37.8 - On the push for war with North Korea

On the push for war with North Korea

We end this week with a warming, a heads-up if you will: 2017 heading into 2018 is shaping up a lot like 2002.

That's because 2002 was the year of an on-going campaign to get the public to embrace a war against Iraq - and as time went on the public resistance to the idea continued, the claims became more and more intense, the dangers being claimed more and more extreme.

We are seeing much the same now - with, I strongly suspect, the same ultimate goal: war, as the claims get more extreme.

On October 25, we had testimony to the House Committee on Homeland Security from the chair and chief of staff of something called the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from EMP Attack about a hypothetical North Korean EMP attack on the US.

"EMP" is "electromagnetic pulse" and it's a by-product of nuclear explosions. It's a burst of intense electromagnetic energy that can disrupt power grids along with phone lines and internet services and more; it can even fry delicate electronics.

The report claims that such an attack would wipe out the US's technological infrastructure for an indefinite period, resulting in, it claims, 90% of us starving to death inside of a year.

Scared yet? No?

Well, the next day, October 26, a report from the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University breathlessly told us that North Korea has an advanced, dangerous, biological weapons program with the ability to douse thousands of people with lethal doses of anthrax, smallpox, viral hemorrhagic fever, or any one of 10 other germ warfare agents.

And two days after that, on October 28, Secretary of War Jim Mattis declared during a visit to South Korea that the threat of nuclear missile attack from North Korea "has accelerated" and that "I cannot imagine a condition under which the United States would accept North Korea as a nuclear power."

But just in case you still can't be stampeded, there is a back-up: Testifying to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on October 30, both Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson refused to rule out a US nuclear first-strike on North Korea. Y'know, just in case.

Tillerson noted that "no president, Republican or Democrat, has ever forsworn the first-strike capability." That, unfortunately, is true - but then again, while some of those presidents brandished those nukes, I don't recall any of them before now ever being quoted something to the effect of "What's the point of having nuclear weapons if you're not going to use them?"

Hang on tight.

As a footnote to that, new reports say that Mount Mantap, the 7,200-foot-high peak under which North Korea detonates its nuclear bomb tests, is suffering from "tired mountain syndrome," where it has been so weakened by repeated tests that the area around the facility is no longer stable.

During the last nuclear test at the facility known as Punggye-ri on 9/3, the mountain visibly shifted, with a 6.3 magnitude artificial earthquake created by the test followed within minutes by a 4.1 magnitude natural quake with an 85-acre area visibly subsiding. Since then, the area, not known for natural seismic activity, has had three more quakes.

It's bad enough that Chinese scientists have already warned that further nuclear tests could cause the mountain to collapse and release the radiation from the blast.

In fact, the weakening was significant enough that when an underground tunnel was being constructed sometime in October, it collapsed, trapping 100 workers - and when another 100 were sent in to rescue them, the tunnel completely collapsed, killing all 200.

This doesn't mean the facility would have to be abandoned and North Korea is unlikely to do so, there being, it seems, few places in the country fit for such a nuclear test site. But it does mean that new tunnels would have to be drilled in another part of the mountain.

Which marks this news as clearly a setback to North Korea's nuclear weapons ambitions. Not an end to them by any means, but a setback.

The thing is, between satellite imagery and seismic observations, US intelligence services doubtless knew about these events - the weakening of the mountain, the subsequent earthquakes, the collapse of the tunnels - pretty much as soon as they happened. So I find it interesting that it was not long after the tunnel collapse that Mattis insisting on an "accelerating" threat of attack, since it would seem odd to claim an increased threat just as your adversary has suffered a setback - unless your intent is not to deter an opponent but to promote a war.

Like I said, hang on tight.

20.10 - Foreign policy and North Korea

Foreign policy and North Korea

The big foreign policy issue these days, at least if you judge by the headlines, is North Korea, so I wanted to offer some of my thoughts. A lot of this of course is speculation and interpretation, but I have learned over the years to trust my instincts on matters such as this and so that's what I'm going to do here.

So let me say at the beginning that I don't think this will result in war. I have no faith in the reasonableness or emotional stability of either Donald TheRump or Kim Jong-un, but in each case they have people around them who are at least somewhat grounded in military and political realities.

One such reality from our perspective is that North Korea is incapable of inflicting significant damage on the US. In the event of a conflict, it could sink a ship or two, which certainly would mean the deaths of soldiers and sailors, but in terms of the United States, it simply does not have the power or the means. However, with an army estimated to number 1.2 million, even with its obsolete weaponry it could inflict significant damage on South Korea, which we clearly would not want.

Meanwhile, the North Korean military knows, must know, if it doesn't know the Chinese would surely tell them, that going to war with the US amounts to national suicide. And China, which surely does not want to get into a war with the US, especially not over North Korea, still could feel obligated to come to the defense of its ally in the event of open fighting. So everyone has cause, good reason, to avoid a war.

So I think there will not be a war unless someone gets stupid. Skip the jokes, you thought of them, I thought of them, let them pass. By stupid, I am here talking about getting wrapped up in thinking about what you want, what your action can be, such that you don't think about what the reaction might be and so wind up facing unintended consequences.

With that in mind, there are a few recent events I think significant.

The first is that in a big break from tradition, Japan's largest warship, the Izumo, is escorting a US supply ship heading toward the Korean Peninsula as it passes through Japanese waters.

By its Constitution, Japan can only act militarily in self-defense, but a new law allows its ships to come to the defense of an ally that's protecting Japan, regarding that as self-defense. Which means that Japan is saying by accompanying the US ship that it regards the US fleet gathering off the Korean Peninsula as "protecting Japan" and therefore any attack on any of those ships potentially could be construed as an attack on Japan. Considering the history between Japan and Korea, that is likely to cause consternation in North Korea and raise there the specter of a reassertion of Japanese militarism. It can't help but make the North Korean military more on edge.

Then in what may be the most significant bit of news to come out of the region of late, on Wednesday, May 3, North Korea's state media publicly criticized China.

Chinese state media commentaries have been calling for Pyongyang's nuclear weapons program to be shut down and had been suggesting tougher sanctions against North Korea toward that end. A commentary carried by the official Korean Central News Agency called that "an undisguised threat" against the country.

The Korean commentary accused China's "People's Daily" and "Global Times" newspapers, regarded as reflecting official government stands, of "a string of absurd and reckless remarks" that "render the present bad situation tenser" and added that "China had better ponder" the "grave consequences" of "its reckless act of chopping down the pillar" of relations between the two countries.

What is interesting about this is that the US has been pressing China, which is North Korea's only major ally, to restrain Kim Jong-un's regime and this appears to be clear evidence that not only is China doing so but that North Korea is feeling the heat.

China had cut off all imports of coal from North Korea in mid-February, saying the ban would extend throughout 2017. While North Korean economists tried to shrug off the decision, saying other exports are more important, coal is the country's biggest export and China its biggest customer and the recent hostility toward China could be a sign that the ban is starting to pinch.

Which can seem like good news if your goal is to put the screws to North Korea and force it to do what we want, but this is actually right where you need to tread carefully.

The fact is, historically, when nations feel cornered, when they feel the choice has come down to war or humiliation, they have shown a depressingly consistent preference for the former. Similarly, when nations feel squeezed economically, when they face or at least believe they face the prospect of slow but certain strangulation, the risks of war, great though they may be, can look to be the better choice.

The bottom line is that if you do not want war, if you are not trying to provoke war, then when you have the upper hand, especially when you have the upper hand, you have to give the other side a way to back out without appearing to back down.

Which is why I'm concerned over what appears to be an unseemly rush to ratchet up the sanctions on North Korea just as existing sanctions appear to be having an effect. The House just passed by 419-1 a bill that would, if enacted, not only increase US sanctions on North Korea but would also sanction any nation that has certain dealings with the government. That bill is supposedly related to North Korea's use of slave labor, not its nuclear weapons program, but I doubt the leaders in Pyongyang will note that distinction or care about it if they do. Pushing too hard too fast is exactly the sort of stupidity I mentioned earlier that we need to avoid.

So it is still a touchy, tense, time but again, I believe that the leadership of everyone involved - even allowing for the fact that one leader is a sociopathic egomaniac and the other is a spoiled brat with delusions of grandeur and it really doesn't matter which is which - but the full scope of leadership of each party has good reasons to avoid war.

All we have to do is find a way to allow both Kim and TheRump to come out of this with their egos intact. Not easy, true, but certainly not impossible considering that both of them have in the past declared their failures to be great victories.