrase a sick joke — and keep them away. With all deliberate speed the Russians should pull back, and in return the US should finally get serious about removing our military forces from Europe beyond what is needed for a Korea-style "trip-wire." NATO forces, as in European Union forces should be at sufficient strength and appropriately positioned to preclude tempting Russia to move against them but not threatening Russia.

            Secretary of Defense Hagel, following ideas going back to Donald Rumsfeld and further, has already proposed cutting back on overblown portions of the US military. The Crimean crisis has shown just how useless a muscle-bound military can be, and comments from the Rumsfeldian neocons have shown clearly the temptations from prossessing the world's strongest military to look for military action to resolve conflicts.

            So much for Kennedy and Cuba.

            For the Reagan precedent I assume that President Ronald Reagan was sane and sincere in wanting to move away from "Mutually Assured Destruction" and eventually to serious nuclear arms reduction and sharing missile defenses with the Soviets.

            The Ukraine/Crimea crisis is another reminder that the superpowers remain nuclear powers and that there are just too goddamn many nuclear warheads in the world — period — for the safety of the human species. More directly, Russian seizure of Crimea and additional threats to the territorial integrity of Ukraine have undermined attempts at preventing nuclear proliferation: Ukraine gave up its nuclear arsenal  on condition that the great powers — Russia, the UK, and the USA — would defend Ukraine.

            If the crisis managers in the US, NATO, the EU, Ukraine, and Russia aren't careful, the main lesson from this mess may be that the only way for a country to avoid being bullied is to get nukes.

            We should not panic, but we should "be afraid; be very afraid" — all of us humans — and get our leaders to various bargaining tables to work out sharing missile defenses near Russia's borders with Russia and to call the Iranians are their claim that they only want nuclear materials for peaceful purposes.

            It is time for a rapid build-down of nuclear weapons starting with the USA and Russia and extending to the Iranian nuclear program, Israeli nuclear stockpiles and achieving a low-nuke Middle East (and reductions on the Indian subcontinent, given the tendency of the Indians and Pakistanis to occasionally fight).

            Two of the more pressing, if usually unrecognized, problems in the worlds of everyday people are that threat of nuclear annihilation and the threat that another "dip" in The Great Recession will lead us into another Great Depression.

            Really effective regimes of economic sanctions against Russian, those that will bite and bite deep, might throw Russia into economic calamity and take much of the globalized economy with it.

            It's time to cool it on all fronts and use low-grade, continuing, and highly realistic fears — the crisis — to move toward getting done what we should have long been doing. So:

                        * Pullbacks by troops of Russia and the United States.

                        * Cooperation between Russia and the United States — and what's become an Iranian (Shiite) Establishment — on the threat of terrorism, including potential nuclear terrorism, and concentrating first on Sunni terrorism and moving out from there to other "fundamentalisms" that are militant, armed, dangerous, and in the market for major fire-power.

                        * Radical cutbacks on nuclear weapons so that there are (1) too few world-wide to bring on nuclear winter or even "merely" the end of human civilization and (2) far fewer that might fall into the hands of "non-state actors" or fanatical leaders of states, whose agendas to achieve some transcendent goal allow for losing a city of two and a few million people to nuclear massive retaliation.

                        * International cooperation to finally get the global economy fairly and justly globalized, and up and running robustly.