Althouse: "Once they do that, it’s serious... Otherwise, the North Koreans are just jerking us around.”

October 9, 2006

"Once they do that, it’s serious... Otherwise, the North Koreans are just jerking us around.”

The North Korean nuclear test.

19 comments:

Robert Holmgren said...: Damn, if only Bush would've stuck to the Clinton/Albright plan. It was working beautifully.; 10/9/06, 7:39 AM
MadisonMan said...: Well what a surprise! The first response blames it on Clinton. Where does the buck stop in Bush's White House?

I wonder how many refugees are poised to swarm north into China from N. Korea, out of the 22+ million population. What are the options when the leader of a country is a certifiable nutjob?; 10/9/06, 7:48 AM
Paco Wové said...: I don't see that this is either Bush or Clinton's "fault". There isn't any reasonable way this could have been prevented, just like there's no reasonable way Iran will be prevented from developing nuclear weapons.; 10/9/06, 8:01 AM
MadisonMan said...: I'd guess the one politician that benefits from this is Denny Hastert -- pushes Foley right out of the news. For now.

The change for N. Korea must come from within, I agree, absent some kind of military intervention. And I don't think China will go along with intervention if it means a refugee crisis. And if China doesn't want it, I don't think it's going to happen.; 10/9/06, 8:07 AM
JohnF said...: Another victory for the international diplomacy corps. Talking to people who lie, getting promises from people who won't keep them, that's the ticket!

This is nothing that a few well aimed cruise missiles would not have fixed long ago, and likely could fix now. And that goes for Iran too.

But what the hey. Why not more diplomacy, backed up with the threat of, say, nothing? Yeah, that's the ticket.; 10/9/06, 8:39 AM
Sloanasaurus said...: The change for N. Korea must come from within, I agree, absent some kind of military intervention.

I don't get people from the left and why they keep bringing up this argument. Organic change in these tyrannical regimes is a pipe dream - it never happens. As in almost every other case, foreign involvement and intervention will be required to throw off the yoke of the N. Korean dictatorship.

I don't blame Clinton for trying appeasement. Sometimes appeasement works. Here it was clear that it will never work, but I don't think we lost anything by trying. We might have found out that Kim Il was a mere playboy and only interested in a comfortable living rather than being agressive. Therefore it was worth trying. Despite appeasement, Clinton would not have done anything different than Bush in his efforts to get a regional answer to N. Korea.

Because appeasment has already been attempted, mainstream Democrats will have more political capital in their own party to support the President in being more aggressive with N. Korea. The left's cry for more appeasment will be less potent because it has already been tried.

More aggressive action is now needed to keep N. Korea from selling its weapons. This may include blockades, and other acts of war, and a massive increase in funding for Star Wars, a program long opposed by the left. I hope Democrats will support the President in these efforts.; 10/9/06, 8:43 AM
Sloanasaurus said...: This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.; 10/9/06, 8:45 AM
Balfegor said...: I don't see that this is either Bush or Clinton's "fault". There isn't any reasonable way this could have been prevented, just like there's no reasonable way Iran will be prevented from developing nuclear weapons.

With North Korea, also, if you need to blame a Bush, the Bush to blame is Bush I -- my recollection is that North Korea first began removing weaponisable plutonium from their reactor in the very early 1990's, before Clinton become president.

That aside, though, my belief is that structurally, there's very little we could have done in any event, even back in 1989. An invasion would almost certainly have resulted in Seoul being shelled by the thousands of pieces of heavy artillery North Korea has been collecting along along the border since the ceasefire. Seoul was not as big then as it is now (now, it's around 21, 22 million -- roughly the population of Iraq), but it was still big and extremely dense, and shelling would have resulted in death tolls like we haven't seen since, well, the Korean War.

Anyhow, I am most interested in Japan's response. My guess is that this just boosted the nationalists' case for remilitarisation. I don't know Shinzo Abe's views on that matter, but he's considered fairly nationalistic, so he might seize the moment.

Re: DMC in Washington

A nuke seems much more complex...

A nuke seems much more complex . . . but we developed nukes well before we developed functioning ICBMs. So not necessarily.

In any event, though, North Korea claims the detonation was a plutonium bomb, in which case it was probably an implosion-type device. I don't think anyone's intelligence has indicated that they've been able to miniaturise an implosion-type to mount it on a missile. The risk there is a gun-type uranium device, which is (or so I understand) much easier to miniaturise -- that's probably why they shifted their focus to uranium enrichment in the late 90's.; 10/9/06, 10:13 AM
Maxine Weiss said...: Cut off all diplomatic relations with China, immediately.

No more of these inane "Trade Missions".

China is an enemy of the State, and should be treated as such.

Russia and China are our enemies.

The Cold War didn't end, actually.

It's still on.

Peace, Maxine; 10/9/06, 10:36 AM
Icepick said...: Maxine, we can't cut relations with China. Too much of our trade is with them, and they own far too much US debt for that to be feasible. Besides, the US, China and India are presently keeping the world economy afloat, in large measure because of trade between those three.

China is also in a tough spot here. They do not want a unified "westernized" Korea on that flank. So maintaining the NK buffer state seems like a good idea. But NK is a seriously unhinged state, and very unstable. If they (China) try to replace the leadership, it may well precipitate a crisis that could lead to a HUGE refugee crisis and the need for China to occupy NK. Now, SK will definitely NOT like that, and Japan will go ape-shit crazy over that, much moreso than they will if NK really did set off a nuke today. (I'm still leaving open the possibility that they used a large stash of conventional explosives as a bluff.)

At the time of Clinton's 1994 deal, I thought it was absolutely horrible and that it would have a negative outcome. Over time, however, I've softened my stance with regard to 'blaming' Clinton. Really, he didn't have good options. My problem with that deal in retrospect is that it was used to provide a false sense of security on that front.

Somehow, North Korea has become a problem that has no soultion. All we can do is try to manage it and hope that circumstances either change, or that when the crisis comes it will be quickly defused.

Oh, and this really isn't the crisis. Not yet anyway. And Pakistan's nukes worry me far more than NK's nukes would.; 10/9/06, 11:04 AM
Icepick said...: Oh, and the Cold War did end, and we won. However, that did not mean the end of history, or the end of competition amongst nation-states.; 10/9/06, 11:06 AM
Anonymous said...: So this wasn't a nuclear test, just "performance art" with many tons of TNT?

As in art, it's the intention behind the act that matters. Kim Jong-(Mentally)Ill intends for the world to believe he has nuclear weapons.

Most likely, conclusive proof that this was or wasn't a nuclear explosion won't be forthcoming. The only safe assumption is that this was a real nuclear test.

A former Japanese Prime Minister floated the idea a few weeks ago that a nuclear armed Japan wasn't out of the question. Now that seems a certainty.

I also think a Chinese invasion of North Korea isn't out of the question. If they see that regime collapsing, the only way to prevent unification would be to put in their own puppet government. They'd be willing to throw a million troops at the problem, I think.; 10/9/06, 11:57 AM
Revenant said...: Add me to the list of people skeptical that this was a real nuke test. A 4.2 on the Richter scale would suggest an explosion in, at most, the 2 kiloton range. That's a tenth as powerful as the Trinity test in 1945.

If it WAS a nuke test, I'd be very surprised if it was one which actually succeeded.; 10/9/06, 12:28 PM
Balfegor said...: Re: Revenant

Add me to the list of people skeptical that this was a real nuke test. A 4.2 on the Richter scale would suggest an explosion in, at most, the 2 kiloton range.

I am not sure what to think at this point. I'm reading right now on Nikkei that in addition to our 4.2 reading, the Japanese Meteorological Agency recorded it as 4.9, and that when Pakistan detonated their first (genuine) test explosives in 1998, the magnitude was 4.8.; 10/9/06, 1:33 PM
Joseph said...: I think Maxine is insane.; 10/9/06, 1:35 PM
Balfegor said...: Huh. I read here that actually gun-type devices cannot be miniaturised for mounting on a missile. Is that correct? They seem so simple. And wasn't the original gun-type device much smaller than the plutonium implosion-type bomb, back in WWII? Hmm. Interesting.

I wonder why North Korea turned to uranium enrichment in the past decade or so, then. Maybe they just wanted something surefire?; 10/9/06, 5:06 PM
Balfegor said...: killing thousands of South Koreans

Realistically, we're talking millions of friendly casualties. The best case scenarios are something in the mid hundred-thousands. The worst case scenario is, of course, a nuclear detonation in Tokyo.; 10/9/06, 6:46 PM
Revenant said...: Realistically, we're talking millions of friendly casualties.

Highly unlikely unless North Korea already has nukes and the means to deliver them. They can shell Seoul, but the North Korean army is pathetic -- South Korea could probably defeat it by itself -- and the border between the two nations is impassable. I also rather suspect that we've got the capacity to take out the North Korean guns pretty quickly in a preemptive strike.

But since thousands of SK casualties is politically unacceptable at the moment, it doesn't really matter anyway.; 10/9/06, 9:48 PM
Balfegor said...: NK's forward artillery positions, annihilating its ability to lob artillery into Seoul and killing only NK soldiers, not civilians.

You, uh, do realise just how close Seoul is to the DMZ, right? It's between 15-20 miles away, with the city centre roughly 30 miles away. Unless our nukes have no fallout, that's still going to render Seoul uninhabitable.

Re: Revenant:

They can shell Seoul, but the North Korean army is pathetic -- South Korea could probably defeat it by itself -- and the border between the two nations is impassable. I also rather suspect that we've got the capacity to take out the North Korean guns pretty quickly in a preemptive strike.

I'm, uh, highly dubious -- I don't think any of our military planners are anywhere near that optimistic. There was an article in the Atlantic a few months (a year?) ago talking with some of the military personnel who were working on North Korea strategies, and they all put 500,000 casualties as the low-end.

South Korea's army could defeat North Korea's -- no contest -- but overwhelming military superiority doesn't really count for much when half your population lives in the primary battlezone, within range of the enemy's guns. I mean, this is not Hitler firing a few V2's into London, or the Paris gun firing into Paris. Think a couple thousand pieces of heavy artillery shelling Manhattan here.

Admittedly, I think were assuming they have the element of surprise, and several hours to shell Seoul in relative peace. It might be different if we had overwhelming surprise along the full length of the border. I don't think anyone thinks we could manage that, though.

Thankfully, none of this is going to happen in the short term -- we're saying the nuke test was a dud, so we'll probably just ignore North Korea for the time being. China, meanwhile, is evidently frothing at the regime, and -- even if they don't have as much influence in Pyongyang as I would like -- they may be able to help us reach a peaceable solution. China may still be interested in grand strategy and toying with a puppet Korean state and all that, but South Korea has huge investments in China now, and losing Seoul would be rather worse for them than for the US.; 10/10/06, 9:07 AM