Summary: North Korea’s latest missile test has Washington in a frenzy. Let’s review the facts, debunk the myths, and look at an alternative to sabre-rattling our way to a nuclear war.
(1) “Pyongyang Fires a Second Missile Over Japan“
Excerpt from Stratfor, 15 September 2017.
North Korea shows no signs of stopping or even slowing down its attempts to achieve an effective nuclear deterrent. And neither will it cease test-firing projectiles on a ballistic trajectory over Japan. In late August, Pyongyang penetrated Japanese airspace for the first time in some years, a move that sparked international condemnation. With its follow-up test early on Sept. 15, North Korea launched another ballistic missile over Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido. The projectile travelled the equivalent distance from Los Angeles to Washington DC before dropping into the northern Pacific Ocean. The launch site — near Pyongyang International Airport in the city’s Sunan district — was the same as the Aug. 29 test.
Sending the missile over the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido also echoes the previous test launch. Given its small geographic size and position, North Korea has few options for test-firing missiles along a full trajectory. Overflying Japan is one of the least provocative options available to Pyongyang, and Hokkaido was likely chosen because of its sparse population and low risk of accidental collateral damage.
In the interim period since the last test, North Korea carried out a controlled nuclear detonation, most likely of a hydrogen bomb. This is another step forward along the parallel track of developing a viable nuclear deterrent. In the wake of that nuclear test — and tougher sanctions from the United Nations — North Korea issued further threats directed against the United States and Japan. …
More prominently, the range enables Pyongyang to effectively reach Guam, and the strategic U.S. facilities there. …
“North Korea: Pyongyang Fires a Second Missile Over Japan”
is republished with permission of Stratfor.
Editor’s note: Journalists often say that NK missiles have violated Japan’s airspace (Stratfor carefully does not say this). There is little agreement about the maximum height of national airspace; numbers range from 30 to 80 kilometers. NK’s missiles fly at heights well over the high end of that range. This week’s missile reached maximum height of 770 kilometers (478 miles).
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(2) The rest of the story: why they fear us.
To learn why they hate and fear us, read “A Murderous History of Korea” by Bruce Cumings in the London Review of Books, 18 May 2017. Bruce Cumings is a professor of history at the U Chicago and the author of The Korean War: A History
“{A}s of this September, the DPRK will have been in existence for as long as the Soviet Union. But it is less a communist country than a garrison state, unlike any the world has seen. Drawn from a population of just 25 million, the North Korean army is the fourth largest in the world, with 1.3 million soldiers – just behind the third largest army, with 1.4 million soldiers, which happens to be the American one. Most of the adult Korean population, men and women, have spent many years in this army: its reserves are limited only by the size of the population. …
“US involvement in Korea began towards the end of the Second World War …They began to consider a full military occupation that would assure America had the strongest voice in postwar Korean affairs. It might be a short occupation or, as a briefing paper put it, it might be one of ‘considerable duration’; the main point was that no other power should have a role in Korea …Several of the planners were Japanophiles who had never challenged Japan’s colonial claims in Korea and now hoped to reconstruct a peaceable and amenable postwar Japan. They worried that a Soviet occupation of Korea would thwart that goal …Following this logic, on the day after Nagasaki was obliterated, John J. McCloy of the War Department asked Dean Rusk and a colleague to go into a spare office and think about how to divide Korea. They chose the 38th parallel, and three weeks later 25,000 American combat troops entered southern Korea to establish a military government. …
“For 25 years now the world has been treated to scaremongering about North Korean nuclear weapons, but hardly anyone points out that it was the US that introduced nuclear weapons into the Korean peninsula, in 1958; hundreds were kept there until a worldwide pullback of tactical nukes occurred under George H.W. Bush. But every US administration since 1991 has challenged North Korea with frequent flights of nuclear-capable bombers in South Korean airspace …
“North Korea now has more sophisticated mobile medium-range missiles that use solid fuel, making them hard to locate and easy to fire. …It isn’t clear that North Korea can actually fit a nuclear warhead to any of its missiles – but if it happened, and if it was fired in anger, the country would immediately be turned into what Colin Powell memorably called ‘a charcoal briquette’. But then, as General Powell well knew, we had already turned North Korea into a charcoal briquette. The filmmaker Chris Marker visited the country in 1957, four years after US carpet-bombing ended, and wrote: ‘Extermination passed over this land. …”
Professor Cumings describes the Korean War’s carnage in “Violet Ashes: A Tribute to Chris Marker” from Positions (a Duke University journal), November 2015 — Gated; open copy here.
“{A}n ostensibly minor “police action” turns into a vicious three-year air campaign, with a fundamental lack of proportion to anything that Koreans could do to us, and to any real American gain in this war. The air assaults ranged from the widespread and continuous use of firebombing (including oceans of napalm), to threats to use nuclear and chemical weapons, and finally, to the destruction of huge North Korean dams in the last stages of the war. It was an application and elaboration of the air campaigns against Japan and Germany, except that North Korea was a small third world country …
“After his release from North Korean custody, the highest-ranking American prisoner of war, General William F. Dean, wrote that ‘the town of Huichon amazed me. The city I’d seen before — two-storied buildings, a prominent main street — wasn’t there any more.’ He encountered the ‘unoccupied shells’ of town after town, and villages where rubble or ‘snowy open spaces’ were all that remained. A British reporter found communities where nothing was left but ‘a low, wide mound of violet ashes.’ Tibor Meray, a Hungarian correspondent, arrived in August 1951 and witnessed ‘a complete devastation between the Yalu River and the capital,’ Pyongyang. There were simply ‘no more cities in North Korea’ …
“In the end, the scale of urban destruction quite exceeded that in Germany and Japan …. Friedrich estimated that the …total tonnage dropped by Great Britain and the United States reaching 1.2 million tons. The United States dropped 635,000 tons of bombs in Korea (not counting 32,557 tons of napalm), compared to 503,000 tons in the entire Pacific theater in World War II. Whereas sixty Japanese cities were destroyed to an average of 43%, estimates of the destruction of towns and cities in North Korea “ranged from 40 to 90%”; at least 50% of eighteen out of the North’s twenty-two major cities were obliterated.”
(3) Why is North Korea building nukes?
From “Libya, WMDs, and Musa Kusa” by Paula A. DeSutter in National Review.
“What lesson will be learned {from Libya} in states considering pursuing or retaining WMD programs? If you have no WMD and cooperate with the U.S. on terrorism, but kill protestors, the U.S. and U.N. might enforce tough resolutions, announce that the leader ‘has to go,’ and initiate military action. But if you keep or pursue nuclear, biological, chemical, and missile programs, you have little or nothing to fear from the U.S. and the international community — even if you also aggressively support terrorists who kill Americans and others, and arrest, torture, rape, and kill protestors.
“The U.S. and the international community have demonstrated that WMD is a good insurance policy against interference and attack.
“I recall an unpleasant meeting I had early in the second Bush term with a senior foreign-service officer at the State Department. My goal was to explain why we verifiers were interested in moving forward on the positive/carrot parts of the relationship with Libya following the elimination of their WMD programs. We wanted more countries to make the strategic decision not to pursue WMD and to eliminate those programs they were pursuing. I believed it was important to demonstrate that Qaddafi was right when he said that WMD programs make a country less secure.
“The senior foreign-service officer disagreed, saying: ‘Libya is just a weak, unarmed country, and we can treat them any way we want.’ Apparently he was right.”
Paula A. DeSutter was assistant secretary of state for verification and compliance from 2002 to 2009, and had lead responsibility within the U.S. government for verifying and implementing U.S. participation in the elimination of Libya’s WMD programs.
(4) What does North Korea want from us?
Excerpt from a statement by the DPRK Government on 8 August 2017. They make some valid points. You would not learn that from the US news media reporting of this, which grossly misrepresented this statement. Most importantly, North Korea did not refuse to negotiate. They refused to negotiate while the US threatens them, which seems reasonable.
“The DPRK is taking measures to strengthen the self-defensive nuclear deterrence in order to counter the policy of extreme hostility and nuclear threat against it from the U.S., the biggest nuclear weapons state of the world. Terming these measures ‘a threat to international peace and security’ is a gangster like logic indicating that the rest of the world should either become U.S. colonies serving its interests or fall victim to its aggression.
“The countries, that openly pursue their ambition to maintain permanent nuclear hegemony by conducting most of the nuclear tests in the world and launching ICBM whenever they please, are adopting illegal and unlawful ‘sanctions resolutions’ to incriminate the DPRK’s bolstering of self-defensive nuclear force and enforcing those sanctions over its alleged ‘violation’ of them. This constitutes the height of outrageous double standard.
“As long as the U.S. hostile policy and nuclear threat continue, the DPRK, no matter who may say what, will never place its self-defensive nuclear deterrence on the negotiation table or flinch an inch from the road chosen by itself, the road of bolstering up the state nuclear force.”
(5) Conclusions
As usual, Americans see ourselves as angels and our foes as demons. That requires amnesia about our history — but we are good at that. As usual, US sabre-rattling serves the needs of our rulers — distracting public attention from serious problems and sparking a “rally-around-the-flag” boost in their popularity.
There are few good endings for the path we are on with North Korea. There are other solutions, such as William Lind’s insightful recommendation in “Misdefining the North Korea Problem.” — Stop threatening North Korea. Normalize relations. See what happens.
(6) For More Information
Articles about North Korea.
- “The Next Korean War: Conflict With North Korea Could Go Nuclear — But Washington Can Reduce the Risk“, Keir A. Lieber and Daryl G. Press, Foreign Affairs, 1 April 2013.
- See articles about North Korea by various experts at the website of the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
If you found this post of use, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. Also see these posts about atomic weapons, about North Korea, and especially these…
- Important: Looking ahead to the final chapter of the North Korea story.
- Should we expect another war in Korea?
- The real reason for America’s hostility to China.
- Stratfor: China builds a new Silk Road for the 21st century.
- Is North Korea or China the bigger threat to America?
- Martin van Creveld explains our phony war with North Korea.
