Essay

North Korea's nuclear umbrella

By Douglas Lummis

A couple of months ago I wrote in this column about the North Korean missile threat (Missile Terror, Aug. 4). Now the North Korean government has raised the ante by carrying out a nuclear test. Well, some people aren't sure. Some experts think they just stuffed a lot of dynamite into a mineshaft and blew it up. Others like the United States say it was a genuine nuclear test although only a small scale one. But whether or not they have a nuclear weapon, they definitely want us to believe they do.

Are they crazy? Of course. Anyone who threatens to drop nukes on cities has to be in some way crazy. The question is: Are they any crazier than the leaders of the other countries that have nuclear weapons?

Now I am going to repeat some of the arguments I made in my earlier column. (Sorry, but this is an idea that doesn't sink in easily.) Actually using nuclear weapons is madness, but threatening nuclear attack has a certain logic to it. Everybody knows this logic: It's called nuclear deterrence. (You and I live under the U.S. "nuclear umbrella," so we can't say this has nothing to do with us.) If you threaten an enemy country with nuclear retaliation, probably it won't attack you. The trouble with this strategy is that for the threat to be effective, you must make the enemy believe you really are crazy enough to carry out mass murder. Without that, the nuclear threat is no threat.

But what have the North Koreans got to be so afraid of?

North Korea has been under nuclear threat for five decades. With the advent of the second Bush administration, the U.S. government abandoned its policy of containment and gave itself permission to carry out preemptive attacks. And the president listed North Korea as one of the Axis of Evil countries, meaning one of the countries the United States means to attack when it gets around to it. In recent months Shinzo Abe voiced the opinion that Japan has the right to carry out a preemptive attack on North Korea; following that, Abe became prime minister. On Aug. 27, the influential U.S. right-wing columnist George Will published a column in which he called North Korea "lunatic," "demented," and "culturally primitive," and quoted Abe's threat. On Sept. 14, addressing the U.S. House Committee on International Relations, Chairman Henry J. Hyde spoke of "an immense task ahead — the reunification of the Korean peninsula." In U.S. strategic thinking, this means invasion of the north.

If you were a North Korean government official, wouldn't this make you a little nervous?

On Oct. 10, Thom Shanker wrote in the New York Times that U.S. military officials understand that North Korea's nuclear program is not aimed at the south, but is intended "as a deterrent against an attack by the United States." Shanker also quoted asenior U.S. military official as saying, "The only good options were before North Korea got the bomb. There are no good options now."

Does this mean the deterrent is working

Shukan ST: Oct. 27, 2006

(C) All rights reserved