Sleepwalking With the Bomb (14 page)

__________________

17.
In 1900, his first year in Parliament, Churchill warned that a European war would be far more costly than colonial wars. It would involve a long, all-out effort engaging the entire population and suspending operation of peaceful industries. Said Churchill: “Democracy is more vindictive than Cabinets. The wars of people will be more terrible than the wars of kings.”

18.
Late in the Cold War similar fears arose inside the Kremlin, though they were without foundation in fact. In 1983, Brezhnev’s successor, Yuri Andropov, reportedly feared a first nuclear strike from the planned NATO deployment of 108 Pershing II missiles, which could span the 1,000 miles from their Western European bases to Moscow within eight minutes and with great accuracy. One possible set of targets was command centers in Moscow. Andropov considered but ultimately declined to launch a preemptive nuclear attack on America. At that time, Fidel Castro reportedly asked—as he had during the 1962 Cuban Missile crisis—that the Soviets launch an all-out strike at the United States. Adrian Danilevitch, a former top Soviet war planner, described how Moscow “had to actively disabuse him of this view by spelling out the ecological consequences for Cuba (in a nutshell, it would disappear) of a Soviet strike against the U.S.” Castro’s request went nowhere.

19.
“To be a true revolutionary one requires a monstrous self-confidence. Who else would presume of his followers the inevitable deprivations of revolutionary struggle, except one monomaniacally dedicated to the victory of his convictions and free of doubt about whether they justified the inevitable suffering? It is the pursuit of this charismatic truth—sometimes transcendental, as often diabolical—that has produced the gross misery as well as the profound upheavals that mark modern history. For ‘truth’ knows no restraint and ‘virtue’ can accept no limits; they are their own justification. Opponents are either ignorant or wicked, and must be either reeducated or eliminated.”

It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open.

M
ARY
S
HELLEY
, F
RANKENSTEIN, OR THE
M
ODERN
P
ROMETHEUS, CHAPTER
5 (1818)

T
HE CONTRASTING FATES OF
I
RAQ
, L
IBYA, AND
N
ORTH
K
OREA ILLUSTRATE
how nuclear weapons can determine whether a dictatorship survives despite adverse international pressure. Saddam’s nuclear program was not complete in 1991, when the Gulf War coalition moved to eject his forces from Kuwait. Had Saddam been able to threaten Turkey and Saudi Arabia with nuclear attack, neither country would likely have permitted coalition forces to launch military action from its soil.

On the eve of the coalition’s March 2003 invasion of Iraq, Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi agreed to surrender his WMD arsenal, including nuclear materials. He feared that after Saddam Hussein’s regime was toppled for failure to comply with UN WMD resolutions, Libya would be next in line. In 2011, with Qaddafi bereft of nuclear materials, NATO and the Arab League were willing to support Libyan rebels, and Qaddafi found himself on history’s ash heap.

This was in stark contrast to the reaction of outside powers when, in 2006, North Korea detonated its first nuclear device. The reaction has been mostly the serial offering of bribes, in what has been the vain hope that Pyongyang would in return surrender its nuclear arsenal. Preventive military options are now off the table.

These cases collectively offer the Fourth Lesson of nuclear-age history: N
UCLEAR WEAPONS GIVE NATIONS A “DYING STING” CAPABILITY THAT VIRTUALLY PRECLUDES PREEMPTIVE ACTION AND CONFERS NEAR-TOTAL SURVIVAL INSURANCE
.

This lesson applies in particular to dictatorships, which rule by force rather than by consent of the governed. Their nuclear status gives them greater freedom to forcibly suppress dissent, because outsiders are less likely to intervene militarily. Rogue states like North Korea are a little less dangerous than revolutionary states like Iran, because they have more limited strategic objectives. North Korea does not aspire to overthrow the existing world order, as does the Islamic state established by the Ayatollah Khomeini. But rogues still can be very dangerous. Not only does the North foment trouble on the Korean Peninsula and in the northwest Pacific, it has distributed nuclear technology to Iran and Syria. For these reasons the ultimate goal regarding rogue states, as with revolutionary states, is positive regime change that brings in a moderate government capable of peaceful coexistence with other nations.

As this book went to press North Korea had violated its international commitments once again by conducting a satellite launch test using its newest ballistic missile, a three-stage vehicle with intercontinental range and the ability to carry a 2,200-pound warhead. This test failed. But an operational missile would put north Alaska at risk. Pyongyang’s claim that it was launching a civilian satellite launch was dismissed the world over as risible, given that the North’s commercial economy is virtually nonexistent. As for the missile itself, all missiles today are universally regarded as exclusively military in purpose; only one nation, the U.S., has ever attempted to create a commercial missile.
²⁰
Thus North Korea’s launch is universally considered a test of its staging capability for an ICBM.

T
HE TRANSFER
of power in North Korea in December 2011 was only the second such transfer in the 63 years since the country’s inception in 1948. The new regime combines the totalitarian tyranny of the two prior absolute rulers with a new instability. How power will be shared in 2012 and beyond is unclear. Because North Korea has nuclear weapons (albeit a small stock), the risk of war on the Korean Peninsula may be fairly judged as the highest since the end of the Korean War in 1953. It was not for nothing that in January 2012 the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a high-level, bipartisan private group whose membership includes many former top national security figures, ranked North Korea dead last in nuclear security among 32 nations having enough nuclear material to make a nuclear weapon.

The prime target for the North’s military power will be Seoul, capital of South Korea, in significant measure due to an accidental intersection of geography and diplomacy in 1945, when two junior American diplomats set the 38th parallel as the boundary between North and South. One, Dean Rusk (later secretary of state for Kennedy and Johnson), recounted the astonishing tale in his memoir: “We were forced by events to act as statesmen beyond our years.”

On the night of August 14 Rusk studied a map of Korea, to find where the Allies would accept Japan’s surrender. He and his fellow diplomat, neither of them having specialized knowledge of Korea, were informed that the navy wanted the dividing line drawn as far north as possible, while the army did not want a foothold on the Korean Peninsula at all, lacking as it did enough troops to put in. Deciding that Seoul, which had been capital of prewar Korea, should be in the southern sector, the two diplomats looked for a convenient natural geographic dividing line. Finding none they settled on the 38th parallel. Neither they nor the superiors who reviewed their selection knew a crucial historical fact: When Russia and Japan had discussed dividing up Korea into spheres of influence half a century earlier they had chosen the 38th parallel as the dividing line. Thus the Soviets interpreted the U.S. selection of the same line as an implied concession of legitimate Russian influence in the North and concluded the United States did not genuinely desire reunification of the two Koreas.

With a population of over 10 million people, Seoul is one of the largest cities in the world, and at 17,000 people per square mile, it is also one of the densest. It has double the population density of Mexico City, more than triple that of Tokyo-Yokohama or London, and more than eight times that of New York. The city and its outskirts hold over half the population of the Republic of Korea, better known as South Korea.

All these people and brightly lit skyscrapers are clustered together a mere 25 miles south of the 38th parallel dividing the two Koreas. Across the demilitarized zone, one of the largest armies in the world faces Seoul. A hundred miles further north lies Pyongyang, a capital city of gigantic monuments (including an extra-large version of Paris’s Arc de Triomphe) and massive, low-slung buildings. The North’s capital is a thousand square miles bigger than Seoul, but has less than one-third its population. Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld liked to display a satellite photo taken at night of the Korean Peninsula that showed a brilliantly lit South Korea versus a nearly totally dark North. In the nineteenth century, Westerners called Korea the “Hermit Kingdom”; now the name fits only its northern half.

Were Seoul even 50 more miles from the 38th parallel, the strategic situation would be quite different. But at half that distance, it lies well inside the range of Pyongyang’s artillery. The North, effectively insulated from attack since it became a nuclear power in 2006, is, metaphorically, the cornered criminal holding a gun to the head of a hostage and shouting “One false move.”

Russia created, and then China protected, a monster rump state that has held peninsular peace hostage since 1948. Joseph Stalin’s Asian satellite state gave the United States its first stalemate in a major conflict, and established practical limits to nuclear use by a superpower with Western values.

Stalin had a definite strategic plan when, with one week to go in the Pacific War, his troops invaded Manchuria. Put simply, he wanted to seize territory from a collapsing empire before borders were set at war’s end. Stalin knew about the power of the atom bomb even before President Truman told him of it in late July at the Potsdam Conference. He prepared his troops to invade Manchuria, the area northeast of China from whence came the last dynastic rulers of China, the Manchu. On August 8, 1945, two days after the Hiroshima bomb exploded and one day before the Nagasaki bomb, Soviet troops poured into Manchuria.

Stalin’s army overwhelmed the Japanese garrisons in Manchuria and continued fighting southwards despite Japan’s informal surrender on August 14. By September 2, when the Japanese foreign minister signed his country’s unconditional surrender on the deck of the battleship
USS Missouri,
ending World War II, Stalin had taken the northern half of the Korean Peninsula.

He created in North Korea a tyranny in his own image, risibly named the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, though neither governed by leaders elected by its people nor in any sense of the term a republic. His last-minute land grab gave Stalin a seat at the Asian part of the diplomatic table, one utterly undeserved.

North Korea persisted in its nuclear program for more than a quarter century, even as 1 or 2 million of its people literally starved to death within a society virtually devoid of normal commercial activity. With its ongoing nuclear program—and even while adding uranium enrichment to plutonium extraction as a method of nuclear weapon fuel production—Pyongyang has serially blackmailed the West for assistance. It has been able to do this for two reasons. First, there is the “dying sting” threat. Once a rogue state goes nuclear, any attempt to disarm it risks failing to find and destroy (or otherwise gain control over) all its weapons. A nuclear state like North Korea, if facing imminent extinction, might decide to fire its nuclear weapons and inflict maximum damage before it falls. Second, 11,000 North Korean artillery pieces are pointed at Seoul, the South’s capital. Those pieces can lay an estimated minimum of 300,000 shells per hour on the Seoul metropolitan area. In 1994 the Pentagon assessed the risks of a military strike on the North’s plutonium reactor, but stood down because artillery could well inflict 100,000 casualties on Seoul’s populace.

Thus the options for America and its Asia-Pacific allies in the confrontation with Pyongyang are severely limited. The United States, in particular, has to take care not to undercut its alliance partners by dealing directly with the North—or with the North and China. Given North Korea’s consistent violation of every commitment it has ever made, there is no credible reason to believe that any further negotiations will bear fruit. The true significance of diplomatic talks is symbolic. Western countries that break off talks risk alienating portions of their publics. Rogue states cheerfully will use international media outlets to blame the West for rising tensions and gain traction with the idealistic and credulous.

The failure to stop North Korea risks encouraging nuclear proliferation by America’s increasingly nervous allies. South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and Australia each could go nuclear in less than a year, having stocks of nuclear fuel and all the technical expertise needed to rapidly weaponize.

A
T THE
beginning of 1950, the normally astute and far-sighted Dean Acheson, the U.S. secretary of state, made a speech in which he excluded South Korea from the reach of America’s vital geostrategic interests—issuing, albeit unintentionally, an invitation for conquest. Stalin, the wrong person to whom to send such an invitation, accepted the offer. He gave his puppet, Kim Il-Sung—a former Red Army sniper who would fill his starving country with 34,000 monuments to himself—his express consent to start a war. Another interpretation of events is offered by Henry Kissinger. Because he found no Russian reference to Acheson’s speech as the reason Stalin consented to the war option, Kissinger concludes that the culprit was National Security Council memorandum 48/2,
²¹
adopted December 30, 1949. It excluded Taiwan and South Korea from the sphere of vital American security interests in Asia—those over which America would go to war. Soviet-era files showed references to this document in assessing whether to invade the South.