North Korea

what the hell?

Thank you Republicans

The talking heads on my TV keep on using the words imminent..nuclear..war in the same sentence and frequently.

That's not a good thing. (propaganda wise, I mean)

who would have guessed that escalation with North Korea would have been a thing in the first 100 days?

And is this all because of the babies he saw on the tv?

it's to troll us all!

.

What happened to Trump's strategy of isolationism and America first?

Excellent historical perspective on why North Korea wants nuclear weapons:

http://www.counterpunch.org/20...

Excerpts:

MacArthur sneered at this warning [ from China -PS ] “… They have no airforce…if the Chinese tried to get down to Pyongyang there would be a great slaughter…we are the best.” He then ordered airstrikes to lay waste thousands of square miles of northern Korea bordering China and ordered infantry divisions ever closer to its border. It was the terrible devastation of this bombing campaign, worse than anything seen during World War II short of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that to this day dominates North Korea’s relations with the United States and drives its determination never to submit to any American diktat.

General Curtis Lemay directed this onslaught. It was he who had firebombed Tokyo in March 1945 saying it was “about time we stopped swatting at flies and gone after the manure pile.” It was he who later said that the US “ought to bomb North Vietnam back into the stone age.” Remarking about his desire to lay waste to North Korea he said “We burned down every town in North Korea and South Korea too.” Lemay was by no means exaggerating . . .

Panic took hold in Washington. Truman now said use of A-bombs was under “active consideration.” MacArthur demanded the bombs… As he put it in his memoirs:

"I would have dropped between thirty and fifty atomic bombs…strung across the neck of Manchuria…and spread behind us – from the Sea of Japan to the Yellow Sea- a belt of radioactive cobalt. It has an active life of between 60 and 120 years"

Cobalt it should be noted is at least 100 times more radioactive than uranium.

He also expressed a desire for chemicals and gas.

It is well known that MacArthur was fired for insubordination for publicly announcing his desire to use nukes. Actually, Truman himself put the nukes at ready and threatened to use them if China launched air raids against American forces. But he did not want to put them under MacArthur’s command because he feared MacArthur would conduct a preemptive strike against China anyway . . . .

. . . Of course the victims suffering worst were the civilians. In 1951 the U.S. initiated “Operation Strangle” which officials estimated killed at least 3 million people on both sides of the 38th parallel, but the figure is probably closer to 4 million. We do not know how many Chinese died – either solders or civilians killed in cross border bombings.

The question of whether the U.S. carried out germ warfare has been raised but has never been fully proved or disproved. The North accused the U.S. of dropping bombs laden with cholera, anthrax, plague, and encephalitis and hemorrhagic fever, all of which turned up among soldiers and civilians in the north. Some American prisoners of war confessed to such war crimes but these were dismissed as evidence of torture by North Korea on Americans. However, none of the U.S. POWs who did confess and were later repatriated were allowed to meet the press. A number of investigations were carried out by scientists from friendly western countries. One of the most prominent concluded the charges were true. At this time the US was engaged in top secret germ-warfare research with captured Nazi and Japanese germ warfare experts, and also experimenting with Sarin, despite its ban by the Geneva Convention. Washington accused the communists of introducing germ warfare.

Napalm was used extensively, completely and utterly destroying the northern capital of Pyongyang. By 1953 American pilots were returning to carriers and bases claiming there were no longer any significant targets in all of North Korea to bomb. In fact a very large percentage of the northern population was by then living in tunnels dug by hand underground. A British journalist wrote that the northern population was living “a troglodyte existence.”In the Spring of 1953 US warplanes hit five of the largest dams along the Yalu river completely inundating and killing Pyongyang’s harvest of rice. Air Force documents reveal calculated premeditation saying that “Attacks in May will be most effective psychologically because it was the end of the rice-transplanting season before the roots could become completely embedded.” Flash floods scooped out hundreds of square miles of vital food producing valleys and killed untold numbers of farmers.

Paul, your endless apologies become tiresome.  The North Korean regime is mentally ill. Period.  The awfulness of the Korea War neither explains nor justifies the regimes actions more than fifty years later. You may have noticed that Vietnam managed to move on from similar horrific treatment.

And, of course, if either Russia or China had sought to guarantee North Korean security the way we have covered South Korea, we might not be in this situation.

Now, if you want to argue that Trump is being naive and reckless, that is a discussion worth having.

Keeping up with the incompetence of this administration is exhausting. 

ITMFA.

There is a chance here to get this right.  I have been saying for years that only the Chinese can curb the North Korean regime.  I would love to see a united and neutral Korea.  It would take a lot of work to save the North, bit it could be done.

Except for the slight problem that if North Koreans become generally aware of the outside world, it won't be good for the Kim regime.

FilmCarp said:

There is a chance here to get this right.  I have been saying for years that only the Chinese can curb the North Korean regime.  I would love to see a united and neutral Korea.  It would take a lot of work to save the North, bit it could be done.

tjohn said:

Paul, your endless apologies become tiresome.  The North Korean regime is mentally ill. Period.  The awfulness of the Korea War neither explains nor justifies the regimes actions more than fifty years later. You may have noticed that Vietnam managed to move on from similar horrific treatment.

And, of course, if either Russia or China had sought to guarantee North Korean security the way we have covered South Korea, we might not be in this situation.

Now, if you want to argue that Trump is being naive and reckless, that is a discussion worth having.

I guess North Korea should just calm down since the US doesn't bomb or invade other countries.

And why should a country remember what happened 50 years ago?  No one else does that.

A deterrent against the US, especially with Donald Trump commander-in-chief?  They must be crazy.

http://www.independent.co.uk/n...

Nothing you can say changes the fact that North Korea has a mentally ill government much like Japan had a mentally ill government in the late 1930's.  

Nobody is suggesting that the Koreans forget the Korean War.  However, they can chose how to move on from that point.

Also, I don't know if you noticed, but the N. Korean nuclear program started even before the possibility of a president like Trump was thought possible.

Paul,

I am bit confused about one thing.  I can't remember who started the Korean War and I can't remember who remains committed to reunification of the Korean Peninsula by force.  I'm thinking we are responsible and, if we had only elected Bernie Sanders, it would all be OK, but I can't find any information on this.

tjohn said:

Except for the slight problem that if North Koreans become generally aware of the outside world, it won't be good for the Kim regime.

FilmCarp said:

There is a chance here to get this right.  I have been saying for years that only the Chinese can curb the North Korean regime.  I would love to see a united and neutral Korea.  It would take a lot of work to save the North, bit it could be done.

I'm talking about the Chinese removing the Kim regime, somehow.  Either buying him off or starving him out.  Cutting off coal was a good step.

FilmCarp said:

tjohn said:

Except for the slight problem that if North Koreans become generally aware of the outside world, it won't be good for the Kim regime.

FilmCarp said:

There is a chance here to get this right.  I have been saying for years that only the Chinese can curb the North Korean regime.  I would love to see a united and neutral Korea.  It would take a lot of work to save the North, bit it could be done.

I'm talking about the Chinese removing the Kim regime, somehow.  Either buying him off or starving him out.  Cutting off coal was a good step.

I think the Chinese and South Koreans want to avoid an economic and humanitarian crisis that would accompany the collapse of North Korea even if this could be accomplished without war.  It seems like a balancing act - maintain the regime but hope the regime doesn't get too nasty - that is no longer in balance.

Excerpt by University of Chicago prof Bruce Cummings, who specializes in modern Korean history:

https://www.thenation.com/article/this-is-whats-really-behind-north-koreas-nuclear-provocations/

. . . Last October, I was at a forum in Seoul with Strobe Talbott, a former deputy
secretary of state for Bill Clinton. Like everyone else, Talbott
averred that North Korea might well be the top security problem for the
next president. In my remarks, I mentioned Robert McNamara’s
explanation, in Errol Morris’s excellent documentary The Fog of War,
for our defeat in Vietnam: We never put ourselves in the shoes of the
enemy and attempted to see the world as they did.

Talbott then blurted, “It’s a grotesque regime!”

There you have it: It’s our number-one problem, but so grotesque that there’s
no point trying to understand Pyongyang’s point of view (or even that it might
have some valid concerns). North Korea is the only country in the world to have been
systematically blackmailed by US nuclear weapons going back to the
1950s, when hundreds of nukes were installed in South Korea. I have
written much about this in these pages and in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Why on earth would Pyongyang not seek a nuclear deterrent? But this crucial
background doesn’t enter mainstream American discourse. History doesn’t matter,
until it does—when it rears up and smacks you in the face.

What was it blackmailed into exactly?  

I wasn't there but I'm guessing Talbott blurted more than “It’s a grotesque regime!” 

I agree that it's important to understand one's opponents or enemies. In fact, there used to be thousands of people in the State Dept whose job was exactly that. So to pretend that Cummings is the first person to think of that is silly.

(But that doesn't change the fact that NK is led by a grotesque regime.)

NK's is George Orwell's worst nightmare.  And we wouldn't care about it, or have any reason to care about it, but for its bellicosity, instability, and grasp for nuclear weapons.   Not buying into the "its' us" explanation for this one. 

Cumings is on point about the ahistorical narrative peddled here in the US and how it distorts our assessment about the current situation. Simply dismissing the North Korean regime as being "mentally ill" is an easy way out. It certainly is easier than thinking that they have agency based on rational self interest. 

I don't think we have operated under the premise that they are "mentally ill," although a third generation absolute monarchy that pretends to be a hard core Stalinist state and was described by one defector as a giant gulag is not the picture of mental health.   What we have seen decade in and decade out is a calculated, extortionate good cop bad cop policy used to preserve the regime.  One minute they get concessions (money usually) based on lets be nice "sunshine policy" etc and then a week a later they are threatening to burn Seoul to the ground, kidnapping South Koreans sinking fishing boats etc.   There may be rational self interest at work but its a ruthless and dangerous kind.  It's not the lets-just-meet-them-in-the-middle kind.  They (him?) need confrontation far more than we need it, both to extort resources and concessions and to keep the populace on a knife edge of fear about war. 

Well I just wish that they were not building nuclear missiles so close to the nuclear missiles that we have had in South Korea for over 50 years.

U.S. nukes removed from SK in 1991. 

If anyone could understand how the North Korean leader thinks, it would be Donald Trump.

Heir to family business, cutting out and cheating partners while grabbing as much for himself.  Donald is the Kim Jong-il (son of the founder), and his kids are Trump Don-un, Trump Eric-un, and Trump Ivanka-un.  They just better hope that younger half-brother Barron doesn't give them the same treatment that Kim Jong-un gave his half-sibling.

bub said:

U.S. nukes removed from SK in 1991. 

Nope only the land based nukes were removed. Air delivered nukes are still there.

Are you saying nuke equipped planes are based in SK?  Source?  I can't find that.

From what I can find out, all nukes were removed from SK after the Soviet Union fell.

wedjet said:

bub said:

U.S. nukes removed from SK in 1991. 

Nope only the land based nukes were removed. Air delivered nukes are still there.

bub said:

Are you saying nuke equipped planes are based in SK?  Source?  I can't find that.

bub said:

Are you saying nuke equipped planes are based in SK?  Source?  I can't find that.

Here is one article that I found from 2005 concerning the 1991 removal of nukes. Note it says tactical nukes except air bombs. Another article, which I cannot find at the moment, stated the same.

http://www.nukestrat.com/korea...

Looks like the air bombs may have been removed later.

http://www.nytimes.com/1991/10...

If I'm reading it correctly, the "except air bombs" qualification was in connection with NATO countries.  The article goes on to say that there are no nukes of any kind in SK, period.