The Risk of Nuclear War with North Korea

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: September 8, 2017 at 8:11:35 AM EDT
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] The Risk of Nuclear War with North Korea
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> [Note:  This item comes from friend Gerald Steinback.  DLH]
>
> The Risk of Nuclear War with North Korea
> On the ground in Pyongyang: Could Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump goad each other into a devastating confrontation?
> By Evan Osnos
> Sept 18 2017 Issue
> <https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/09/18/the-risk-of-nuclear-war-with-north-korea>
>
> 1. The Madman Theory
>
> The United States has no diplomatic relations with North Korea, so there is no embassy in Washington, but for years 
> the two countries have relied on the “New York channel,” an office inside North Korea’s mission to the United 
> Nations, to handle the unavoidable parts of our nonexistent relationship. The office has, among other things, 
> negotiated the release of prisoners and held informal talks about nuclear tensions. In April, I contacted the New 
> York channel and requested permission to visit Pyongyang, the capital of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
>
> The New York channel consists mostly of two genial middle-aged men: Pak Song Il, a husky diplomat with a gray brush 
> cut; and his aide-de-camp, Kwon Jong Gun, who is younger and thinner. They go everywhere together. (The North Korean 
> government has diplomats work in pairs, to prevent them from defecting, or being recruited as spies.) Under U.S. law, 
> they can travel only twenty-five miles from Columbus Circle. Pak and Kwon met me near their office, for lunch at the 
> Palm Too. They cautioned me that it might take several months to arrange a trip. North Korea periodically admits 
> large groups of American journalists, to witness parades and special occasions, but it is more hesitant when it comes 
> to individual reporters, who require close monitoring and want to talk about the nuclear program.
>
> Americans are accustomed to eruptions of hostility with North Korea, but in the past six months the enmity has 
> reached a level rarely seen since the end of the Korean War, in 1953. The crisis has been hastened by fundamental 
> changes in the leadership on both sides. In the six years since Kim Jong Un assumed power, at the age of 
> twenty-seven, he has tested eighty-four missiles—more than double the number that his father and grandfather tested. 
> Just before Donald Trump took office, in January, he expressed a willingness to wage a “preventive” war in North 
> Korea, a prospect that previous Presidents dismissed because it would risk an enormous loss of life. Trump has said 
> that in his one meeting with Barack Obama, during the transition, Obama predicted that North Korea, more than any 
> other foreign-policy challenge, would test Trump. In private, Trump has told aides, “I will be judged by how I handle 
> this.”
>
> On the Fourth of July, North Korea passed a major threshold: it launched its first intercontinental ballistic missile 
> powerful enough to reach the mainland United States. In response, on July 21st, authorities in Hawaii announced that 
> they would revive a network of Cold War-era sirens, to alert the public in the event of a nuclear strike. Trump said 
> that he hopes to boost spending on missile defense by “many billions of dollars.” On September 3rd, after North Korea 
> tested a nuclear weapon far larger than any it had revealed before—seven times the size of the bombs dropped on 
> Hiroshima and Nagasaki—the U.S. Secretary of Defense, James Mattis, warned that a threat to America or its allies 
> would trigger a “massive military response.”
>
> A few days after the July 4th missile test, Pak told me that I could book a flight to Pyongyang. I submitted a list 
> of people I wanted to interview, including diplomats and Kim Jong Un himself. About the latter, Pak only laughed. 
> (Kim has never given an interview.) After Pak stopped laughing, he said I could talk to other officials. I wanted to 
> understand how North Koreans think about the kind of violence that their country so often threatens. Were the threats 
> serious, or mere posturing? How did they imagine that a war would unfold? Before my arrival in North Korea, I spent 
> time in Washington, Seoul, and Beijing; many people in those places, it turned out, are asking the same things about 
> the United States.
>
> About a week before my flight to Pyongyang, America’s dealings with North Korea deteriorated further. On August 5th, 
> as punishment for the missile test, the U.N. Security Council adopted some of the strongest sanctions against any 
> country in decades, blocking the sale of coal, iron, and other commodities, which represent a third of North Korea’s 
> exports. President Trump, in impromptu remarks at his golf club in New Jersey, said that “any more threats to the 
> United States” will be met “with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” A few hours later, North Korea 
> threatened to fire four missiles into the Pacific Ocean near the American territory of Guam, from which warplanes 
> depart for flights over the Korean Peninsula. Trump replied, in a tweet, that “military solutions are now fully in 
> place, locked and loaded, should North Korea act unwisely.”
>
> Suddenly, the prospect of a nuclear confrontation between the United States and the most hermetic power on the globe 
> had entered a realm of psychological calculation reminiscent of the Cold War, and the two men making the existential 
> strategic decisions were not John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev but a senescent real-estate mogul and 
> reality-television star and a young third-generation dictator who has never met another head of state. Between them, 
> they had less than seven years of experience in political leadership.
>
> [snip]
>
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