Gordon Campbell on the latest US threats to bomb North Korea
Just before Christmas, the US political scientist and government consultant Edward Luttwak published an article in Foreign Policy magazine called “Its Time To Bomb North Korea.”
You know, just like Israel did to Iraq in 1981, and to Syria in 2007. As Luttwak argued : “Namely, use well-aimed conventional weapons to deny nuclear weapons to regimes that shouldn’t have firearms, let alone weapons of mass destruction. Fortunately, there is still time for Washington to launch such an attack to destroy North Korea’s nuclear arsenal.”
Oh, Luttwak did consider there is a risk of retaliation. A limited risk in his view, and one confined largely to South Korea, which – in his view – had only itself to blame for not being serious about building bomb shelters and investing in installing an “Iron Dome” self-protection capacity. As he put it :
It’s true that North Korea could retaliate for any
attack by using its conventional rocket artillery against
the South Korean capital of Seoul and its surroundings,
where almost 20 million inhabitants live within 35 miles of
the armistice line. U.S. military officers have cited the
fear of a “sea of fire” to justify inaction. But this
vulnerability should not paralyze U.S. policy for one simple
reason: It is very largely self-inflicted…..Even now,
casualties could still be drastically reduced by a crash
resilience program. This should involve clearing out and
hardening with jacks, props, and steel beams the basements
of buildings of all sizes; promptly stocking necessities in
the 3,257 official shelters and sign-posting them more
visibly; and, of course, evacuating as many as possible
beforehand (most of the 20 million or so at risk would be
quite safe even just 20 miles further to the south). The
United States, for its part, should consider adding vigorous
counter-battery attacks to any airstrike on North
Korea.
Nonetheless, given South
Korea’s deliberate inaction over many years, any damage
ultimately done to Seoul cannot be allowed to paralyze the
United States in the face of immense danger to its own
national interests….
So far, so crazy.
To Luttwak, there is a fast closing window whereby the US
could attack North Korea (now!) without (much) risk to
American lives. The timing of this article’s
appearance came just as Washington was abuzz with rumours
that a salutary bombing raid on North Korea – the term
being used was “giving them a bloody nose” - was exactly what the Trump administration is
currently considering.
Just before Christmas,
Jim Mattis, defence secretary, warned that “storm clouds
are gathering”. General HR McMaster, the adviser who has
been the most bellicose of the Trump national security team,
says it would be “intolerable” for North Korea to be
able to attack the US with a nuclear weapon. After Pyongyang
in November tested a rocket with the range to reach anywhere
in the continental US, he said the odds of war were
“increasing every day”…. Gen McMaster has talked
about the possibility of a “preventive war” aimed at
eliminating the North Korean missile and nuclear weapons
programmes. In a private briefing for former national
security advisers over the summer, Gen McMaster outlined the
options, which led some — but not all — of the
participants to conclude that the US was more serious about
military action than they had
thought…
The form this “bloody nose”
take would be along these lines :
Dennis Wilder, a former top CIA analyst, says there are many options that could be interpreted as a kick in the shin or a bloody nose. They include striking an air base or naval facility not associated with the ICBM programme, destroying one of Mr Kim’s homes, hitting a key part of the missile programme or targeting a missile during a test launch. “Presumably, such a strike would be a one-off attack that is immediately followed-up by a presidential announcement that this is a warning shot and nothing more,” says Mr Wilder.
As other, saner commentators have pointed out. this policy would be like knowing that there’s a guy down the block who, although smaller, is considerably more aggressive and unstable. So to deter him, you decide to go down the road to his house, and punch him in the face.
This recent round of escalatingly aggressive rhetoric may only of course, be aimed at scaring Pyongyang into agreeing to a diplomatic solution. (McMaster is directly painting a military action as being a practical response open to the US. ) Problem being of course that the Kim regime – given that it feels its very survival is at stake, and that its nuclear programme provides its only effective means of defence – is highly unlikely to be scared into disarming itself. So far, the bombing scenarios being mooted in the US have envisaged the use of conventional weapons, but this may be only a transitional phase. In December, the Trump administration moved (a) to remove the regulatory constraints on the use of nuclear weapons per se and (b) develop a new ‘low yield’ nuclear warhead for its submarine fleet.
The Trump
administration plans to loosen constraints on the use of nuclear weapons and develop a new
low-yield nuclear warhead for US Trident missiles, according
to a former official who has seen the most recent draft of a
policy review.
Jon Wolfsthal, who was
special assistant to Barack Obama on arms control and
nonproliferation, said the new nuclear posture review
prepared by the Pentagon, envisages a modified version of
the Trident D5 submarine-launched missiles with only part of
its normal warhead, with the intention of deterring Russia
from using tactical warheads in a conflict in Eastern
Europe.
Oh, and yes, this does comprise a
turn for the worse :
The new nuclear policy is
significantly more hawkish that the posture adopted by the
Obama administration, which sought to reduce the role of nuclear weapons
in US defence.
Reagan
revisited
The willingness
to consider a pre-emptive strike on North Korea, and to
entertain the theoretical possibility that the US (at least)
could survive its own tactical first use of nuclear weapons
marks a radical change, and is something no other US
President has been willing to consider since the early days
of the Reagan presidency.
In fact, the logic of the Luttwak Foreign Policy article has some distinct similarities to a notorious 1980 article published in the same magazine called “Victory Is Possible” and written by two young RAND analysts, Keith Payne and Colin Gray.
In it, the pair argued that the option of the US waging a tactical nuclear war against the Soviet Union should not be ruled out of contention entirely - because with luck and if waged “rationally” such a war might well result in “ only” 20 million US casualties. In the authors’ view, a nuclear war waged between the superpowers was therefore entirely survivable, for the US, anyway.
Payne went on to play a major policy role on nuclear deterrence within the George W. Bush administration. With good reason in 2003, Fred Kaplan (in Slate) called him Dubya’s ‘Dr Strangelove’.
That’s quite a valid comparison. Put side by side, it was hard to tell the difference between the original Payne/Gray article and the arguments put forward by General Buck Turgidsen in the Kubrick movie. Even the possible US death toll involved was almost identical. Here’s General Turgidsen arguing most forcefully for a pre-emptive attack (bomb them now!) on the Russkies:
Mr. President, we are rapidly approaching a
moment of truth...Now, truth is not always a pleasant thing,
but it is necessary now to make a choice, to choose between
two admittedly regrettable, but nevertheless,
distinguishable post-war environments. One, where you got 20
million people killed, and the other where you got 150
million people killed…Mr. President, I'm not saying we
wouldn't get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten
to twenty million killed, tops! Uh, depending on the
breaks.
These days, Payne is still at it.
In his view, security is objective – if they were the
right type, fewer warheads could still do the job - but
since deterrence is subjective, you need more of them and
bigger, to convince the other guy you’re serious and
loaded for bear. It's a ‘heads I win, tails you lose’
argument weighted in favour of nuclear
expansion.
The Nuclear Wake Up
Calls
Apparently, two basic
scenarios are involved when it comes to the nuclear option.
They comprise (a) when the military wakes up the President
and (b) when the President wakes up the military. Here’s why we should be worried when Trump
is up alone late at night, with the nuclear
football:
It is commonplace to hear that no one can
stop the President from ordering the use of nuclear weapons,
that he alone can make the decision and needs no one else to
second it, and that he could do so in only minutes. This
concern gives the impression that the president could take
the country from peaceful stability to a nuclear war with
about the same effort and carelessness with which he can
fire off a tweet.
Yes, that is exactly
what the world is worried about with Trump as the
Commander in Chief. But rest easy, because there’s someone
– surely there would be someone, right? – who would step
in to stop him. Or so this article would have it:
…. The steps the President would have to take in
order to pass a nuclear order to someone who could
physically launch the missiles would simultaneously alert
the rest of his national security team. Efforts to bypass
the senior leadership would themselves further alarm
subordinates, increasing the likelihood that they would draw
in the rest of the national security team, even if ordered
not to. The military is trained to reject illegal orders and
the president trying to order the military to go from
peacetime to nuclear war without consulting with his
national security advisors would set off alarms up and down
the system about whether the orders were legal. The
president does not need anyone else to help him fire off a
tweet, but he does need many others to help him fire off a
nuclear intercontinental ballistic missile. If he were
trying to do so it would take an enormous effort of
persuasion that would involve many more people than are
involved in the streamlined, launch-under-attack
scenario.
Really? Given the current White
House climate and personnel, would it really take an
“enormous amount of persuasion” to convince Trump’s
advisers to accede to his order to fire a missile at North
Korea? In the Trump White House, it isn’t at all
re-assuring that a disproportionate number of the alleged
‘adults in the room’ (James Mattis, John Kelly, H.R.
McMaster) have recent military backgrounds, and it has been
McMaster who has been doing most of the recent
sabre-rattling at Pyongyang. No wonder the South Koreans and
North Koreans are starting to talk to each other. To the US,
Seoul is starting to look like it is being regarded as mere
collateral damage.
Footnote: Ironically, Luttwak ends his “bomb them now” article on a note that all but sabotages his own case. As he concedes, Pakistan has nuclear weapons and no one in the White House seems much concerned about that fact. (Pakistan is also politically unstable, and notoriously lax about security. Any terrorist seriously seeking nuclear material would be likely to get it from Pakistan.) Yet here’s how weakly Luttwak deals with this flaw in his argument:
It’s true that India, Israel, and Pakistan all have
those weapons, with no catastrophic consequences so far. But
each has proven its reliability in ways that North Korea has
not. Their embassies, for instance, don’t sell hard drugs
or traffic in forged banknotes. More pertinently, those
other countries have gone through severe crises, and even
fought wars, without ever mentioning nuclear weapons, let
alone threatening their use as Kim Jong Un already has.
North Korea is different….
Yeah
right. In reality, North Korea is different (in very large
part) simply because the US has chosen to elevate a fourth
rate military power to the status of global threat.
Arguably, Pyongyang should simply be left alone. Like
Pakistan (and India and Israel) North Korea now has nuclear
weapons - and like those other countries, it appears to
regard such weapons as being a deterrent against attack, and
not as a first-use
option.
The alternative, in
song
Peace in the world or the world in
pieces.. That was the message 70 years ago, from the Sons of
the Pioneers :