North Korea Has No Intention of Giving Up Nukes

In the days right after North Korea signed an agreement that would supposedly require its nuclear disarmament, the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il, made clear that he has no intention of giving up those weapons.

The consequences of that stance are likely to be far reaching. Politically, Presidents George W. Bush of the US and Roh Moo Hyun of South Korea, both having labeled the agreement a step toward getting North Korea to abandon its nuclear arms, will most likely be shown to have been naÃ¯ve or, worse, deceptive.

Then, no political leaders anywhere appear to have begun figuring out what they will do when forced to accept North Korea into that small circle of nations with nuclear arms, which will change the dynamics in the balance of power in Asia.

Nor has anyone confronted the crack that a nuclear North Korea will cause in the nuclear non-proliferation regime that has stood for four decades, even though weakened in recent years when India and Pakistan went nuclear. In particular, the example of North Korea will undoubtedly complicate negotiations with Iran on a similar nuclear issue.

The agreement that North Korea signed in Beijing in what is known as the Six Party talks with China, Japan, South Korea, Russia, and the US on Feb. 13 says Pyongyang "will shut down and seal for the purpose of eventual abandonment" its nuclear facilities and will provide the other five with "a list of all its nuclear programs."

On that same day, however, the North Koreans, through their official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), said Pyongyang had agreed only to a "temporary suspension of the operation of its nuclear facilities." Further, North Korea ignored most of the other provisions of the agreement, such as denuclearizing the Korean peninsula.

That began a steady drum roll of belligerent statements asserting Pyongyang's right and need for nuclear arms. An official newspaper, Rodong Shinmun, charged that the US sought to dominate Asia "through preemptive nuclear attack."

KCNA said North Korea's "status of a full-fledged nuclear weapons state successfully realized the long-cherished desire of the Korean nation to have matchless national power." In another dispatch, KCNA said that "Kim Jong Il punctured the arrogance of the US imperialists with a powerful nuclear deterrent."

On Kim Jong Il's birthday, a national holiday on Feb. 16, a Communist Party committee lauded him: "You have turned the homeland of Juche (Self-reliance) into a power having nuclear deterrent for self-defense and made the Korean nation emerge a nuclear weapons nation which no force can ever provoke."

At a banquet that evening, which was aired by the Korean Central Broadcasting Station, the president of the Supreme People's Assembly, Kim Yong Nam, toasted Kim Jong Il for, among other things, for turning North Korea into "a military power that even possesses a self-defensive nuclear deterrent."

Still more: The North Koreans fell back on the time warn argument -- the Americans made us do it. Using North Korea's proper name, the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, KCNA asserted: "US policy compelled the DPRK to have access to nuclear deterrence for self-defense."

Some observers question the value of statements from Communist officials. Experience has shown, however, that Communist leaders, when addressing their home audiences as in this case, tell the public what they really want their people to believe.

A former foreign minister of South Korea, Han Sung Joo, has published an assessment of the reasons the North Koreans want nuclear arms. Writing in Time magazine, Han said:

* "North Korea's nuclear capability gives it an upper hand in relation to the South."

* "The nuclear program is seen as a key to survival-a way to block and prevent any outside attempts at regime change."

Han was politically correct in contending that this agreement was "better than no deal at all," which kept him reasonably in line with his government's position. He went on, however, to demolish any thought that Kim Jong Il will move toward abandoning his nuclear arms.

Instead, he points to "what North Korea sees as compelling motives to possess nuclear weapons." He doubts that Kim Jong Il's regime will "agree to completely rid itself of nuclear equipment and material," including the 8 to 12 nuclear warheads it is thought to have already produced.

As well the Administration SHOULD be.

Let's be clear: an attack on North Korea means a full scale war against an army of more than a million men. It means nuclear strikes somewhere - South Korea, Japan maybe. It means a disastrous blow for the world economy. It means a massive military mobilization in the USA, with steep tax hikes. In short, it means all out war.
Meanwhile, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan won't go away.

The US is in no position to start a war with North Korea right now. The North Koreans beat us. They drove for nuclear weapons, we said no. They did it, we could not stop them, and we cannot make them disarm. Kim Jong Il outmaneuvered and defeated George Bush, and he just humiliated us in front of the world, by getting on the air just after Bush told everyone we have an agreement, to say he's not disarming.
He's not.
And we can't make him.
Match. Set. Point.

And now, we are going to see exactly the same thing happen in Iran. Iran is going to humiliate Bush and the US in front of the whole world too, and get nuclear weapons. We will not stop it, we will not force them to disarm once they get them. Two of the three Axis of Evil states are going to whip our ass in public and wipe our noses in it.

It's a sorry place to be, but that's what happens when you run a war into the ground. Which we have.

We could have won using "air power alone", if we were really willing to use airpower!

But really using airpower means using it to shatter the economic infrastructure of the company, making all combat operations (or government, or nutrition...) impossible. Airpower alone, continued, would have shattered Japan and Germany completely. It would have left both nations homeless, industryless and without food or supplies. Sustained, both countries would have collapsed, and there would have been about 100 million dead. You can totally destroy any nation from the air, if you drop enough bombs relentlessly enough and destroy EVERYTHING.

But that's the problem, isn't it? Airpower alone can work so long as you're willing to use conventional bombing like slow nuclear weapons, and target civilian populations and the infrastructures that allow urban survival, and intentionally destroy millions and millions of people. Any nation can be brought to its knees our outright wiped out by that strategy. You can do it in a night with nukes, or you can do it in five years with unending full-scale bombing of everything and everyone, and artillery fire at the borders.

Airpower alone can win, but it requires the willingness to commit indiscriminate genocide. Destroying trucks and bases will do nothing. You have to destroy the PEOPLE, as many as possible, and you do that by destroying their water systems, food supplies, housing, roads, electricity, hospitals, and every other standing thing.

That's the only way to win with airpower alone.

Americans have no spine for any of that.
It's too brutal.
It's illegal.
It's horriffic.
And it takes quite a long time.
Fallujah could have been reduced without a battle. Surround it, bomb it flat, and let every single human being in it perish from hunger and thirst. It would take a year or two, but casualty rates would have been 100% (provided your cordon is tight enough).

That's the trouble.
You CAN win with airpower alone, but you have to be willing to be Nazis and use genocide as your strategy. We're not.

You're right about the peace dividend.
I wouldn't have used it as you suggested, though.
When the USSR fell apart, the USA had a golden opportunity not to bolster the empire, but to dismantle it. Entangling alliances put the US at risk and cost a fortune. The only reason we really needed them was to face off against a world-threat ideology. That didn't exist anymore. Asia and Europe are both capable of providing 100% of their own defense: their economies are as large or larger than ours!

It was time to return to the pre-World War I US domestic focus. Bring the forces home, deploy what you need for border security, and largely disband the rest. We could be a reserve force for NATO, to the extent NATO is even still necessary, but in no sense whatever should we be expected to be the defense for Japan or for Europe. The EU economy is larger than ours. They should bear 100% of the cost of defending themselves. Japan's economy is second only to ours, and they can have a nuclear deterrent to China within a half-year. Taiwan is very advanced and could have a nuclear arsenal bigger than Israel's in a short time.
We should not be bearing ANY of the burden to defend these wealthy countries. They should be spending the money and burdening their economies with their own defense. The USSR is gone, and there is no country that has taken its place. We should be out of the business of defending the world, and should have had no military forces deployed West of Guam or east of Maine. Our foreign aid should have been invested in building up the Americas, specifically Mexico. Take the billions a year we pour into Israel and put it into Mexico, and the immigration tidal wave would have ended a long time ago.

At the end of World War II, we were something like 60% of the world economy, and were faced off against enemy powers who had something like 30% the rest.

Today, we're only 20% of the world economy, and declining. We cannot afford to try to be the source of defense for the world, and it is not our responsibility anyway. We should be linking the whole Western Hemisphere into a prosperous economic unit, and leave Asia to the Asians and Europe to the Europeans. If the oil resources of the Americas were bought and transported withing the Americas, we would not need to ship oil from the Middle East here.

It would have been a very different world.
But old habits die hard. Look how much money the French spend on keeping troops in places like Rwanda. Why bother?

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.