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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (81433)	3/14/2003 12:14:00 AM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Clinton could have done what he now says he had plans for. A conventional bombing of the reprocessing plant to stop them from going ahead. Those plans were reviewed and rejected; for very practical reasons. Those reasons still stand, and the current involvement in Iraq adds several more good reasons. Please don’t be tempted to compare Yongbyon to the Iraqi reactor that the Israelis destroyed way back when: the political and technical circumstances are entirely different. The Israelis destroyed a reactor that would, if allowed to operate, have generated material that could have eventually been used to manufacture nuclear bombs. In Yongbyon such material already exists, in the form of several thousand spent fuel rods stored in the facility. We cannot destroy this material without a massive radiation release that would unquestionably impact neighboring countries. All we can destroy is the reprocessing equipment, which can be rebuilt in other less accessible locations. Bombing the plant could delay the North Korean nuclear program, but it wouldn’t stop it. It would also not affect any existing bombs, and would create a considerable incentive for their use or release to terrorists. Limited gain plus enormous risk is not an attractive equation. I have read your other posts on NK, and see two solutions, once all the "yak yak" is over. 1) Conventional bomb the reprocessing plant now, to stop any more bombs, and risk a Korean War. 2) Resign ourselves to paying them off, with no real way to check what they are doing, no matter what they say. With the knowledge that they have lied to us before about Nukes. And risk a Nuke attack on the mainland. This whole style of argument is beginning to tire me. We see it all the time; on both sides of the fence: reduce the issue to two courses of action, in a framework slanted toward your preferred course, than argue within that framework. It is very, very, rare in this world that a situation presents only two options. In most cases there are options that are not being considered (usually because the person constructing the framework doesn’t want them to be considered), and there are usually innumerable potential shades of subtlety within each option. If you only see two ways to move, you need to look harder. There may well be no really good way out, but there may be ways much better than either of the options you are looking at. If you can stand more yak-yak, there's good comment on these issues at: tnr.com I’ve seen a number of quotes – not from Korea experts – suggesting that North Korea’s military is not as great a threat as it is made out to be. There may be some point in this: the force is large, but it is based on a Soviet model, meaning that it is the sort of force that our forces are designed to combat, and the technology gap is huge. This factor can be overplayed, though. In any event, a war with Korea would almost certainly be much, much more difficult than one with Iraq, even on purely conventional terms. I won’t say that Koreans would never surrender the way the Iraqis did, but only a fool would count on it. It’s also unlikely that North Korea would sit still while we piled forces into South Korea: they have the capacity to attack, and they will probably use it if they believe war is inevitable. Short of tactical nukes, our forces in Korea now have very few options to resist an attack. One unfortunate truth of our current situation is that any military action that falls short of fast, decisive victory is for all practical purposes a defeat. The unfortunate geography of the peninsula makes it possible for North Korea to inflict unacceptable damage within hours of the initiation of conflict, and that limits our options.