Posted on 06/20/2006 7:45:22 PM PDT by neverdem
The North Koreans are likely to launch an intercontinental ballistic missile this week that has the range to hit the West Coast. This means Kim Jong Il and company now have something to do with the dozen-or-so nuclear weapons they have built.
And so, for perhaps the first time since Stalin achieved nuclear armaments in 1947, the United States is confronting the ultimate weapon in the hands of a psychopath. Will the North Koreans use their newfound status to drop a bomb on Seattle or San Francisco? I wouldn’t bet against it. They have nothing to lose. Most Americans could go their whole lives without giving North Korea a second thought, but North Koreans (in their press, at least) are obsessed with the United States and imagine themselves in a one-on-one battle of Armageddon.
North Korea wants to take on America for the same reason that Mark David Chapman decided to kill John Lennon and Lee Harvey Oswald shot President Kennedy. They were nobodies who wanted to attack a somebody. Just engaging us hugely inflates their ego. Will they eventually launch one of their missiles against us? I wouldn’t bet against it. Both Hinckley and Oswald found their targets. And of course al-Qaeda accomplished the same thing on September 11th.
As we contemplate what to do about this flyspeck attack, it’s worth pausing a moment to draw a few lessons about the nuclear age.
Let’s start with the age-old question of whether we should have dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There are still people who argue it was all unnecessary and that we should have detonated the bomb at a remote location or refrained from using it altogether. The question is interesting is because North Korea probably wouldn’t even exist if we had completed construction of the bomb a month sooner.
In February 1945, we had invaded Iwo Jima, an eight-square-mile island defended by 21,000 Japanese soldiers. Within 750 miles of Tokyo, it put us within bombing range for the first time. The Japanese had vowed to fight to the last man and they did. 18,000 died—along with 6,800 U.S. Marines. Only 200 Japanese soldiers surrendered.
On April 1, 180,000 soldiers and marines invaded Okinawa, a much larger and more heavily defended island, backed by the U.S. Navy. 12,000 Americans died, including 5,000 sailors, the highest total of any American naval engagement in history. 70,000 Japanese soldiers lost their lives and another 150,000 civilians died, many who killed themselves and their families in order to avoid capture by the Americans.
Now we faced the task of invading the Japanese mainland, an island nation of 145,000 square miles defended by 70 million people, all vowing to fight to the end.
The German surrender on April 29 left both American and Russian forces free to move to the Pacific. The Soviets were not even at war with Japan but President Roosevelt had enlisted Stalin’s support at Yalta. When Roosevelt died on April 12, President Harry Truman continued the strategy. Stalin moved troops to the Manchurian border, where a considerable portion of the Japanese army was stationed.
As Truman became aware of the Manhattan Project, however, he began to hedge the agreement. By July, when the Big Four met at Potsdam, Stalin was already reneging on agreements to restore autonomy to Poland and Czechoslovakia and Truman was becoming wary. When news of the successful test at Los Alamos reached him in the middle of the conference, Truman changed his approach and told Stalin he might not be needed.
The atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, each killing between 75,000 and 90,000 people. The March 9 firebombing of Tokyo had killed 120,000 but because the raid was conducted with conventional weapons, it had little impact on the Japanese will to fight. When Truman promised to wipe every Japanese city off the map, however, the Emperor was persuaded to surrender. (Actually we had no more bombs left in our arsenal and it would have taken weeks to build another.)
The Soviet Union entered the war on August 9, the day the second bomb was dropped. Japan surrendered the next day but Soviet troops rushed into Manchuria anyway to seize territory. By August 12 they had reached Seoul and threatened to engulf the entire peninsula. Given half an hour to draw up an agreement dividing Korea into occupation zones, General Charles F. Bonesteel, head of the army’s policy section, picked the 38th parallel as a dividing line. Four days later, Stalin agreed. That is how North Korea was born.
The division soon cost America 54,000 lives during the Korean War and Stalin’s annexation has long outlived the Soviet Union. But it could have been worse. Without Hiroshima and Nagasaki we probably would have lost 500,000 more American lives and ended up with North and South Japan.
So how did North Korea get the bomb? That’s an interesting story as well. The science of building nuclear weapons is not all that difficult but it does pose an engineering challenge. Natural uranium contains two isotopes, U-235 and U-238. Both are “radioactive” in that they are slow breaking down, but only U-235 is “fissile,” meaning it will split in two, releasing an enormous amount of energy, when it absorbs a neutron. Originally there were equal amounts of the two isotopes, but over geological history U-235 has broken down faster so that it now constitutes only .7 percent of the natural ore. To get to bomb-grade material, these isotopes must be separated until the ore is “enriched” to 90 percent U-235.
Uranium enrichment is an incredibly laborious process. Because the isotopes are chemically identical, they must be separated on the basis of their miniscule difference in weight—three neutrons. The best method is through centrifuges but it takes a solid year of twirling the uranium before bomb-grade levels can be approached. The Iranians may be getting close but there is reason for skepticism.
The faster way to build a bomb is through plutonium. When U-238 is exposed to neutrons, some of the atoms will absorb two neutrons and move two places up the periodic table to become plutonium-239, which is almost twice as fissionable as U-235. The Manhattan Project undertook both uranium enrichment and plutonium production, but plutonium proved much more practical. All Russian and American bombs were made with it.
Nuclear power plants run on fuel rods that are enriched to only 3 percent U-235. After two years of operation, however, about 1-2 percent of the U-238 has been transformed into plutonium. This plutonium can be extracted to use as a reactor fuel or a bomb, or it can be left in place. The extreme radioactivity and the difficulty of performing chemical separation make it highly unlikely that anyone outside an industrial country could ever build a bomb from a power plant.
Nonetheless, in 1976, President Jimmy Carter called off the recycling of fuel rods from nuclear power plants on the grounds that extracted plutonium might end up in the hands of terrorists. As a result, spent fuel has piled up at reactors all over the country while the futile effort to dispose of it at Yucca Mountain continues. With recycling, 95 percent of the fuel rod can be reprocessed and the problem of “nuclear waste” disappears.
Meanwhile, countries around the world have not paid the slightest attention to our fatuous plan to bury our own plutonium. They have simply manufactured their own. China built its own bomb from a homegrown reactor in 1966. India extracted plutonium from a donated Canadian reactor and exploded a bomb in 1974. Israel built its own bomb in the 1970s and then passed the technology on to South Africa. Pakistan seems to have picked up some stray plutonium from Russia and passed it on to several countries.
North Korea began a nuclear program in the 1980s with a Soviet-supplied graphite reactor—the kind the Soviets had at Chernobyl, designed for extracting plutonium. In 1989 the Koreans closed down the reactor for 70 days—sufficient time, American intelligence calculated, to extract 12 kilograms of plutonium, enough for two bombs. They also started fooling around with uranium enrichment. With concerns mounting, President Bill Clinton sent the same Jimmy Carter to North Korea in 1994 to try to halt the effort. Carter returned with a pledge from the North Koreans that they would give up building a bomb in exchange for hundreds of thousands of tons of fuel oil plus two light-water nuclear reactors. By 2000, however, it was clear that the North Koreans had continued their experimentation and in 2005 they announced a nuclear weapon. They are now believed to have about a dozen.
What are the lessons here? First, it was the height of naivete to think that by abstaining from plutonium recycling we could prevent other nations from developing nuclear weapons. It’s like saying that by giving up matches we can persuade Brazilians against burning their rainforests. Other countries have gone right ahead developing their own nuclear programs while we are stuck with trainloads of nuclear “waste.”
Second, we’re probably going to have to do something about North Korea. Ignoring the rogue nation is like ignoring al-Qaeda in the 1990s. David Frum has suggested a naval blockade. Daniel Kennelly wants an “amiable divorce” from South Korea to free our hand. One way or another, no one is going to solve this problem for us and it makes no sense to wait until the North Koreans decide to lob a missile onto the Microsoft campus.
Finally, we should take off our blinders and realize we are living in the nuclear age. There is a widespread public sentiment to ignore reality and believe the nuclear genie can be put back in the bottle. Less than a year ago, Discover ran an article entitled “The End of the Plutonium Age,” which opined that, with the aging of our own nuclear arsenal, perhaps the era of nuclear weapons could soon be forgotten.
Unfortunately, the North Koreans don’t seem inclined to go along. They may be insignificant and paranoid, but as Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley, and Nedjelko Cabrinovic (assassin of the Archduke Ferdinand) all proved, such insignificant paranoids can change history.
Just for the record, it was Gavrilo Princep who assassinated Archduke Ferdinand. Nedeljko Èabrinoviæ had previously hurled a hand grenade at Ferdinand's car but missed.
They have a lot to lose. Like their entire military structure and leadership. Major case of urban renewal--under new management--and that country could use it.
David Frum has suggested a naval blockade.
Wow! Does he want to send a stern diplomatic note as well? That'll show 'em!
Wrong. The first Soviet nuclear test was in 1949.
Pakistan didn't get stray plutonium from Russia.Their N-programme started in the 70s with CHINESE help.
This article has plenty of factual holes...
im convinced more than ever, that all this shit in the Middle East..N.Korea...Israel-Iran...its only gonna stop when someone gets hit REAL HARD!!..To me, the United States is wasting time, men , and money fighting these battles all over the world...sorry, but its time to set an ultimatum..you either conform and live peacefully with the rest of world, or your countries will be completely destroyed in 20 minutes..United States should unleash its nuclear forces and end this shit once and for all.
He seems to have been under the control of the Serbian Secret Service too. (Perhaps the SSS didn't think through the consequences too well, or maybe WWI was what they wanted.)
im convinced more than ever, that all this shit in the Middle East..N.Korea...Israel-Iran...its only gonna stop when someone gets hit REAL HARD!!..To me, the United States is wasting time, men , and money fighting these battles all over the world...sorry, but its time to set an ultimatum..you either conform and live peacefully with the rest of world, or your countries will be completely destroyed in 20 minutes..United States should unleash its nuclear forces and end this shit once and for all.
"Wrong. The first Soviet nuclear test was in 1949."
Technically, you have to HAVE a nuke before you can test it. 8)
However unbalanced Ding Dong Ill is, he must know that firing a nuke at us will only mean his immediate destruction. I still think the little moron just wants to sound tough and use nuclear blackmail.
Pyongyang Goes Ballistic - Doing what works for the other evil ones.
If Necessary, Strike and Destroy (Clinton Defense Secretary Says Take down N. Korea Missile)
2003 UN Report: Iraq Sulfur Mustard Gas Chemical Weapons Have High Quality After 12 years of Storage
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Iwo was useful as a fighter and divert base for damaged bombers. It was also worthwhile to deny it's use to Japanese fighters. But the bombers did not operate from there, the operated from Saipan and Tinian, which we had taken somewhat earlier, in June and July of 1944.
This author seems a bit deficient in his grasp of historical facts.
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