Posted on 05/14/2003 10:18:17 AM PDT by adamyoshida
Jack Wheeler
Freedom Research Foundation
Monday, Dec. 30, 2002
Poker Beats Chess
One of the meta-reasons America won the Cold War is that Russians play chess, while Americans play poker.
Chess demands great skill and intelligence, particularly at developing complex long-range strategies and anticipating your opponent's moves. But it bears little resemblance to life in the real world. It is completely static and open. Nothing is hidden.
Poker is very different. You have to guess what your opponent has and the extent to which he is bluffing. In business, in politics, in life in general, the folks who know how to play poker will almost always fare better than those who know how to play chess.
Ronald Reagan never played chess with Mikhail Gorbachev. He played political poker. At the 1986 Reykjavik summit, Reagan bluntly told Gorbachev he was going to build and deploy a space-based missile defense (SDI). Then came the clincher.
"Mikhail," he said, looking the Soviet leader in the eye, "we both know that America can afford to do this, and the Soviet Union cannot. There is no way you can compete with us in military spending. So you are going to lose."
Gorbachev did not know if the U.S. could actually create a workable missile defense in space. But he did know it could afford to do so, while he could not. So he didn't call for Reagan's cards. He, and thus the Soviet Union, folded their own. In the real world, good poker beats good chess every time.
One of the great geopolitical puzzles of our day is why America has been outplayed at poker by a collection of primitive Stalinists in North Korea. The guys in Pyongyang are the best experts in the world at military bluffing and nuclear blackmail. They easily took Clinton to the cleaners.
Now they have decided to raise the ante against his successor. This may prove to be a fatal miscalculation. No one plays better poker than a Texan, especially one so smart and ruthless as GW.
A good poker player always looks for "tells" in his opponents, unintended clues and tip-offs in their demeanor. GW has undoubtedly noticed that Pyongyang has created a huge nuclear crisis at the precise time when it should have done the opposite: just when South Korea is experiencing such a spasm of anti-American resentment that it elected a new president pledged to appease North Korea.
Such a blatant "tell" informs GW that Pyongyang is holding a weak hand and is playing it badly out of hand-shaking desperation. Given such a "tell," a good poker player knows it's time to go for the jugular. In examining his options, GW may decide the best way to go for Pyongyang's jugular is with a spear.
Spearing Yongbyon
North Korea's claim that its Yongbyon five-megawatt nuclear reactor's purpose is to produce electricity is laughable. Five megawatts can light up little more than a good-size trailer park. The only possible purpose for such a graphite-type reactor is to convert uranium into weapons-grade Plutonium 239.
Reactivating the Yongbyon reactor can only mean North Korea intends to produce nuclear bombs. And this leaves GW with only one choice: The reactor must be physically destroyed.
Blowing it up like the Israelis blew up Saddam Hussein's Osirak reactor in 1981 (with bombs dropped by F-16s) is obviously not the best way – far too public, releasing a media firestorm. Far better to destroy it quietly, safely, stealthily and mysteriously.
With a spear. A steel rod 40 feet long and 4 inches in diameter, fin-stabilized, with a needle-sharp tungsten-carbide tip, equipped with a small JDAM guidance package including a GPS. It is non-explosive; there is no warhead.
You've heard of smart bombs. This is a smart spear.
You take a half-dozen of these Smart Spears up in a high-altitude bomber, like a B2 or B52, and drop them over Yongbyon at 50,000 or 60,000 feet. The Smart Spears have such a big sectional density that it will be like a vacuum drop – with no wind resistance, they will be going faster than the speed of sound when they hit their target.
Going so fast and with almost no radar signature, the GPS-guided Smart Spears will punch through the Yongbyon reactor and keep right on going, burying themselves in the earth several hundred feet deep. The North Koreans won't know what happened, and all there will be is some holes in the ground – plus a melted-down reactor.
The time to do this is just after the fuel rods have been inserted into the reactivated reactor and have started to burn. It will take up to three months for the uranium in the rods to be converted to plutonium-239. The fuel rods lie inside water-cooled pipes placed in graphite blocks. If holes are punched through the reactor core, rupturing the pipes, the uranium fuel rods – no longer being cooled with the water drained out – will catch on fire and the entire reactor will melt down.
While much of the radioactive contents and fission fragments will drain down the holes in the reactor floor made by the Smart Spears, some radiation will be released into the atmosphere through the holes punched in the roof. The longer the rods have been burning in the reactor, the more radiation will be released. The earlier the Smart Spears are dropped, the less radiation release.
It would also be psychologically more effective if Yonbyon is taken out within days of its going critical.
There would be no dramatic World War II-type bombing raid by carrier-launched fighter jets. There would be no large radiation leaks. There would be no announcement by the U.S. government before or after, admitting it had done anything. The North Koreans would be unable to produce any evidence of U.S. culpability (unless they want to dig down several hundred feet underneath the Yongbyon complex, which would take them a while anyway). It would just look like there was an unfortunate "accident," about which GW would be silent.
Our Turn to Up the Ante
Now it would be GW's turn to up the ante. He could inform Pyongyang that unless it begins a full disarmament process, he is prepared to initiate the following:
Instruct U.S. Trade Representative Bob Zoellick and Secretary of State Colin Powell to inform every country that does business with North Korea – including Russia, France, Japan and especially China – that they must choose between doing business with it or America.
For any country continuing to trade with North Korea – and again, especially China, which has recently sold 20 tons of tributyl phosphate (TBP, a chemical used for extracting plutonium from uranium fuel rods) to North Korea – every port in America will be closed to the importation of every product from that country. (It is worth noting that such a total trade embargo would soon cause the collapse of China's economy.)
Instruct the Pentagon to have one B2 bomber carrying 16 2,000-pound smart bombs with conventional high-explosive warheads blow up the Yongbyon Cooling Pond. This contains some 8,000 spent fuel rods, created before Yongbyon was mothballed in 1994, from which enough plutonium-239 can now be extracted for several nuclear bombs using the Chinese TBP. The destruction of the cooling pond would cause a radiation release in the atmosphere of less than one-tenth of 1 percent of Chernobyl's.
Further instruct the Pentagon to be prepared to incapacitate the entire firing line of rocket launchers and artillery cannons, of which there are several thousand, and annihilate the entire force of close to a million North Korean soldiers clustered along the DMZ (demilitarized zone) border with enhanced radiation weapons, either produced by us or borrowed from the Israelis, who already have hundreds.
ERWs – enhanced radiation weapons, or "neutron bombs" – are extremely localized. They produce minimal heat and blast, but emit a form of nuclear radiation that is intensely powerful over a very short range that is also very short-lived. The ERW's massive wave of neutron and gamma radiation will penetrate armor, hardened bunkers and several feet of earth within a radius of a thousand yards. Within this radius, every living thing will be quickly killed.
The danger rapidly decreases beyond a thousand yards, dropping to virtually zero after 2,000 yards. The radiation dissipates within 24 to 48 hours. One single B2 with 16 JDAM-guided ERWs will sterilize 24 kilometers of the North Korean front line, and less than a dozen will wipe out the entire line of North Korean forces and batteries along the DMZ – with no collateral damage to South Korean population centers such as nearby Seoul threatened by these forces and batteries just a few miles away.
Kim Jong-il and his gang should know full well that George Bush can't be bluffed, bullied and blackmailed like Bill Clinton. Once GW raises the ante to this level, they will realize they are in a poker game they are going to lose.
Saving Korean Face
Yet it is very unwise to give a dangerous and deranged enemy no hope of escape. Once Yongbyon melts down in a mysterious accident and GW conveys to Kim Jong-il in a fully confidential manner with no media leaks what he is next prepared to order, he can then offer Pyongyang a way to save face.
Cloaked in diplomatic euphemisms, GW could say to Kim:
"Look, my opinion is that you are human garbage and that the people of North Korea would be infinitely better off if you were dead. However, my job is not to get rid of you. My job is to protect my country and the lives of the 37,000 American soldiers in South Korea. Thus my job, as far as you are concerned, is to prevent you and your government from (1) being a threat to South Korea, and (2) selling weapons and technology to countries and groups that could be or are a threat to us.
"So here's the deal. You will dismantle your entire offensive military capacities – nuclear, biochemical, conventional. You keep only what you need – and we'll be the judge of that – for defense. You will submit to a rigorous WMD inspection program. You will sign a peace treaty with South Korea. You will engage in no military transfers or sales with any foreign company or country. In short, you will stop being a threat to us or anyone else. In exchange, you get to stay in power.
"We both know that's all you really care about – staying in power. You would rather have millions of your fellow countrymen starve to death than relinquish your power. Frankly, if they would rather starve than rebel against you, that's their business (just like it's the business of the people of, say, Zimbabwe regarding Robert Mugabe).
"I am making this offer to you because I think you are less of a danger than Saddam Hussein. There is no doubt whatever that if Saddam remains in power, he will build and disseminate weapons of mass destruction throughout the world. We cannot simply disarm him; we have to remove him. I think simply disarming you will be sufficient. But if it is not, believe me, Kim, I will take you out in a New York second.
"Has it ever occurred to you how impossibly vulnerable you have made yourself, placing the majority of your pathologically large army in one narrow line along the DMZ? Do you think I care any more about annihilating your million soldiers along the DMZ than Truman did about the inhabitants of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? I will fry every last one of them if that's what it takes to eliminate your threat to the world. So – do we have a deal?"
That said, there remains another Korea to play poker with. With the folks in the south, the ante is straightforward. GW simply explains to incoming president Roh Moo-hyun that he no longer wants 37,000 American soldiers to be held as Korean hostages. So Mr. Roh is to cooperate with his program of disarming the North, and then all those American soldiers who annoy him and so many other South Koreans can come back home.
For far too long, Koreans in both Seoul and Pyongyang have been playing with America as if they held the high cards. They do not. The aces are in our hands. It is time for GW to use them and play to win.
Jack Wheeler is President of the Freedom Research Foundation.
©Copyright 2002 Dr. Jack Wheeler and the Freedom Research Foundation.
And Andrei Sudoplotov, Alexandr Nemets and Viktor Suvorov? Etc. These guys all corroborated Golitsyn,...more than twenty-five years later. As to the others, there is such a thing as need-to-know, dupes and plants. Surprise. You've been duped. Angleton was justified.
So the conspiracy allowed the formation of a free press and then began applying pressure to that same press to make it less free all to maintain their illusion? Brilliant.
They have you convinced, don't they?! Mere random-walk political events. Ya. Sure. You've already forgotten about the Gulags. Still going strong. Not a whiff of concern by Western Media. Or you.
The same Topol-M that has been continuously bedeviled by delays, failed tests, cost overruns, and production slowdowns for the last ten years? Which also happens to be the only Russian ICBM in production?
The last statement was the ONLY one in your iteration which was accurate. The missile has gone through a number of variations to improve its anti-missile performance, from its stealth shielding to its MARV performance envelope. It has also successfully increased range to also be the only functioning FOBS delivery system in the world today. The rest of your spiel, is just that, t'sk, t'sk.
The Soviet military had been planning to fight and win a nuclear war for the past forty years. A vast network of underground complexes was constructed and an amazing amount of resources were hoarded away throughout the cold war to just this end, and, gues what? Most all of these hoarded resources were sold off during the "privatization" of the 1990's. The Russian military's infrastructure meant for the survival of a nuclear war is a ghost of what it was during the Cold War.
'Zat so? Gee, we really so know much, don't we? We know precisely what goes on under that mountain range, eh? (Keeping in mind that all U.S. requests to inspect that site pursuant to existing treaty agreements have been totally rebuffed from Yeltsin to Putin). And while some of the hardened military bunkers may have been decommissioned in the spin-off states (such as the Submarine pens in the Black Sea) apparently the facilities around Moscow are online and undiminished...and not sold off. A Bunker is a little difficult to sell. And so would the fixtures thereto. The sale of bunker stuff by 'black marketeers' is anecdotal. Got hard numbers?
Yes, the sinister Soviet Military Machine that does not have an adequate supply of boots for its fighting men, that doesn't have adequate munitions or supplies to fight the war in Chechnya, whose air force is grounded most of the time for lack of maintenance budget, and whose fleet is rusting in the harbors is secretly planning for world domination. Because they are upgrading their nuclear arsenal. Sure.
The conventional forces have new tanks, new fighters, and new air-to-air and new air-to-ground missiles...and as for the navy supposedly rusting, they are mostly irrelevant in the new Russian calculus. They don't need to cordon off the sea lanes with their own navy to defeat us in this plan. They will control the Panama Canal and South America. Internal Subversion efforts will suddenly become violent (just where do you think ANSWER and Ramsey Clark really came from...out of thin air?. Plus, with their huge...and growing... advantage in counterforce weapons (first strike) being the real and critical key to their plans. Once the U.S. strategic forces are largely dismantled, the residual forces can then be destroyed in detail by a first strike. The nuclear decapitation of the West is now everything...with Russia and China (and France?) then holding all the remaining nukes. They will then dictate terms.
Russia incarcerates people. Shock. And the hordes of human rights NGO's both in Russia and abroad that are consistently hectoring all who will listen about Russia's occasional human rights abuses are what? Mere fronts? And I still want to know how the Communist party was able to organize all of those media organizations just to go through the trouble of appearing to bring them down.
The last statement was the ONLY one in your iteration which was accurate.
Well, let's see, on October 22, 1998, a Topol M exploded after being launched from the Plesetsk test site, but this was all a clever ruse to disguise its true deadliness. There is a grand total of one plant that produces the missiles, and production lagged for years until it finally got underway back in 2000.
The missile has gone through a number of variations to improve its anti-missile performance, from its stealth shielding to its MARV performance envelope. It has also successfully increased range to also be the only functioning FOBS delivery system in the world today.
And the U.S. military is also continuously upgrading its nuclear forces. It's what militaries do. And think, for a moment, if you will: If a nation's nuclear submarine fleet has been slashed by two thirds, and all scheduled fleet upgrades have been put on hold (again) until several years in the future, and many of its new ICBM's are going into the silos originally occupied by degraded obselescent equipment, it might, and I emphasize might, stand to reason that there is something less than a sinister plot to streamline its nuclear force with precision deadliness to the point that they need neither SLBM's nor bombers. These conditions just might indicate that they don't have the money.
And while some of the hardened military bunkers may have been decommissioned in the spin-off states (such as the Submarine pens in the Black Sea) apparently the facilities around Moscow are online and undiminished...and not sold off. A Bunker is a little difficult to sell.
I was, if I made it unclear, referring to all of the stockpiles of supllies necessary to actually run a country after a nuclear war. Having a virtual hardened city underground is great, but without the necessary stockpiles, its useless.
The conventional forces have new tanks, new fighters, and new air-to-air and new air-to-ground missiles...
Added at miniscule rates. Let's see... Since 2001, the Russian military has been saying that they will upgrade "some" of their Mi-24's. Strangely, these upgrades keep getting pushed back. Fun fact: The Russian military has procured a few new self-propelled howitzers; some of these were deployed to Chechnya only to be withdrawn shortly thereafter because even though the military had procured the guns, it hadn't procured enough shells.
...and as for the navy supposedly rusting, they are mostly irrelevant in the new Russian calculus. They don't need to cordon off the sea lanes with their own navy to defeat us in this plan. They will control the Panama Canal and South America.
It now becomes clear: the Chinese own the Panama canal. Of course, how they could hold it against anything larger than a Battalion landing team is anybody's guess. Why the Chinese would want a war that would definitely cut off the Pacific trade that gives a huge part of its workforce jobs and kick their own economy in the testicles, though, is beyond me.
Internal Subversion efforts will suddenly become violent (just where do you think ANSWER and Ramsey Clark really came from...out of thin air?.
Yes, let's talk about peace movements. Hell, how about we talk about the peace movement in 1999? In 1999, the very essense of pure distilled evil that is Bill Clinton bombed a Marxist dictator for a few months. The far left was apoplectic (I know that any actual divide between center-left and far left is part of the grand ploy, though, but imagine, hypothetically that such a divide exists) and the Russians flipped out, bringing our two countries quite close to an actual shooting war. Now then, unless the whole ordeal of bombing Serbia, antagonizing Russia, and accidentally bombing the Chinese embassy was an elaborately staged plot to distract True Americans, it strikes me as rather odd that the liberal Americans and Europeans who are under the thumb of the secret World Council of Evil in Moscow would bomb a Marxist regime with close ties to Russia. Have the Russians also implant mind control chips into Shamil Basayev and Khattab so that they would invade Russia so that they could create the clever illusion that the U.S. and Russia both have a common enemy in Wahabbi Islam?
Plus, with their huge...and growing... advantage in counterforce weapons (first strike) being the real and critical key to their plans.
What plans? If the last ten years has shown is that the Russian system was riddled from top to bottom not with fanatical ideologues, but crass opportunists. Unless they, too, are part of the ruse. I would think, though, that what amounts to the complete restructuring of Russia and the setting loose of Eastern Europe seems to be an awfully big disguise.
If Russia and China do, in fact, have a secret plot to control the world, and secretly run every political party in the world, why do they even need to strike at the U.S.? After all, they control everything behind the scenes anyway.
One thing this particular article does not cover is the military build up going in at present in Myanmar, with much help from Pakistan, Russia and the PRC. Thailand is getting encircled, and is itself moving further away from the USA and more into the position of being a Vichyoid bootlicker of Hu Jintao & Co. ASEAN is getting physically and geopolitically cleaved away from India. India is getting stabbed in the back by Russia who overtly continue to be friendly with India while overtly aiding Myanmar, Malaysia and Laos, while covertly picking up the pace of dealings with Pakistan. And the US continues to stupidly consort with backstabbing Musharraf, continues to send our disposable income to the PRC, continues to pretend to see a KGB dicatator's soul, and essentially, to become the fool.
Simple. They were real, and erupted spontaneously once the general public felt it was free. The stomping down process was initiated to restore state control, and would be a precondition of any attempt to confront the West. And as for your position on the Gulag....WHAT 'hordes' of human rights groups??????!!!! Watch any medium in the West and there is ZERO coverage of anything like what you allude to. Lots of coverage of human rights abuses alleged to occur in the West, and particularly in the U.S. And it isn't because we would not listen to Russian abuse stories. Where are the war crimes tribunals of the people responsible for offing 100 million lives??? Where is the outrage?
On the Topol-M, one test incident, or even a coincident pause in production while things are re-tooled, is not sufficient to make your case. The thesis that their old SS-19s which the Topol-Ms replace (very similar to our Minuteman missiles, and just as new) are moldy and obsolete and rusting in their silos is just a canard. The Topol-M replacement for the SS-19, is the equivalent if not more, of replacing our Minutemen IIIs with MX missiles. I.e., I doubt Ken Adelman, Caspar Weinberger or Donald Rumsfeld would agree with your assessment. And you can't counter the stealth or the MaRV, or the FOBs ability. That is not consistent with your thesis of a country with no money.
And the U.S. military is also continuously upgrading its nuclear forces.
False. We don't have either Stealh, MaRV or FOBS deployments. We basically only have the D-5 Trident retrofit, which is the only real upgrade slated for continuation, thanks to a stubbornly-concerned congress. Clinton tried to kill it. But GWB is going Clinton one better, and just retiring essential platforms outright, decommissioning two-thirds of the fleet.
Clinton did approve an package to 'modernize' the Minuteman IIIs, which successfully LOWERED the RANGE, and LOWERED THE ACCURACY of the missile. With this degraded missile no longer competent for counterforce employment, we also have the added action of GWB retiring ALL of the MX. Half the B-1s are retired...and more were slated before their impressive display in the Gulf. Some over-due improvements to the avionics suite was just shelved for it. The B-2s were never fully deployed, but stopped mid-stream, and have shown to be limited in potential.
Synergistically these declines are telling, our strategic capacity to respond to the first-strike scenarios are reduced primarily the Tridents. A lot of eggs are riding in just a few subs, consequently. And we aren't deploying anymore. Hell, we can't even build a diesel-electric sub for the Taiwanese. Your claims about the Russians 'degraded and obsolescent equipment' had me briefly thinking you were talking about U.S. forces...but no such luck. You really just don't get it. These guys are patient. Your not.
I was, if I made it unclear, referring to all of the stockpiles of supllies necessary to actually run a country after a nuclear war. Having a virtual hardened city underground is great, but without the necessary stockpiles, its useless.I already challenged you to put up on that point with empirical (non-fudged) data. I hear a deafening silence on that. Russian 'official' stats and anecdotals are not good enough.
In 1999, the very essense of pure distilled evil that is Bill Clinton bombed a Marxist dictator for a few months. The far left was apoplectic
False. Boy, what planet were you living on??? Not a single one of their staged mass rallies occurred. Ramsey Clark even was quiet. The NYT/ABC/CBS/LAT DID NOT DECLARE OPEN WAR ON BILL CLINTON over Mlsovic, as it has with the War on Terror and GWB. Quite the contrary.
It now becomes clear: the Chinese own the Panama canal.
They don't need to. They can sabotage it with the forces in place, rendering it useless and unrepairable for years with ten times your battalions deployed. And they only need to buy time, or deter in a confrontation over some other issue such as Taiwan's subjugation by force.
Why the Chinese would want a war that would definitely cut off the Pacific trade that gives a huge part of its workforce jobs and kick their own economy in the testicles, though, is beyond me.
Their economy is only a means to an end. Military modernization. Jobs are irrelevant in their calculus. Why are we the 'Main Enemy' in ALL their modern military dogma? We are not talking a trade war, buddy.
More on your feeble attempt to argue by 'reductio ad absurdum' on the conspiracy we face later...
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