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For the second time in three years, North Korea has tested a nuclear device, to the great consternation and teeth-gashing of just about everybody. This warhead was reported to have been several times larger than the one exploded in 2006 and was about the size of the bombs we used at the end of World War II.
The North Koreans also tested a number of short- to medium-range missiles, and until the president's nomination of Judge Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, North Korea's potential capability to fire missiles with nuclear warheads dominated the news.
First, the good bit: although it is difficult to develop missiles, and more difficult to develop nuclear weapons, marrying the two is very, very hard indeed. But that's the extent of the good news.
North Korea spends the majority of its gross domestic product on its military establishment, and most of the country's building material, fuel and food goes to the army. Pyongyang has about one million men on active duty and vastly more in reserve. If the United States had an active duty military in the same proportion to our population, we would have more than 22 million citizens in uniform. Fighting the North Koreans is not unknown to us, and legally and technically, the Korean War is not yet over. Veterans will tell you that it was no picnic, and friends of mine who were captured assert that they would prefer to be prisoners of the Chinese rather than of the Koreans, who were the personnification of ruthlessness and brutality.
We have many military contingency plans on file, and some of them deal with North Korea, but there is no serious consideration of a military response to anything except an invasion of South Korea by the North. The United States has conventional weapons that can be delivered with precision, to destroy or disable Pyongyang's nuclear sites, but the US government will not conduct a unilateral attack, no matter how surgical, without the concurrence of the major powers, and the odds of that are very long.
Because humans are so self-centered, there was plenty of talk on American television about the timing of the nuclear blast, how it was designed to test President Obama in his early days in office, or to coincide with Memorial Day. If the test was tied to anything, it was the current paralysis of South Korea, in a state of national mourning after the suicide of ex-president Roh.
The UN Security Council is about to meet on the issue of North Korea, and our ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, said that any response to the latest test will have teeth to it. But it is difficult to envision what kind of teeth she's talking about. An embargo or a blockade would require the concurrence of China, and China is a serious part of the problem here. North Korea is a client state, and sanctions with teeth would produce millioins of Korean refugess streaming across the Yalu River into China. Blocking the escape of North Korea's people will produce a large number of civilian casualties, and nobody has the stomach for it.
There is much talk about how much of the decision-making is done by Kim Jong-il, and there is plenty of evidence that the country is controlled by a group of elite people, of whom Kim is only one. But how the country is ruled is of little practical importance. It has ignored pleas, entreaties, admonitions and threats, and it will continue to do so. It desperately needs hard cash and earns it by selling drugs and contraband. We are very concerned that North Korea will sell nuclear material or technology, or both, to terrorists, and if it does that, then it's always possible that Muslim extremists, including those in southwest China, could get their hands on deadly weapons.
That would be very bad news, except to the extent that it would finally get Beijing's attention.
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Thanks. As much as an extremist as I am---and as we all tend to be on some subjects, especially as we get older---I find it useful to cut to basics, something we all learned as brand new soldiers.
