The news that North Korea has exploded an atomic bomb is easily the worst we’ve had since the end of the Cold War. Any hostile power with atomic weapons is orders of magnitude more dangerous than anything Al Qaeda can throw at us, and of course increases the likelihood that AQ will end up getting access to bombs. It also seems very likely that Iran will soon have its own bomb.
There’s no easy way this could have been stopped, but a bit more attention from the Bush Administration might have helped.
The biggest problem though is the general acceptance, which has emerged in the past 10 to 15 that any major power that wants nuclear weapons is entitled to have them, unless it’s a ‘rogue state’ like North Korea. Of course, in these circumstances, everyone excluded from the club is more eager than ever to join. More importantly, getting a serious co-ordinated efforts to stop proliferation, since no one really takes the Non-proliferation Treaty seriously any more. We’re about to undermine it by exporting uranium to India, and in doing this, we’re only recognising the realities. India and Pakistan, among others, are less blameworthy than the existing nuclear powers, which have made it clear that they have no intention of fulfilling the commitments they made, under the Non-Proliferation treaty to eventual disarmament. Particularly for Britain and France, doing so would have no strategic consequences, but would entail an admission that they are, and have been for decades, middle-sized countries of no particular importance, and not Great Powers. How can represenatives of these countries keep a straight face while pointing to the dangers of proliferation?
All that said, there are some hopeful signs. The only way to bring any real pressure to bear on the North Korean government is through China and, for the moment, the rhetoric coming out of Beijing suggests that they might do something.
John Quiggin 
I imagine this has scared the crepe out of the Chinese. The North Koreans cause enough strife for the Chinese.
Taiwan, Japan & South Korea will be even more worried. The prospect of nuclear weapons being in the possession of the lunatics in North Korea will have Taiwan, Japan & South Korean scrambling for their own nuclears as a guarantee of safety.
Absolutely the most alarming news since the end of the cold war.
However, I don’t blame George Bush & his administration, but Kim Jong Il & his administration! Lets not lose sight of who is the enemy & who is the one who guarantees our contined freedom.
I wonder if they timed it with the lead up to a possible war with Iran in mind.
Well how “mad” can the regime in North Korea actually be? You can’t develop a nuclear bomb in your back yard (I don’t think). You need a number of stable well running institutions that coordinate
* the real scientists willing to put decades of their life into the program
* the resources involved in the operation of this type of project
* security for the major facilities
stability is the key here. Sadam spent years trying to get a nuclear bomb but simply couldn’t do it, This was partly because the institutions needed where far more elaborate that what his regime and iraq could muster.
When Pakistan got their bomb. The first thing I thought was that despite the coups and complete chaos there must be a number of institutions I wasn’t aware off that where stable and well run (the military).
What I’m saying is: Madmen don’t develop nuclear weapons
North Korea is part of George Bush’s “Axis of Evil.” Given what that madman did in Iraq, I’m not surprised they have rushed to get the bomb.
Can I be a contrarian and say that I’m not particularly fazed about this – certainly, I’m far less fazed about the North Koreans having the bomb than I am about the Pakistanis having the bomb.
The North Koreans have had the ability to turn Seoul into a bloodbath for decades, but they haven’t done so because they know that it would result in the end of their regime. They may be venal and odious, but the evidence is that they are a largely rational bunch. And, while they are certainly prepared to trade weapons with Islamic fanatics, they did so purely on the basis that it was in their interests. As selling a weapon to a terrorist group would be treated by the West as akin to launching a nuclear missile directly at Washington, it’s hard to see how it could ever be in North Korea’s interest to do so.
Furthermore, given the iron-like grip the North Korean regime has internally, it’s probably the least likely place on Earth that Al Queda would be able to steal weapons or weapons materials from.
Not to mention the silver lining – any neocons harbouring dreams of invading North Korea has had those ideas put back into their box forever because of this test.
Obviously, no sane person wants the North Koreans to have their hands on the bomb. But they are as susceptible to deterrence as the next nuclear power.
rabee,
Do you seriously imagine that this program, and the untold suffering that must have been made to forward it, sprung up out of nowhere when Bush gave the orders for the invasion of Iraq? Kim Jong Il may not be mad, but he is almost certainly suffering from an antisocial personality disorder. The suffering in North Korea to pursue the aims that he and his father have set is simply staggering and there are few other satisfactory explanations I can think of as to why it is continuing.
Think about the three points you made on the development of the bomb and how they apply in North Korea:
1. Whether the scientists were will or unwilling would not have mattered. Non-co-operation would not have been an option.
2. The utter devastation of the NK environment, the willingness to export any form of contraband and the ability to abuse people in any way whatsoever was the source of the resources.
3. As for security – have a look at the Yongbyon reactor site on Google Earth to see the security. Like most of the rest of NK it is ringed by SAM batteries, and it has extensive military camps around it.
The only reason it was not wiped as a regime in 1950 was Chinese and Soviet support – and the Chinese support has kept it going ever since.
If you want to see what NK looks like, have a good look around on Google Earth. It is very instructive. Then head south and see what can be done. You will be in little doubt which system is better for the people and what the true cost of the regime of the two Kims has been.
Robert,
What happens in the case of mass internal dissent?
John,
I have to respectfully disagree that this is particularly bad news – and certainly not surprising in the least – and side with Robert on this one.
I wrote a fairly detailed post about this on my blog outlining why I think this is not a particularly large threat, including a link to an IHT article outlining the offensive capabilities (limited) of North Korea, and the ways in which the various international powers involved are stymied.
Sadly, you are all too wrong when say there is no easy way this could have been prevented. The peace process that the Clinton administration was pursuing was highly successful, and working quite effectively until Bush utterly scuttled it. For more information, read this great Washington Post article by Fred Kaplan.
I’m not worried about this, and I don’t think anyone should be, really. Not that a few carrots wouldn’t help the North Korean regime, after several years of unsuccessful sticks.
Kim Dae Jung, former president of SK, described Kim Jong Il as a very smart guy. Kim Dae Jung might, of course, have gone mad during his years in prison under the US-funded military dictatorship in his country, and therefore be an unreliable source. At least, however, he has met the guy. People who actually study NK argue that Kim Jong Il doesn’t have as much power as some of the above comments suggest. They say he has been struggling to introduce economic reforms, but the NK military/security apparatus have other goals that have so far impeded him.
I would also like to remind readers that 80% of the global arms trade comes from the US and Western Europe. The West is the real weapons proliferator. The weapons might not have the awesome destructive power of nuclear bombs, but they sure have killed more people in the past half century. It makes me, at least, wonder who is mad.
melanie,
1. Being “a very smart guy” does not preclude any form of mental disorder.
2. OK – might be the regime as a whole that exhibits the tendencies. The difference is, essentially, irrelevant unless and until there are gaps that can be exploited.
3. The 80% is by value – not impact. At a rough guess the weapon that has been used to kill more than any other is a design of the Kalashnikov weapons factory – the AK-47, produced and exported en masse by virtually all of the old Eastern Bloc countries.
.
Patrick,
With respect – utter tosh. A few years ago it was considered unlikely that they would have the capacity to develop a bomb soon. Then it was unlikely thay could develop decent rockets. Now we are equivocating on a delivery system? Do we wait until they successfully test the one they failed at a few months ago?
They have been receiving carrots galore. They do not even say “thanks” before they redeploy further resourses and ignore the strings attached to the carrots. The amount of food aid they have been receiving is large – they have merrily taken it.
Carrots will continue only to re-affirm, in their own minds, the path they are taking.
Andrew, what are you suggesting?
a) That the North Koreans would use a nuclear weapon against their own people?
b) That if the regime breaks down, that some factions in the North Korean regime would seek to sell weapons to terrorists?
c) That, faced with starvation, the regime would threaten a nuclear apocalypse if aid wasn’t provided?
Scenario a) is horrible, but seems pretty unlikely and, to take the ultimate in realpolitik positions, does not imperil the rest of the world’s security. Goverments don’t need nuclear weapons to slaughter their own citizens in bulk.
As to scenario b), I don’t see any ideological motivation amongst the North Koreans to sell nuclear weapons to terrorists. If money was the issue, to put it bluntly I imagine that Western (or Russian or Chinese) intelligence services will be far larger bidders for North Korean nuclear weapons in such a scenario. In fact, if that happened it wouldn’t be a surprise to see generals politely knocking on the door of the Australian embassy, seeing we have diplomatic relations with the North.
Finally, as to c), well, they’ve been blackmailing the West and China into providing food aid for decades. They don’t need nuclear weapons for that; the thought of millions dying of starvation and/or an equivalent flood of refugees has been more than enough to get the rice sacks over the DMZ.
Nuclear weapons represent by far the greatest threat in the hands of those who cannot be deterred by the threat of retaliation in kind. I see a far greater danger them reaching such people from Pakistan than from North Korea.
Andrew, no i don’t think that. Of course, the North Korean program is older than the Bush administration.
But I do think that this is a failure of the Bush administration. They threatened North Korea around five years ago and they have been busy dismantling the NPT, in particular those articles that contain the main incentives for non-nuclear states to remain non-nuclear.
I do think that testing the bomb was motivated by the attitudes of the Bush administration after 9/11. Apart from the axes of evil speech, the administration was, according to reports on Musharraf’s recent book, warning friendly states that they will bomb them to the stone-age if they didn’t cooperate.
There was another nuclear crises 13 years ago with North Korea, who wanted to pul out of the NPT. The Clinton administration averted that crises through diplomacy and the prudent implementation of article IV of the NPT. That’s what the NPT is there for.
“They have been receiving carrots galore.”
I presume you are talking about the nuclear deal Clinton signed which was meant to keep the events of the last few days from ever happening.
Its not a very well known fact, but initially North Korea stuck by its part of the bargain and it was actually the Americans that did not deliver their side of the deal. Essentially the Americans were never able to deliver the light water reactors because Congress, which did not agree with the policy, refused to fund or allow it. Its a debatable point as to whether the policy was a good idea in the long run, and whether Clinton should have made a deal he did not have signed off by Congress. The US domestic politics at the time was in a strange place so I guess its not surprising that the US position towards North Korea became a mess. But it is quite clear that 1) the US made a nuclear deal and then reneged and 2) this was followed by the North Koreans re-activating their nuclear program.
We don’t know that 1) caused 2), but it certainly seems likely.
I agree we are being blackmailed, but could you please advocate an alternative policy? These deals are pretty horrible things to swallow but they have the benefit of keeping Seoul from looking like Baghdad or worse. Since it seems no-one is willing to live with the consequences of not making the deals, and I think it would be pretty arrogant for people outside of Korea to be making decisions about whether a million South Koreans die anyway, my own preference is to make the deals and do them in a way that strengthens the reformers in North Korea.
The half hearted and directionless way we have been carrying out these deals up to now has led to the worst of both worlds. They think we’re weak because, lets face it, we rationally don’t want a war, and the way we have carried out deals has humiliated and politically weakened the reformers while strengthening the hard liners. The fruits of a foriegn policy lacking the subtely and intelligence to divide our opponents despite holding all the aces.
I dont understand how North Korea’s possession of nuclear weapons is our problem. The security situation is northern asia which is an area controlled by the well-minded and rational governments of China and Japan. ALthough we should denounce the ownership of nuclear weapons generally, including those possessed by our allies, North Korea’s actions should not drag us into another conflict to which we are, for all intents and purposes, not involved.
It is clear that any entity with sufficient funds, manpower and patience can develop nuclear weapons. Those ingredients are present in almost all state governments, including the medieval state of North Korea. The science is not too complex at all.
If we wish to avoid conflict then we should not jump onto the bandwagon.
Perhaps the best response to the nuclear test was made by Japanese Prime minister Abe who pushed for nations to keep a cool head and “collect more intelligence”.
If Australia is to have a role in this conflict then it should not go beyond that.
Look at the bright side. One more customer for our uranium!
I couldn’t agree with Still Working It Out more.
Robert, did you read that Washington Post article I linked? We have not, in fact, been offering North Korea any serious carrots for a number of years, and this action is, I believe, directly attributable to that.
In regards to your call about shifting the goal posts, let the record reflect: we’re not actually sure a nuke went off, and they _Still_ don’t have a successful missle system.
Furthermore, I can’t help but feel you’re missing a crucial part of this equation, which is the diplomatic game theory basically, and North Korea’s negotiating history. Merely having nukes, or missiles, or great delivery systems, let alone shitty, unreliable ones is no guarantee that you will use them. After all, many of the world’s nuclear powers since WWII have been involved in conflict, undemocratic, etc. and no one has dropped a bomb.
North Korea will be as scared of using the nuke as we are of going to war with them: it’s a MAD situation, and as such, level heads will almost certainly prevail – and about time. If they had a few years ago, this would never have happened.
One thing the Bush administration could tell straight away was that NK was part of an Axis of Evil. At least the neocons can cut through all the bullshit of the prevarications and obfuscations sloshing about here. This has nothing to do with the Bush administration, or Clinton’s for that matter. This is the first major test for that notorious international fence-sitter in China, as well as for those who believe in the UN and its gaggle of gangsters. Their response is now eagerly awaited by that other remaining Axis of Evil- Iran. This is not America’s problem, as NK is China’s love child, but how they handle it has ramifications for the West in the ME with Iran’s nuclear ambitions now.
Patrick is right – the US has largely brought this situation on itself, most recently by reneging on the Clinton deal but over the longer term by consistently running its own agenda in Korea in disregard of the wishes of the Koreans and the welfare of that country. Something like this has been inevitable since the US/Russian occupation and partition of post-War Korea in 1945 – an act driven by the Great Power rivalries of the day, and nothing to do with the history and aspirations of the Koreans.
And as far as alternative policies are concerned, the best way forward is to abolish the 50+ year blockade of N.Korea and send trade delegations. It will be a slow process, but trying to maintain what has become a defacto sovereign State in an artificial state of Coventry forever is a formula for disaster.
Of course I’m waiting with baited breath for those that decry post Cold War, US hegemonic power, to advise China of its obligations here. Here is your opportunity to get down to the Chinese embassies, burn a few flags and make your recipes perfectly clear to them.
Ender, the North Koreans have their own uranium mines. Good ones, apparently.
Particularly if you’re prepared to pay over the going rate for it, very few countries are going to be so short of uranium that they can’t mine enough for a weapons program. The North Koreans probably haven’t even needed to do that; from what little information is available their ores are good enough that their mines would probably be competitive on a commercial basis.
Piffle Gordon! This is China’s baby.
observa – it is China’s baby, built up under previous leaders but now acting like a teenager that is not getting enough attention and pissing off the parents. It remains to be seen if the parents will turn them in to the police, though.
It is not as if the world has had them under sanctions for decades – they cut the world off under their version of socialism – apart from the idealogically safe China the idea of Juche (self-reliance) has effectively meant that they have cut themselves off from the rest of the world. Only the US has maintained sanctions – but most others have been giving them aid, particularly after the last great famine a few years ago killed an estimated 2 million North Koreans.
This is the great tradgedy here – to pursue this program, to get the missiles and bombs, the NK government has been systematically starving their own people. Before the Korean war the North was the wealthy part, with most of the productive base, a lot of the farm land – now it is virtually a desert with a shrunken population and occasional mass starvation.
It could be so wealthy, yet it has been reduced to starvation.
As Prof Q points out, the abrogation of the NPT by the nuclear-armed states refusing even to contemplate reducing stockpiles has long rendered the treaty useless. Noone in this discussion has yet mentioned the acquisition of an offensive stockpile – some 400+ warheads according to Vanunu, together with US-supplied delivery systems capable of reaching any target in the Eurasian-African land mass – by the US client state Israel, so let me be the first to do so.
North Korea’s record of belligerence toward its neighbours, bad though it is, is nothing compared to the military recklessness and preparedness to cause civilian casualties in neighbouring states exhibited by the Israeli military. Viewed from Pyongyang, US military adventurism in Iraq, bellicosity towards itself and Iran as the remaining members of the Axis of Evil, and contempt for international treaties and systems of law made acquisition of nuclear weapons eminently rational. As an Israeli general remarked, I have no idea whether Iran is actually in the process of building a nuclear weapon but they’d be fools if they weren’t.
Continuation of current policies whereby the US and its allies arrogate to themselves the right to engage in preventive warfare, and to expand and improve their nuclear stockpiles, look set to ensure further nuclear proliferation. As Vanunu says, nuclear weapons are by nature genocidal and have no part in any legitimate arsenal. The standard for rejection of multilateral disarmament has been set by the nation whose spending on weapons is greater than all other nations combined. Australia’s security, in this as in targeting by terrorists, is imperilled by the entirely correct perception of us as obedient lapdogs of Washington.
“Of course I’m waiting with baited breath for those that decry post Cold War, US hegemonic power, to advise China of its obligations here.’
Maybe you should read the post before commenting, observa. I’d recommend the last para in particular.
What Hal5000 said.
Nothing short of regime change would have prevented NoKo from attempting to develop a nuclear capacity. The fact that they have succeeded is a darkly remarkable feat of ruthlessness and efficiency. NoKo isn’t the first regime to starve its population in the cause of overriding national objectives.
But it is difficult to argue against the proposition that Bush’s bellicose attitudinising about the “Axis of Evil” caused NoKo to make the maximum effort to complete its program. This may have broken the regime, but it didn’t. And now it is a very different regime from what is was yesterday.
This represents a failure of will and imagination on the part of the Bush Clique.
AR, “At a rough guess the weapon that has been used to kill more than any other is a design of the Kalashnikov weapons factory – the AK-47,”
Who are you trying to kid? Aerial bombardment is a much more efficient killer than the Kalashnikov – though as an instrument of war pollcy (assuming the killing and terrorizing of civilian populations are not the ends in themselves) a good deal less so. Saddam got his weapons from the West… I recall some argument over whether the Americans or the Germans had supplied the majority.
True that the collapse of the Soviet Union led to a dangerous phase of potential WMD proliferation, but it’s also true that the only actual use of chemical agents against civilian populations since the Holocaust has been by the US and its then client Saddam Hussein.
Did they ever catch the person(s) who sent anthrax through the US mail after they discovered that the stuff came from Idaho?
“might be the regime as a whole that exhibits the tendencies. The difference is, essentially, irrelevant unless and until there are gaps that can be exploited.”
Precisely my point. There are gaps that SK, in particular, has been trying to exploit – without much help from it’s big friend.
Melanie, while I agree with your general sentiments, it simply aint the case that Iraq’s pre-invasion arsenal was sourced from the West. While he received some weapons, and more importantly financial backing, from the West in the invasion of Iran most of the actual Iraqi conventional arsenal was sourced from the former Soviet Union.
Well just suppose for a moment we want to be lapdogs of the new enlightened kid on the block, China, what are you proposing they do with their recalcitrant love child Hal? We’re all ears, when you’ve finished changing the subject to your favourite Jews and Yanks. That’s the problem here isn’t it lefties? To actually commit yourselves to some kind of action would immediately invite comparisons with past situations and policies and we couldn’t have that now could we? Safer to sit on the fence and be a smug, irrelevant critic eh?
“This represents a failure of will and imagination on the part of the Bush Clique. ”
Bloody priceless aren’t they?
Gordon,
I agree with you on this point. I also thought that maintaining sanctions against Iraq for a few more decades was probably worse then having a quick war that was followed by open borders. Of course my prefered option (advocated by nearly nobody else) was offering the middle road that you suggest which is to normalise relations and open up trade.
I disagree almost entirely with the premise of using trade restrictions as a military or diplomatic tactic.
Regards,
Terje.
P.S. Attempts at such economic warfare have a long tradition: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_System
Pakistan anyone?
melanie,
aerial bombardment has not been a factor (or not a major one) in the wars where most lives have been lost in the last 50 years. In the West we hear a lot about the conflict we have been involved in, but almost nothing about the ones we have not had a major involvement – even though many, many more die there. The various civil wars running in Africa have cost more lives than anything else since WWII. The war in DR Congo from 1998 to 2003 alone cost over 3.8 million lives, making Iraq look like a border skirmish, and that is besides the millions who have died in West Africa, East Africa, Southern Africa and the other central African conflicts over the last 50 years. Many more are dying in Darfur than in Iraq – let alone Afghanistan, yet we seldom hear a peep about that.
Your rhetoric about weapons proliferation simply does not make sense once you look at who is actually doing the killing – they are almost all supplied out of the former Soviet Union and its client states.
While the Europe and the US does not exactly have a proud history of weapons supplies, that of the nations of the former Soviet Union and it clients (and China, North Korea, etc.) is much, much worse.
As for the gaps in the NK regime – if they do exist the gaps would very soon be filled with the bodies of those who created them. I doubt SK has been fooled in this way, but others may have been.
There’s only one country that has actually used nuclear weapons against another country, so isn’t logical for Iran, North Korea etc., who have been declared enemies of that country by that country’s leaders, to fear that country? And to arm themselves against it? Or am I missing something?
Standard issue cop out, they’re worse than us. Pardon me while I spew.
er,
When will we stop and have a conversation about Pakistan, the bomb, the internal security apparatus of Pakistan, OBL (remember him observa?) the recently concluded agreement between Pakistan and the border area ‘tribes’ re mutual recognition, the hostitlity between Afghan president Karzai and our new (well since 11th September 2001) best friend in the gwot, Musharraf, women’s rights, freedom, democracy and draining the swamp of Islamofascisim in the NW frontier that Pakistan occupies?
I know that NK is now the next topic and we are all enjoined to hold our breath with fear and trembling as a regime that couldn’t hoist a missile much furrther than it’s own maritime borders explodes a nuke down a mine shaft, but really, I for one, refuse to get in a lather about a regime that is not so much tottering, as propped, by China. I know it’s all about the ‘axis of evil’ or should I write, that was yesterday’s story for the great unwashed, but really, can we have a break from right wingnut induced hyperventilation, and attend to the little problems we have with our friends who have had nukes for quite some time, (Pakistan) and who appear to be less firmly in charge of the lunatic asylum than possession of such things might require, at least for our safety, if not the region’s?
Get a grip.
With regards to foreign policy towards North Korea, there needs to be a seperation between the two fundamental issues (human rights and nuclear weapons). IMHO, foreign policy has been decided on the basis of considering the two together, which is a recipe for disaster.
The fact that North Korea has the bomb is very bad (although hardly surprising) news. I’m opposed to nuclear weapons in general, but there is no comparison between them being in the hands of a democratically elected ruler, even one as abomnible as Bush, and in the hands of a regime which is collectively insane such as this one.
On the other hand, I’m not sure that the test itself is a bad thing. The amount of plutonium they possess is believed to be small – estimates of 13 bombs at most. If they want to use a bit of it up on testing that just reduces the number of weapons to play around with. With 13 bombs on hand the temptation to sell one to Bin Laden would be quite high. If that number drops, particularly in the light of unreliable delivery systems, they’re presumably going to want to keep them all.
Presumably they are producing more plutonium all the time, but the longer they don’t have enough to think about selling any, the better.
AR,
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/11/24/world/main657774.shtml
Six years of continuing conflict in Congo have claimed 3.8 million lives, nearly half of them children, with most victims killed by disease and famine in the still largely cut-off east, the International Rescue Committee said in a study released Thursday.
Most deaths come from easily treatable ailments, it said, citing measles epidemics known to have swept populations in the foreign- and rebel-held east during the war.
Direct deaths: Cambodia: 5-600,000 killed by US bombs. Vietnam: 2.8-3 million killed (a minority by Kalashnikovs); Laos about 300,000; Korea 2.8 m (of which 600,000 SoKo).
I am also fairly sure that the Indonesian armed forces did not use Kalashnikovs to massacre upwards of 800,000 alleged communists in 1965 or an estimated 300,000 East Timorese during 1975-99.
The indirect effects of war are even more horrendous of course. But my point remains that aerial bombardment is a more efficient killer than a rifle.
melanie,
Correct – but in each example it was not really the guys with aircraft doing most of the killing. In Cambodia, for example, the bulk of the killing was carried out by people armed with AK-47s or its variants – even if that wasa through working the people to death, rather than shooting them. The Indonesians would have used machetes, spears and other knives, while the TNI would have used (US supplied) M-16s in the main, with a few M-60s – no need for aircraft here. The 800K figure is also only an estimate – the number is probably between 300K and 1 million, but where ever it was it is not a good thing.
The point remains, though, melanie – it is the really nasty wars in places that we seldom hear about that kill the most people. Once the western powers get involved you get reporters tagging along and reporting on the My Lai type situations – and this is a good thing – but these are not where the bulk of lives are being lost. The bulk are in the deserts and the jungles by people with low-tech weapons, not those big, expensive, shiny new killing machines you see reported in the statistics.
“the worst news we’ve had since the end of the Cold War” – bollocks.
Complete bollocks actually. Pakistan and India’s nukes are a far more serious concern. US unilateralism freed of cold-war restriants, the failure of the NNPT….in fact there are no shortage of things far worse than North Korea.
Though I’m sure the Bush Administration will continue to stoke up a nuclear NK frenzy in the lead up to the mid-term elections in the hope of maintaining the Republican majorities.
Trackback:
John Quiggin writes that the North Korean atomic bomb test news “is easily the worst we’ve had since the end of the Cold War�. I disagree. September 11, 2001 was on a par with a nuclear missile actually hitting, with no warning, somewhere in the West, or somewhere otherwise sufficiently televisual/strategic . . .
http://paulwatson.blogspot.com/2006/10/north-korea-nukes-and-1962-cuban.html
Anyone who thinks that North Korea won’t have nuclear tipped ICBM’s (Intercontinental Ballistic Missile) within a decade is kidding themselves.
I follow space technology quite closely. An ICBM is smaller version of a space rocket. The technology; guidance, propulsion, structures are identical.
Although the phrase “rocket science” is synonym for very hard this is not really true. Relatively speaking building rockets is a lot easier than, for example, making fighter jets. The real obstacle North Korea has to nuclear tipped ICBM is making nukes small and robust enough to fit on and survive a trip on an ICBM.
Don’t let the “failed” missile tests fool you. North Korea is probably on track to have very reliable and perhaps quite accurate ICBM’s around the time they have nukes suitable to arm them with. I would be surprised if that is more than a decade away. Be glad you don’t live in Japan, or a major city on the west coast of the US.
AR, 800K is the CIA estimate. Others have said 2 m, but I went for the low end of the range. It was very well organised as well and I suspect the M16s played a larger role than you give them credit for.
Bang for the buck: bomb delivery systems v small arms?
Small arms win hands down.
But in asymmetric war, small arms v mines and IEDs?
The latter win hands down. Professional soldiers with no stake in the outcome of the struggle hate the impersonal, relentless, yet unpredictable effects of mines etc. They sap morale and break down discipline. AK-47s are just icing on the cake.
melanie – In the case of Indonesia I have little doubt the M-16s had a significant role. It does not diminish my case.
Andrew and Katz,
Thanks for the reminder of the point of this discussion which was related to efficiency rather than absolute numbers killed. Granted the bomber method of delivering death comes at a high financial cost which, however, also enhances the income of the arms dealer and its employees. On the other hand, the people delivering the bombs are far less likely to be killed in the process => less public opposition at home.
More bucks for your bang!
Something I recall was that either a year ago or many months ago, they reported about an internal Chinese military report about the feasibility of military intervention into North Korea. I’m surprised that there hasn’t been any reference to it yet. However, the report from what I recall said that intervention would not work well and said it really isn’t an option for China.
I am confused.
North Koreans are living in a communist utopia. How can it be bad that they have nuclear weapons? Surely the world revolution just got one step closer.
Come on lefties – we stand shoulder-to-shoulder with our North Korean comrades. This is a day of great celebration!
Oz,
I suggested to another commenter further up the thread that a good dig around on Google Earth would be rewarding. I did it a little while ago. If you want to find missile batteries, defensive earthworks, military style encampments, large, apparently useless concrete buildings and tall monuments then North Korea is the place to go.
If you want to see greenery, economic progress cars etc, then head South from there.
If you were to try to take the place with anything other than very expensive military hardware (thanks for the reminder, melanie) then, if the people actually tried to defend it, it would cost a huge number of lives.
Looks like the right have finally succumbed to the attrocities occurring in Iraq.
Over at Tim Blairs site he is admitting in his posts all of the below, I quote:
“Let’s put Lancet’s number in perspective:
* It is larger than the total number of Americans killed during combat in every major conflict, from the Revolutionary War to the first Gulf War.
* It is more than double the combined number of civilians killed in the bombings of Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.
* It is a larger number than were killed in Germany during five years (and 955,044 tons) of WWII bombing.”
Nice that they are starting to see through all the lies and grasping reality for once.