U.S. and North Korea: the risks of war

Tensions Between the U.S. and North Korea: The Risks of War

John R. Boettiger

Mill Valley Seniors for Peace, 13 December 2017

1. I hope most of you will join me in figuratively lighting a candle of thanks and relief for the remarkable, unanticipated victory of Doug Jones, the Democratic candidate, in the special election yesterday of a Senator in Alabama. It’s related to our topic this evening in that it is a victory for sanity, for reason and good sense over bigotry and exploitation, and will reduce the GOP majority in the Senate to the narrowest of margins. Amy Sorkin writes in the current New Yorker, “In less than a year, the President, with help from the Alabama Senate candidate [Roy Moore], has so damaged the party that it may never recover.”

2. Tensions between the US and the autocratic regime of Kim Jong-Un’s North Korea are longstanding, but greater than they’ve been in a generation. NK is sometimes characterized as “the world’s most isolated country” whose people have no access to the internet or news sources other than what’s provided by their own regime. 85% of them live outside the capital city, Pyongyang, and none can enter without permission. Only its political elite and Kim Jong-Un’s most devoted followers live in the city.

3. The film is called “North Korea with Dread” – four NYT journalists were able to visit NK this fall:

4. The excellent, level-headed columnist Nicholas Kristof and three NYT colleagues. They described their visit in sobering language: “This fall, we went to North Korea on a quest to understand whether war is inevitable, whether there is a real chance that millions of people might die.” The risk of war, they believed, is greater than the public appreciates, talks between the two countries never more urgent, and they hoped on their return that this film could “serve as a call for politicians on both sides to seek exit ramps for peace.” “This is the story,” they said, “of two novice and reckless leaders—one 33 years old (Kim Jong-Un), the other 71 (Donald Trump) taking their countries toward what we fear is a needless collision.”

5. You’ll see in the very first minutes of the film a strange montage: the voice-over is Donald Trump’s extraordinary statement before the UN General Assembly earlier this fall that if North Korea continues to develop its threatening nuclear missle program the US will totally destroy North Korea; and behind the voice-over are North Korean children and adults, some sober, most laughing as if Trump’s threat is empty of substance or impossible to implement. Are they actually listening to Trump? No; more likely to Kim’s characterization of the American president as a “dotard.” At the UN, Trump derisively called Kim “rocket man,” and has even tweeted, “Little Rocket Man Won’t be Around Much Longer.”

6. At the end of last month, NK tested a ballistic missile that could reach anywhere in the continental US, including Washington and New York. It’s also tested nuclear weapons, the latest of which they characterized as a “hydrogen bomb,” a weapon that’s in any event multiple times more powerful than those used at the end of WW II against Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

7. Whatever the specifics, this is clear and won’t change: North Korea is a nuclear power. The Trump Administration’s approach – a combination of threats, sanctions, demands for nuclear disarmament, and isolation hasn’t stalled the advance of its weapons programs.

8. Nicholas Kristof asks, “Are we headed toward a new Korean War?” His answer is unsettling. He says we, the American public, are “far too complacent about the possibility of a war with North Korea,” one that, he writes, “could be incomparably bloodier than any US war in my lifetime.” A million people could die the first day. International experts he’s consulted estimate the risk of war from 15 to more than 50 percent. That, he says, “should be staggering.”

9. So what can be done to reduce those risks, to increase the prospects of a more reliable peace? Are there circumstances in which Kim might be willing to negotiate a freeze on its nuclear programs? Certainly diplomacy has to be engaged more seriously than the Trump Administration has been willing so far. Kristof ends his recent column, “So let’s try talking, rather than risk the first exchange of nuclear weapons in the history of our planet.”

10. Madeline Albright, who served as Secretary of State under Bill Clinton, offered thoughtful context last week. “The fundamental problem,” she writes, “is that the North Korean leadership is convinced it requires nuclear weapons to guarantee its own survival.” They look at the fate of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Libya’s Muammar el Qaddafi. She believes we need military deterrence, yes, but also direct diplomacy, multilateral and bilateral, including a willingness to engage in direct talks. Others, like Thomas Friedman of the NYT and a recent column in the SF Chronicle by Stanford professor John Bunzel, offer another intriguing possibility: a US pledge publicly to North Korea and the entire world that the US will never be the first nation to launch a unilateral preemptive nuclear strike – a first strike - against another country.

11. North Korea is not about to give up its nuclear weapons programs, and the US government needs to abandon demands that they do so as a condition of real negotiations.

12. We need to de-escalate tensions between the two countries also because under conditions of mutual recrimination and high tension there is a real possibility of nuclear war by accident or misperception, a blunder into war, when some combination of verbal threat, practice maneuvers, and bluster becomes the real thing. If you want a hair-raising worst-case scenario, read an article last week in the Washington Post called “This is how nuclear war with North Korea would unfold.”

13. Let’s see Kristof’s film – it’s 26 minutes long – and have some good discussion afterward. One more observation about what you’re about to see. Do you know the term “minder”? Minders are people who work for an autocratic regime and are assigned quietly to shadow visitors like Kristof and his crew, or to shadow ordinary (in these events North Korean) citizens to be sure that they stick to the party line. You’ll see minders in the film, particularly in the person of a man wearing brown clothes walking behind, listening and sometimes whispering to those on whom he’s keeping a careful eye.