SPEAKING
FREELY Why Pyongyang is going
nuclear By Kim Myong-chol
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please click hereif you are interested in
contributing.
The time is coming
fast to decide who is the winner and who the loser
in the long-standing conflict between the Korean
people, with a history of 5,000 years - proud
descendants of Dankun and Paedal Korea and Koguryo
- and the United States, with a history
of a
mere 200 years. The Korean people have many scores
to settle with the US.
The North Korean
government of Kim Jong-il is going to show who the
real masters of Korea are by winning the nuclear
standoff with the US. The Korean people adamantly
refuse to be second-class citizens, but are
determined to prove that they are sovereign
masters of the Land of Morning Calm.
The
Korean-US conflict began long before the late Kim
Il-sung and his son, current North Korean leader
Kim Jong-il, were born. It was nearly 150 ago, in
1866 when the US gunboat General Sherman raided
Pyongyang. The final stage of the conflict is in
the present nuclear standoff between the
Democratic People's Republic of Korea and the
United States. Kim Jong-il and his North Korean
people have long-standing scores to settle with
the US and its allies. Scene I of the first stage
is the declaration of nuclear-weapons status.
Scene II is to show beyond doubt that North Korea
has the nuclear capability to settle the old
scores with the US.
The six-party talks on
North Korea's nuclear program are practically
dead, with the US tightening the financial noose
around Pyongyang, killing the September 19, 2005,
joint statement in which the US and other
participants pledged to respect the sovereignty of
North Korea. The July 15 United Nations
resolution, adopted with Chinese and Russian
support, makes a most blatant mockery of the
independence, sovereignty and liberty of North
Korea and its people as it denounces them for
their routine exercise of their sovereign rights.
The Pyongyang leadership and its people
are well aware that the big powers are not
reliable and their nuclear umbrella is porous and
hard to unfold.
True, the Korean People's
Army (KPA)is capable of repelling invading
physically superior US forces, but it is apparent
that the KPA, armed only with conventional
weapons, cannot be expected to keep Korean land
from being ravaged by the Americans. Such a KPA
would not be powerful enough to settle the old
scores with the US.
Some people may cite
primitiveness of the KPA's hardware as a key
reason for doubting that the KPA would win a war
with the US. What is lacking in such an analysis
is proper understanding of how war is won. Should
these people's view be correct, how could they
account for why the US lost in the Korean War and
the Vietnam War? Why is the US losing its wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan? Why did Israel lose to
Hezbollah? There are three critical factors: the
first is mental, the spirit of martyrdom and
discipline; the second intellectual, the art of
war; and the third physical, weapons. The third is
ineffective in the absence of the first two.
All the national heroes of Korea,
including General Ulchi Mundok of Koguryo and
Admiral Li Sung-sin of the Li Dynasty, heroically
drove back invaders from China and Japan. The late
Kim Il-sung beat the Japanese colonialists but was
unable to stop the Americans and the Russians from
splitting the liberated Korean Peninsula into two.
He became the first in the world to win a
full-blown war with the US, but dismally failed to
deter the enemy from devastating the Land of
Morning Calm as the previous two national heroes
did.
Most important, none of those
national heroes succeeded in building up adequate
long-range attack capability to strike the heart
of the enemy. All the wars the Korean people had
to fight were limited to the Korean theater. Once
outside the Korean borders, the foreign invaders
remained intact.
However, this is no
longer the case since Kim Jong-il has embraced the
tamul-inspired (tamul is an ancient
Koguryo term meaning standing up to a big power,
developing newer weapons and restoring the lost
land to settle long-standing scores with the
enemy) army-first policy, upholding the banner of
the samjoku (three-legged black bird
symbolizing three gods - heaven, man and the good
earth; it also symbolizes the sun, life, harmony
and people). He has successfully equipped the KPA
with nuclear weapons, including hydrogen bombs,
and their intercontinental means of delivery,
after transforming the whole land into a national
underground fortress.
For the first time
in the Korean history of 5,000 years, the
dedicated sacrifices of the patriotic Korean
population have enabled supreme leader Kim Jong-il
and his armed forces to acquire military
capability to go directly to the heart of the
enemy. The KPA is now capable of detonating
hydrogen bombs far above the metropolises of the
US in case of war. The Koreans are now able to
fight nuclear war on the Japanese and US
battlegrounds.
The government of Kim
Jong-il and his armed forces should welcome any US
preemptive strike on Korea. If North Korea should
happen not to resist, US attacks on missile sites
and nuclear facilities in the country would all
too naturally shower massive lethal radioactive
fallout on the Japanese archipelago in a quantity
produced by 150 hydrogen bombs.
There
should be no doubt that the government of Kim
Jong-il and his armed forces would never allow the
enemy to attack first. On detecting the slightest
signs that the US intends to launch a first
strike, Kim would order his armed forces to move
first and blaze key US metropolitan targets with
high-precision nuclear-tipped intercontinental
ballistic missiles (ICBMs), several exploding at
high altitudes. It goes without saying that
operating nuclear power stations would be prime
targets, sitting ducks.
The stage is being
put in place where North Korea will demonstrate
its potential capability for the rest of the world
to see. Korean scientists and engineers are ready
to detonate nuclear devices at any time on orders
from Supreme Leader Kim Jong-il. More and more
nuclear weapons and long-range ballistic missiles
are being cranked out on a crash-program basis in
a bid to catapult North Korea to the spot of the
third-most-powerful nuclear-weapons state just
after the US and Russia.
There is no worry
about further isolation and sanctions. North Korea
is unique in East Asia in that it has been
technically at a state of war with the US more
than half a century, subject to that country's
nuclear threats longer and harder than any other
member of what the US terms the "axis of evil".
The US has applied all available sanctions on
North Korea.
Unlike the other so-called
"axis of evil" states, North Korea is a
nuclear-weapons state and has the will and
capability to torch urban US. With history as the
guide, the North Koreans are great at badly
mauling big enemies. They routed Sui China and
Tang China. They routed the Toyotomi invasion
forces out of Korea. They were the first to drive
fear into US troops. As a US history book notes,
North Korea controlled ground warfare in the last
Korean War with Korean pilots downing many US
warplanes. They helped Egypt win the fourth
Mideast war with Israel and the Vietnamese win the
liberation war with the US.
Kim Jong-il
outfoxed US president Lyndon Johnson into
accepting all the North Korean demands over the
1968 Pueblo case. A three-aircraft-carrier naval
attack force withdrew from Korean waters without
attempting to take back the spy ship USS Pueblo.
Later, the team led by US president Richard Nixon
and Henry Kissinger was awed into ordering
withdrawal of a mobilized four-aircraft-carrier
attack force from the scene as defense secretary
Melvin Laird warned that most of the attacking US
warplanes would risk being shot down.
The
1976 Poplar Tree Incident ended with US president
Gerald Ford agreeing to demarcate into two the
joint security area of Panmunjom. The only
physical action the US managed to carry out was to
cut down a poplar tree with an escort of
martial-arts experts with B-52s circling overhead
as a one-flattop battle group steamed into Korean
waters. [1]
The 1993-94 nuclear standoff
between North Korea and the US is distinguished
from the previous three rounds of military
showdowns in that a suspected nuclear-weapons
state was pitted against the world's largest
nuclear-weapons state. Then-US president Bill
Clinton, however, ended up striking the landmark
1994 Agreed Framework with North Korea and
subsequently issuing the 1999 Perry Report. In
1993 North Korea test-fired long-range missiles
into waters off Hawaii and Guam, but the US kept
the fact secret from the Japanese for five years.
In 1998 North Korea launched a long-range rocket
to put a satellite into orbit, which the US called
a failure.
The current US administration
of President George W Bush declared the doctrine
of nuclear preemption after North Korea threatened
to launch retaliatory nuclear strikes on the
continental US. North Korea has test-fired ICBMs
and now threatens to conduct nuclear-detonation
experiments. The most significant aspect about the
ongoing nuclear standoff is that Bush has allowed
Kim Jong-il to earn North Korea the most coveted
membership of the elite nuclear club.
Since his country is now a member of the
nuclear club, Kim has lost any appetite for talks
with the US. His interest is in how to settle the
long-standing scores of the Korean people with the
US.
Former US president Jimmy Carter noted
in a September 2, 2003, op-ed in USA Today: "It is
a cultural and almost sacred commitment for its
[North Korea's] leaders not to back down, even in
the face of international condemnation and the
most severe political and economic pressure ...
Notwithstanding their abysmal economic failures
and the resulting hardships of their people, North
Korean leaders have never deviated from a
commitment to military strength. They maintain a
formidable army, with artillery and missiles able
to wreak great destruction on Seoul and the
northern portion of South Korea, regardless of how
much punishment North Koreans might have to absorb
during a US attack or counterattack. The
development of advanced rocketry and now a
potential nuclear capability is further proof of
their scientific resources."
Note 1. The Poplar Tree
Incident, also known as the Ax Murder Incident,
occurred after the United Nations Command sent
five Korean Service Corps personnel into the Joint
Security Area of the Demilitarized Zone to trim a
30-meter poplar tree that was blocking the view of
North Korean troops' activities. A dispute with
Northern troops followed, resulting in KPA
soldiers attacking the tree-trimming party with
axes. Several South Koreans were injured and two
US soldiers died.
Kim Myong-chol
is author of a number of books and papers in
Korean, Japanese and English on North Korea. He is
executive director of the Center for
Korean-American Peace. He has a PhD from the
Democratic People's Republic of Korea's Academy of
Social Sciences and is often called an
"unofficial" spokesman of Kim Jong-il and North
Korea.
(Copyright 2006 Asia Times
Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us
about sales, syndication and republishing.)
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please click hereif you are interested in
contributing.
