January 7, 2003
NO MORE NUKES:
'The Greatest of Great Men' (NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF, January 7, 2003, NY Times)Unless the administration switches gears, here's what may happen: North Korea will reprocess spent fuel at its Yongbyon reactor, giving it enough plutonium for five to eight nuclear warheads by May 1. The North will also resume construction of a much bigger reactor at Taechon, accelerate its enriched uranium program, possibly drop out of the Nonproliferation Treaty, and test a Taepodong 2 missile that, in three stages, could reach New York (although it might be so inaccurate that it would miss and wipe out Newark).In five years, North Korea could have 100 nuclear weapons and be churning out more like a fast-food chef. With nothing else to keep its economy going, North Korea will peddle them to the highest bidder ("One free Taepodong 2 missile with every three warheads you buy!") [...]
The only way out that I can see is to negotiate with North Korea, despite the administration's legitimate concerns about rewarding bad behavior. We could save face by getting Vladimir Putin to sponsor an international conference on North Korea, and then working out a deal in which the Great Leader verifiably gives up his nuclear and long-range missile programs, while the West offers normalization, trade, Asian Development Bank loans and pledges of nonaggression.
This would be a deeply unsatisfying solution, but it is less unsatisfying than the options we're now speeding toward: a nuclear factory peddling bombs
on the North Korean Ebay, or Korean War II.
There is, I think, a much better way out. It is to prove, decisively, that we're serious about putting an end to the spread of nuclear weapons, something we should have done when the USSR began its program.. We should take out--by whatever means necessary, including nuclear--both Kim Jong Il himself and the facilities that North Korea is using to produce its nuclear weapons. At the same time it should be made clear that it will be our policy to stop the further spread of nukes and that any nation found to be producing them will face an identical fate. It might be appropriate at this time to require China and Pakistan to surrender their nuclear capabilities too. We can work with Russia, Britain, and France to dismantle their arsenals. The US, and maybe Israel and India, should have a monopoly on nuclear weapons. Posted by Orrin Judd at January 7, 2003 12:55 PM
Orrin, your proposal is nonsensical. Why would the Chinese, the Russians, Britain and France give up their nuclear weapons ? For the last three of them, it's the only thing that keeps them above the level of Argentina or some place like that in terms of global significance. And they should accept that India and Israel are to keep their nuclear weapons ? No way.
Methinks the US should tell the Chinese that either they dismantle Kim Jong Il's (who is their subcontractor and chief provider of plausible deniability when it comes to proliferation of WMDs) regime and his weaponry themselves or the US will do it by taking out the reactors and some other facilities. Let's see what the Chinese are willing to risk to save their poodle. Er, that's a bad metaphor on the Korean peninsula, I suppose.
Well, we wouldn't give the Chinese any option. Give them up or we blow them up. Russia, Britain and France just don't need them anymore and would probably, at least secretly, prefer not to have them.
Posted by: oj at January 7, 2003 2:28 PMBush blew this one big time.
If he had done what he said he wanted to do, and there had been an American proconsul in Baghdad for the past year, with satraps in Mosul, Angora, Damascus etc., do you think N. Korea would be posturing around now?
Not me.
So now we get atomic war or something similar in Korea thanks to shillyhshallying in the Gulf.
Even Gore couldn't have done worse.
I suspect the message to the Chinese will be a bit more subtle: that there will either be 1 nuclear power (China) in Asia, or 5 (China, NK, SK, Tiawan, Japan), and that they can feel free to choose which.
Posted by: mike earl at January 7, 2003 3:24 PMHarry:
What's wrong with war in Korea?
The last one got over 30,000 Americans killed.
If the Koreans want to fight each other again
(2 million dead last time), I'm not gonna stop
them.
Harry: The North Koreans made an unprovoked attack on South Korea last time around.
It wasn't as if the South was spoiling for a fight.
Anyway there isn't a chance in hell Pakistan would surrender its' nukes since its' one of the only things stopping open warfare with India.
And we'll keep our nukes in Britain too, thank you very much.
The proposal that India should keep its' nukes while China disarms is absurd. Someting like that would only encourage belligerent Hindu nationalists to take liberties.
As Peter said, your proposal is pretty bizarre.
OJ asks, what's wrong with war in Korea?
Here's why: millions of people will die. The city of Seoul will cease to exist as a city. There will be millions of civilians dead. Conceivably, the NKors could lob a warhead or two at Japanese cities. Conceivably, the Chinese might loan the NKors warheads in retaliation for our using nuclear weapons near their border. It would be a catastrophe.
No, no, no. We're not going to fight our way out of this one. Unfortunately, the NKors got nukes. We failed to stop them. Blame whoever your like. This is the reason why we're dealing with Saddam BEFORE he gets them, and should be object lesson #1 for every future president, congressional leader and foreign policy advisor. We have to stop them BEFORE, not AFTER, they get nukes.
Charles Krauthammer's idea of giving the Japanese counter-balancing nuclear weapons, echoed by Mike Earl, also won't work. For one thing, the Japanese public finds the thought of their country having such weapons to be repugnant. The Taiwanese might take them if we could get them in there before the Chinese reacted. But it could be dicey, and the high risk sort of game that we don't need to play to get what we want.
We have to eat our oatmeal this time. Find a way to isolate the NKors without provoking a war, whether it's by an international conference, or some sort of mealy-mouthed guarantee that we won't launch an attack AS LONG AS THEY BEHAVE.
Too many innocent lives are at stake here, and it's downright callous for us to talk about the brave sacrifices the South Korean and Japanese civilians would have to make.
Finally, we are not going to blow up the Chinese nukes. They have too many of them for us to find, and they have the means to deliver them. Sorry Orrin, but this is a bad idea.
My suggestion? The President should authorize a covert op to discover where their nuclear arsenal is warehoused and other possible fabricating facilities and have them blown up.
Then, start highlighting the regime's human rights record. This would only get Jane Fonda, Barbra Streisand, Jim McDermott, Jesse Jackson and Helen Thomas proclaiming solidarity with Kim Jong Il but that's a risk we'll have to take
Ali:
India has commandos who are trained for only one mission, to secure Pakistan's nukes before they can be used. We could just give them our support in such an action. China we'd probably have to nuke to get rid of theirs.
Steve:
There's zero chance that the Chinese or North Koreans could arm, launch and target their missiles if we launched a pre-emptive strike.
Harry;
This one might get 37,000 killed, or however many we have there, but the nukes would be gone.
Steve writes:
"object lesson #1 for every future president, congressional leader and foreign policy advisor. We have to stop them BEFORE, not AFTER, they get nukes. "
Unfortunately, this also becomes object lesson #1 for every tin-pot dictator in the world: Whatever you do, be sure to sneak yourself into the Nuclear club, and you'll be immune to any US pressure thereafter.
Ali, I am aware that N. Korea launched
the attack on an unarmed S. Korea.
But we now know that the USSR was
behind it.
It is interesting to speculate whether
Koreans would fight each other again.
There doesn't seem to be any percentage
in it. I hesitate to find myself on the side
of peaceniks, like the S. Korean dimbulb
reunifiers, but who knows. Maybe this
once it could happen.
China does not have missile delivery
systems that reach the U.S. yet. It could
always try to smuggle a bomb into L.A.
in a shipment of blenders, though.
If once the world got the impression that
the U.S. was resolute about not taking crap,
then anytime somebody wanted to make
trouble we could mail it in. Send a letter
demanding specific performance or else.
But the world does not have that impression
about Wimp Boy in the White House, and
our continuing to send food to N. Korea
only reinforces the notion that we are
afraid.
mike:
Exactly. We need to nuke someone who has them to show they aren't a deterrent.
I think we can show resolution without
using atomic bombs or, say, clouds of
poison gas.
Here's my suggestion. Get that old
Ranchhand equipment out, switch it from
Agent Orange to pig's blood and promise
to spray the 100 most sacred sites in
Islam, one a day, until the Religion of Peace
purges itself of its non-peaceful elements.
Then do it.
We won't do that, but if we did, nobody
would ever doubt our resolution again,
and nobody gets hurt.
Harry,
I can't think of a quicker way to unite the Islamic world (Salafists and Sufis) against us to desecrate holy sites. That's the sort of thing we rightly condemn when others do it -- for example, the Taliban blowing up the Buddha figures.
Insulting other religions will not bring us to victory, nor will it convince Muslims that they must change. We have to break the Salafist mindset, and the only way to do that is to show them 1) that they CANNOT WIN, and 2) that Muslims who embrace the secular word as Christians have done can have the best of both worlds, technology and faith.
Spraying holy sites with pig blood will not do this.
OJ,
With all respect, your idea of nuking them before they can fire at us assumes a few things that are unrealistic. We cannot know where 100% of all Chinese nuclear warheads are for certain. We only need to miss one, which later is mixed in with a shipment of blenders to Long Beach Harbor, for us to rue the day we tried to take them out. We cannot even be certain that we'd find all the NKor nukes, even if they only had ten. A nuke is an easy thing to hide. They don't have to sit atop missiles.
As they say in the military, a nuke can ruin your whole day.
It isn't realistic to talk about blowing up another country's nukes as an example to the rest of the world. It would guarantee the hatred of much of the world. We have better, more certain strategies to bind the truculant parts of the world to a more rational course. It will take longer, but we'll all live to see it.
Steve, where have you been? The whole
Moslem world is already united against us.
It's been making war on Dar-al-harb (that's
you) for 1,400 years.
The question is, can it stop itself or is its
unending warfare built in?
I say it's built in, but there's an easy way to
prove me wrong.
In an age when the reach of trade and armies
were comparatively small, it was possible --
only just -- to tolerate Moslem militancy.
That does not work any more. Either 1) the
religion changes itself,2) it submits to change
imposed from outside, or3) it is extinguished.
I would prefer 1 but expect 3.