You, North Korea, and the Nuclear Bomb
North Korea just dropped a bomb. So to speak.
They didn't drop it on anyone. It was what all the members of the formerly so much more exclusive nuclear "club" like to call a "test," and the rest of us call an "explosion." No, it was no Hiroshima or Nagasaki, although if you judged solely from news reports and angry reactions from governments, you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise.
Bad things are likely to happen. All countries are united in condemnation, including China, which issued a rather strong statement, and South Korea, which postponed a planned aid shipment. The Japanese debate over acquiring nuclear weapons will be reignited. North Korea will presumably suffer from a sustained aid cutoff and some sort of Security Council sanctions, at the very least.
But before the world rushes to punish North Korea, there are a few things they ought to think about.
North Korea is a paranoid state, with a government whose authority feeds on and creates isolation, which then reinforces the paranoia.
It comes by that paranoia honestly. If you feel a little paranoid about North Korea, that's understandable, given the tone of media coverage on the issue. But now consider for a moment the events that have made North Korea paranoid.
After World War 2, when Koreans rose up and helped defeat the Japanese, the United States and the USSR treated Korea like a defeated enemy. The USSR occupied North Korea, imposing a totally authoritarian regime and helping to introduce and then prop up Kim Il-Sung; the United States came and took the Japanese collaborators out of jails and public opprobrium and put them into power, helping them crush the political leaders who actually represented Koreans at that time with an iron fist. After five years of escalating violence, insurgency, counterinsurgency, on June 25, 1950, North Korean forces swept across the border (which, of course, the genuine Korean nationalist forces that had opposed the Japanese did not recognize) and the United States assembled a multinational force under a UN flag and went to war.
The war was horrific for North Korea. U.S. bombing made what it later did to Vietnam look civilized by comparison. In Vietnam, there was a lot of talk about bombing the dikes on the Red River, flooding agricultural areas and mass starvation; in Korea, they did bomb the dikes and impose starvation on untold numbers.
As Sahr Conway-Lanz documents in his excellent book, "Collateral Damage: Americans, Noncombatant Immunity, and Atrocity After World War 2," the Korean War was where the wonderful American concept of collateral damage was forged. It was applied in an interesting way. Although the principle of distinction between military and civilian targets was not explicitly abandoned, as the war progressed, the definition of military target steadily grew broader. In the last half of the war, if a town had a road, that road might be used for troop transport, so the town was a military target; if it had food supplies, they might be eaten by the troops, so ditto.
Unlike in the Vietnam War, where the most brutal shelling and bombing was confined to the countryside and the occasional town (like Hue), in North Korea entire towns were essentially wiped off the map. Douglas Macarthur wanted to go further and detonate a string of nuclear bombs along the border with China, making it impassable due to radiation.
The war induced a permanent fear of total destruction by the United States in the North Korean regime, exacerbated by the fact that the war never officially ended. Over the decades, as North Korea isolated itself more and more from the rest of the world, and especially after the collapse of the communist bloc threw it into crisis, that sense of paranoia has simply grown stronger, expressed and reinforced by the doctrine of juche, self-reliance, which says that North Korea cannot depend on anyone for anything.
In the first nuclear showdown with North Korea, in 1994, the great peacemaker Clinton was on the verge of war; he even ordered an advance team of soldiers to set up logistical headquarters for an invasion. Fortunately, Jimmy Carter, apparently sent with the blessings of the Clinton administration, managed to broker a deal, the so-called "Agreed Framework."
It provided that North Korea would renew its commitment to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and let nuclear inspectors back in; in return, the United States was to normalize diplomatic relations, provide North Korea with two light-water nuclear reactors, and most important pledge not to attack North Korea with nuclear weapons. Although initially North Korea kept its end of the bargain, the US never even started to. Nine years on, when the US still couldn't manage the non-aggression pledge – a basic requirement the NPT imposes on all nuclear powers with regard to non-nuclear nations and thus something the United States had already in principle agreed to – the system broke down and the second nuclear confrontation emerged.
We have now a paranoid state that was treated with brutal violence in the past, with brutal duplicity more recently, and with constant threats of violence. At the same time, it is in a total internal economic crisis, which at one point led to the starvation of millions, and it is now faced with a cessation of aid that will imperil millions and with further isolation, which will further reinforce its paranoia.
This is rank idiocy and very dangerous. When dealing with North Korea, the sensible thing is to speak very slowly and softly, in a soothing tone. Bush can perhaps manage the slow, but the rest is beyond both him and any other American leader. There is no great threat from North Korea, unless an overreaction by the world and a stepped up internal political crisis creates one – unfortunately, that's the way things appear to be headed. Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean everyone else isn't, in fact, out to get you.
Rahul Mahajan |
