Yeah, it’s more North Korean nuke crap
- Fresh from bringing us startling news that the New York Times was defacing its maps with the “Sea of Japan,” the Kyunghyang Shinmun reports that the greatest beneficiary of North Korea’s recent nuke test was—you guessed it—Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Thanks to Kim Jong-il’s theatrics, Abe was able to push the thorny history issue aside during his summits with Hu Jintao and Roh Moo-hyun. And, of course, it helps his ambition to turn Japan into a military power.
- Guess what? The North Koreans are warning that an increase in U.S. pressure will be regarded as—you guessed it again—a “declaration of war.” Last time I checked, the United States and North Korea were technically at war already. Or in the middle of a police action. Or something to like that. Anyway, North Korea is threatening a “physical response” if the Americans keep pestering them, but they also said they wouldn’t need a single nuclear weapon if the Americans just stopped being such big meanies.
- The Kyunghyang Shinmun pondered what North Korea’s threatened “physical response” might be. Firstly, it might conduct another nuclear test. If this doesn’t work, it could play other cards. In particular, it might start pulling fuel rods out of its 5MW reactor in Yongbyon to begin reprocessing plutonium.
- President Roh was quite blunt with Pyongyang today, telling South Koreans that the “security threat North Korea speaks of either does not exist in reality, or is very exaggerated.” He added he wasn’t sure whether the North was intentionally exaggerating the threat or if it was just paranoid.
- Japan will slap pretty tough sanctions on North Korea, banning North Korean ships from entering Japanese ports and banning trade between the two countries. That’ll probably hurt.
- Korean Prime Minister Han Myung-sook said Korea would not back a UNSC resolution citing Article 42 or Chapter 7 of the UN Charter. Article 42 would allow UN member states to use military force to blockade the North. According to the Korea Times, Seoul is higher on Article 41, but worried that even that clause might allow the UNSC to block transportation into North Korea and other means of communication like postal and radio services. This could disrupt intra-Korean economic projects like Kaesong and Kumgang Mountains tourism.
- Now, all this being said, the Hankyoreh Shinmun ran on its front page this morning that the United States was “putting pressure” on Seoul to participate in the search of North Korean ships. U.S. Ambassador Sandy Vershbow said Seoul might want to reexamine intra-Korean business projects that benefit the North Korean regime (i.e., just about all of ‘em) and, oh yeah, U.S. Undersecretary of State for Arms Control Robert Joseph would be coming to town to discuss South Korea’s participation in the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI). No pressure. No pressure at all. A government official told the Hankyoreh Shinmun that Korea was seriously considering upping its participation in the PSI from observer to participant depending on the language of the expected UNSC resolution. Uri Party leader Kim Keun-tae, however, said today that he opposed Korean participation in the PSI since you couldn’t exclude the use of force in boarding and searching North Korean ships. The Grand National Party, on the other hand, is pressing for full participation in the PSI, so this could get really messy.
- Surprise! Former President Kim Dae-jung blames the United States again for the nuke crisis.
- Lots of speculation that North Korea’s nuke test was a failure. One blogger examined the possibility that Pyongyang was testing a suitcase nuke. U.S. nuke expert Siegfried S. Hecker, however, warned the Dong-A Ilbo that North Korea may have been testing a sophisticated, low-yield warhead that it could sit on something like a missile.
- More North Korean missile tests near the Yalu River. Obviously, North Korea figures that it can win sympathy by encouraging its citizens to chuck stones at foreign journalists. Hey, if it worked with Robert Fisk…
22 Comments
North Korea’s rather anti-climactical nuke test is probably the international relations equivalent of what is referred to as “limping in” in Texas-Hold Em poker. “Limping in” meaning placing a deliberately small bet despite a rather strong hand in order to prevent others from folding immediately.
Additionally, this is just the first of a coming series of continual, graded Nuke Test escalations. First, it is a small uranium bomb in an underground test. Next, will be a somewhat larger uranium bomb. After that, perhaps a plutonium bomb. Then after that, a thermonuclear hydrogen bomb, or what Edward Teller referred to as the “Super” back in the 1950s, also the reason why the Rosenbergs got electrocuted. And so on. The fun never ceases.
Jeez…first you print nulji’s e-mail address, now his picture…
On the last matter…I’ve read or heard in a variety of foreign news media now that NK soldiers along the borders appear to be putting on a show of “bravado,” taunting, spitting, gesturing, throwing things, etc. It seems unlikely that a whole bunch of soldiers several hundred miles removed from each other (on the Yalu and DMZ) would suddenly start spontaneously engaging in the same behaviour, so are they being encouraged (or “encouraged”) to do it? It seems so ridiculously petty, though.
If economic sanctions are what it takes to do the trick, so be it. But given how much private money is wrapped up in Kaesŏng and Kŭmgangsan, I’m sure SK is going to drag its feet as much as it can on doing anything that affects those projects. Or maybe they’ll give up Kŭmgangsan (where the only real write-off would be the buildings up there, which are sunken assets anyhow) in exchange for keeping the machines humming at Kaesŏng. Is this right? Arguably not, but there are going to be a lot of private interests in the South pushing to maintain the status quo, unless they all have “sanction insurance” or some such thing….
Solid little piece by John Feffer at CounterPunch, “Pyongyang 1, Bush 0″:
http://www.counterpunch.org/feffer10112006.html
Now that the question of whether this is a North Korean hoax or not (Experts are saying it’s not a hoax), wait for further North Korean nuke tests.
This one was a mini failure, and they will try to correct their first mistakes in coming days.
The World has literally days to stop the North Koreans from gaining a full nuclear capability.
North Koreans wear Nike caps?
I see a long chain of causal worldwide events unfolding which will eventually lead to startling, future developments such as the real loss of civil liberties and a police state implemented in the United States. North Korea’s nuclear adventure is only the latest domino that has fallen in that particular direction.
re: ‘Solid little piece by John Feffer’
In Mr. Feffer’s first paragraph:
‘… It (Pyonyang) was even willing to negotiate away its missile program.’
I’d have to say that Mr. Feffer is ’setting the reader up’ with the false logical argument known as the ’straw man fallacy.
Has Mr. Feffer ACTUALLY ever negotiated with Pyongyang? I believe that if he had, he wouldm’t be be making such a patently disengenuous statement. A reading of the book ‘How Communists Negotiate’ by C. Turner Joy would benefit all concerned.
Mr Sheehan, I dont know if you are familiar with some rudiments of game theory but negotiations that are carried out on the level between political leaders, international bodies, and government representatives are at least somewhat a bit different from the level of haggling with an ajumma over some cute trinkets in an outdoor market. Negotiations involving war, strategic weaponry, the fate of nations, and millions of people obey its own logic and is universal whether you’re a State Department politico dealing with North Koreans over nuclear weapons or the CEO of a corporation deep within talks with a rival to execute a strategic take-over. So I would surmise that a book that has a title like ‘How Communists negotiate’ is just as patently disingenous and based upon biased flawed thinking. You might as well publish a book entitle ‘How Communists do Differential and Integral Calculus’. Calculus is calculus, whether you’re a Communist, a Capitalist, or anything in between.
bluejives,
Do you who “C. Turner Joy” was? He was not just…
Vice Admiral C. Turner Joy, USN, was the U.N. Command Senior Delegate during the Korean Armistice talks from
(taken from a Pacific Affairs review of “Negotiating While Fighting. The Diary of Admiral C. Turner Joy at the Korean Armistice Conference”
He, of all people just might have had a little bit of experience dealing with the north Koreans….
Charlie,
The KimcheeGI
tmc1233 (#6):
That sure does look like a Nike cap (or a knock-off), doesn’t it? Good catch!
Bluejives (#9): here’s a case study.
Back in 2000 as a result of the summit, SK and NK agreed to reconnect a couple of roads and rail lines, including the Kyŏngŭi-sŏn, the mainline between Seoul, P’yŏngyang, Sinŭiju, China, and the rest of Eurasia. All that was required to achieve this was a short stretch of a few miles around the DMZ, and it would theoretically be possible to travel or ship freight by train from Birmingham to Busan, or Manchester to Mokpo. There was talk in the Korean media at the time (2000) of the “t’ongil yŏlcha” (unification train), etc. Since then, SK made good on its side of the agreement, and extended tracks (and passenger service) from Munsan to Dorasan, within spitting distance (so to speak) of the DMZ; by now, I would assume there’s a freight connection (though no passenger service) to the Kaesŏng industrial area. There was even a much publicized press event a couple of years ago when the gates in the DMZ fence were opened up to allow trains to pass. But all the way since 2000, the Norks have dragged their feet endlessly on living up to their side of the agreement, stalling on work or tests, or demanding food aid, etc. to continue doing what they agreed to way back in 2000. And this was negotiating with SK, which has pretty much given NK everything they have asked for under the current regime—despite all the SK overtures of the Sunshine Policy, the rail line still isn’t completely connected, and/or there is still no train service whatsoever between SK and anywhere beyond Kaesŏng at the very furthest. As for similar connections on the East Coast, a road was pushed through to Kŭmgangsan to allow tour buses up to the tourist area, and that’s it. In other words, the only transportation connections to NK are to the SK outposts on the border.
It’s as if the intention was never really to effect real connections in the first place, or to continually demand for more and push the original, agreed-to objective further and further into the distant future.
That, for better or worse, is how NK negotiates.
In fact, last year, within just one or two days of the September six-party agreement—and before the US took action on the counterfeit stuff—NK was already publicly trying to interpret certain wording in the agreement in a way that the other five parties promptly contradicted. That agreement was DOA.
BJ said:
I stopped the quote there b/c that’s where you are wrong. North Korea does not operate under those assumptions, it does not operate to ensure the national survival, only the regime survival.
By the way, How Communists Negotiate was written by Vice Admiral C. Turner Joy of the US Navy, who was the senior UN delegate to the Korean Armistice Conference, from July 1951 to May 1952. He wrote the book in 1955, based on his experiences, and in particular his exasperation at negotiating an end to the war.
Keep in mind, by the way, that it took two years just to negotiate an end to hostilities; all the while, soldiers were dying protecting the front that would soon become the Military Demarcation Line, the centre strip of the DMZ.
Sewing, in Physics, there is a certain well known headache-inducing conundrum known as the “three body problem”. Analyzing the dynamics and mechanics of interaction between two bodies in a controlled, isolated environment is simple enough. Introduce a third body into the situation and the problem instantly becomes orders of magnitude more difficult.
The case study that you bring up makes a fundamental assumption that North-South inter-relations is like the two-body problem (completely free and independent of outside variables). But we all know that is not the case.
Basically, SKorea’s peaceful overtures to their northern brethren were doomed to failure from the gecko because the South was basically saying “let’s make love not war but pay no attention to that world police man behind the curtain either.” Just because the North is reluctant to be foolish in their own best interest doesnt make them peculiar Martians or something.
But, unfortunately therein lies the truth about why the West has failed to effectively deal with the likes of North Korea, Al Qaeda, etc. The West insists on viewing North Korea through a flawed lenses of what is effectively a caricature. It is incorrect to even label North Koreans or especially the Chinese as Communists anymore in the rigorous, original sense of that term as Marx or Engels may have meant it. Yet, the term persists. The West’s insistence on understanding the enemy not on their terms but based on our own arrogant, contrived framework is a gross violation of one of Xenzu’s principal axioms stated in the Art of War and has been the reason why the US has failed in much of its military overseas adventures starting with Vietnam. It also informs the enemy that the US is fundamentally not interested in peace or equal bargaining but rather brute-forcing its way into making things the way that the US thinks it should be. Hence, the enemy acts accordingly.
Libya.
Wow, congrats for coming up with…like…one counter-example. But since when did the US ever care so much about Africa anyway?
Bluejives, I don’t think you actually read what I wrote. I was talking about one particular item that was agreed upon in 2000, that has nothing whatsoever to do with geopolitics: a measly rail connection. A few miles of railway track connecting existing railway lines in the South and North. I’ve been following news of the line since it was announced during the 2000 summit. The Norks’ intransigence even on something as trivial as this—and their use of it as a bargaining chip to get concessions from SK in subsequent years—disabused me of any illusion that NK ever negotiates in good faith.
I understand that North Korea negotiates differently than what we are used to in the West. I read a book about negotiation and it said somethign like Soviet style negotiation. It used an example where businessmen from Russia were buying land in America. the price they started with was considered insane and after the contract was made they pushed for more and more.
I really don’t care if the North or china is labled as communists but I agree there are different ways t oNegotiate. We seem to expect two sides to compromise and come to an agreement benificial to both sides. Where as the North are trying to gain leverage and will stop at nothing.
I guess Americans want to read agreements in their favour to but it is rediculas dealing with North Korea. And South Korea should realise Korea is not one country of bothers.
It only takes one to show a pretentious know-it-all that he doesn’t.
If you have a specific question about Africa maybe you should just ask it directly.
The angry Korean gesticulating at the foreigner - and wearing a Nike cap. That says it all. North and South really are one.
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