The
U.S. government may pretend to respect a “rules-based” global
order, but the only rule Washington seems to follow is “might makes
right” — and the CIA has long served as a chief instigator and
enforcer.
by
Nicolas J.S. Davies
Part
6 - Boxing In North Korea
A
U.S. aerial bombardment or “preemptive strike” on North Korea
could quickly escalate into a war between the U.S. and China, which
has reiterated its commitment to North Korea’s defense if North
Korea is attacked. We do not know exactly what was in the U.S. war
plan discovered by North Korea, so neither can we know how North
Korea and China could respond if the U.S. pressed ahead with it.
Most
analysts have long concluded that any U.S. attack on North Korea
would be met with a North Korean artillery and missile barrage that
would inflict unacceptable civilian casualties on Seoul, a
metropolitan area of 26 million people, three times the population of
New York City. Seoul is only 35 miles from the frontier with North
Korea, placing it within range of a huge array of North Korean
weapons. What was already a no-win calculus is now compounded by the
possibility that North Korea could respond with nuclear weapons,
turning any prospect of a U.S. attack into an even worse nightmare.
U.S.
mismanagement of its relations with North Korea should be an object
lesson for its relations with Iran, graphically demonstrating the
advantages of diplomacy, talks and agreements over threats of war.
Under the Agreed Framework signed in 1994, North Korea stopped work
on two much larger nuclear reactors than the small experimental one
operating at Yongbyong since 1986, which only produces 6 kg of
plutonium per year, enough for one nuclear bomb.
The
lesson of Bush’s Iraq invasion in 2003 after Saddam Hussein had
complied with demands that he destroy Iraq’s stockpiles of chemical
weapons and shut down a nascent nuclear program was not lost on North
Korea. Not only did the invasion lay waste to large sections of Iraq
with hundreds of thousands of dead but Hussein himself was hunted
down and condemned to death by hanging.
Still,
after North Korea tested its first nuclear weapon in 2006, even its
small experimental reactor was shut down as a result of the “Six
Party Talks” in 2007, all the fuel rods were removed and placed
under supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and the
cooling tower of the reactor was demolished in 2008.
But
then, as relations deteriorated, North Korea conducted a second
nuclear weapon test and again began reprocessing spent fuel rods to
recover plutonium for use in nuclear weapons.
North
Korea has now conducted six nuclear weapons tests. The explosions in
the first five tests increased gradually up to 15-25 kilotons, about
the yield of the bombs the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
but estimates for the yield of the 2017 test range from 110 to 250
kilotons, comparable to a small hydrogen bomb.
The
even greater danger in a new war in Korea is that the U.S. could
unleash part of its arsenal of 4,000 more powerful weapons (100 to
1,200 kilotons), which could kill millions of people and devastate
and poison the region, or even the world, for years to come.
The
U.S. willingness to scrap the Agreed Framework in 2003, the breakdown
of the Six Party Talks in 2009 and the U.S. refusal to acknowledge
that its own military actions and threats create legitimate defense
concerns for North Korea have driven the North Koreans into a corner
from which they see a credible nuclear deterrent as their only chance
to avoid mass destruction.
China
has proposed a reasonable framework for diplomacy to address the
concerns of both sides, but the U.S. insists on maintaining its
propaganda narratives that all the fault lies with North Korea and
that it has some kind of “military solution” to the crisis.
This
may be the most dangerous idea we have heard from U.S. policymakers
since the end of the Cold War, but it is the logical culmination of a
systematic normalization of deviant and illegal U.S. war-making that
has already cost millions of lives in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria,
Libya, Somalia, Yemen and Pakistan. As historian Gabriel Kolko wrote
in Century of War in 1994, “options and decisions that are
intrinsically dangerous and irrational become not merely plausible
but the only form of reasoning about war and diplomacy that is
possible in official circles.”
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