Hyping
North Korea To Relaunch Reagan's Star Wars?
By Moon
Of Aalabama
August
15, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- Since Trump issued "fire and fury" threats
against North Korea (the DPRK), sanity has taken
over among serious people. The talk of
preventive strikes on North Korea within the
expert community has largely ended. It was never
a seriously possibility. North Korea has many
options to retaliate to any strike and all would
come with catastrophic damage to South Korea and
Japan and thereby to U.S. interests in Asia.
North Korea can be successfully deterred in the
same way that all other nuclear weapon states
are deterred from using their weapons.
Unfortunately the National Security Advisor
McMaster
has not yet
received that message:
STEPHANOPOULOS: But your predecessor Susan
Rice wrote this week that the U.S. could
tolerate nuclear weapons in North Korea the
same way we tolerated nuclear weapons in the
Soviet Union far more during the Cold War.
Is she right?
MCMASTER: No, she’s not right. And I think
the reason she’s not right is that
the classical deterrence theory, how does
that apply to a regime like the regime in
North Korea? A regime that engages
in unspeakable brutality against its own
people? A regime that poses a continuous
threat to the its neighbors in the region
and now may pose a threat, direct threat, to
the United States with weapons of mass
destruction? A regime that imprisons and
murders anyone who seems to oppose that
regime, including members of his own family,
using sarin nerve gase (sic) -- gas in a
public airport?
Classical deterrence worked against the Soviet
Union as well as against Mao's China. (Vice
versa it also worked against the United States.)
Both were arguably, like North Korea, brutal
against internal dissidents, threatening to
their neighbors and military opponents of the
United States. If they could be deterred than
North Korea can also be deterred.
To set the Trump crew straight. China re-issued
its guarantee for North Korea's security. The
Global Times, a party owned but unofficial
mouthpiece,
wrote in an
editorial:
"China
should also make clear that if North Korea
launches missiles that threaten U.S. soil
first and the U.S. retaliates, China will
stay neutral," [..].
"If
the U.S. and South Korea carry out strikes
and try to overthrow the North Korean regime
and change the political pattern of the
Korean Peninsula, China will prevent
them from doing so."
Any
unprovoked war against North Korea would thereby
escalate into a war with China and no one is
seriously interested in that adventure. The only
reasonable course is to negotiate some new level
of balance between North Korean and U.S.
interests.
The U.S. continues to run large scale maneuver
together in South Korea and to fly nuclear
capable strategic bombers near the North Korean
borders. These actions necessitate that North
Korea's military stays in expensive high alert
against potential surprises. One aim of North
Korea's nuclear armament is
to lessen the necessity
for such conventional preparedness.
North
Korea has offered several times to stop all
missile and nuclear testing if the U.S. stops
its large maneuvers near its borders. The Trump
administration rejected that offer but North
Korea increased the pressure with its recent
tests.
Last week North Korea again offered to decrease
its own actions if the U.S. stops some of its
provocations. It announced a possible test of
four missiles targeted into the vicinity of the
U.S. base on Guam. The strategic U.S. bombers
flying near North Korea usually take off from
Guam.
Few noticed
that the
announcement
was conditional and came with an offer:
Typically, the nuclear strategic bombers
from Guam frequent the sky above south Korea
to openly stage actual war drills and
muscle-flexing in a bid to strike the
strategic bases of the DPRK. This grave
situation requires the KPA to closely watch
Guam, the outpost and beachhead for invading
the DPRK, and necessarily take practical
actions of significance to neutralize it.
In the morning of August 8
the air pirates of Guam again appeared in
the sky above south Korea to stage a mad-cap
drill simulating an actual war.
...
[The US]
should immediately stop its reckless
military provocation against the state of
the DPRK so that the latter would not be
forced to make an unavoidable military
choice.
In
other words: Stop the overflights from Guam or
we will have to test our missiles by targeting
areas near to the island. The U.S. has no
reliable defense that could guarantee to destroy
four missile simultaneously coming towards Guam.
If North Korea would indeed test near Guam the
U.S. will lose face. If it tries to defend
against the incoming missile and fails it will
lose even more face. I am confident that the
strategic bomber overflights from Guam will soon
end.
No
Advertising
- No
Government
Grants
-
This
Is
Independent
Media
|
Several commentators claimed that the U.S. is
giving false alarm over North Korean abilities.
That the intelligence confirmation of
miniaturized North Korean war-heads is
a lie, that the
North Korean missiles can
not reach the
continental U.S. or that the reentry vehicle cap
North Korea used in recent tests is
not strong enough
to protect its nuclear payload. But it was North
Korea that
showed off a
miniaturized war-head in March 2016; the reach
of a missile is variable and largely dependent
on payload size and burn time, and the discussed
RV cap failure was
caused by the
unusual trajectory North Korea chose for the
test. The chance of North Korea being correct
when it claims to be able to hit the U.S. is
higher than 50%. For any practical consideration
one thereby has to accept that North Korea
is a nuclear weapon state
that can successfully target the continental
U.S. with multiple nuclear armed missiles.
The
claim that the U.S. intelligence agencies are
exaggeration North Korean capabilities is likely
false. But it is also reasonable. The Trump
administration, the Pentagon and weapon salesmen
will of course use the occasion to further their
aims.
One missile defense marketing pundit
claimed today
that the North Korean missile engines used in
the recent tests were bought from factories in
Ukraine or Russia. The usual propagandist at the
New York Times
picked up on
that to further their anti-Russian theme:
Mr.
Elleman was unable to rule out the
possibility that a large Russian missile
enterprise, Energomash, which has strong
ties to the Ukrainian complex, had a role in
the transfer of the RD-250 engine technology
to North Korea. He said leftover RD-250
engines might also be stored in Russian
warehouses.
But the engines in question are of different
size and thrust than the alleged R-250 engines
and the claimed time-frame does not fit at all.
The Ukrainian government
denied any
transfer of missiles or designs. The story was
debunked with in hours by two
prominent
experts. But
implicating Russia, however farfetched, is
always good if one wants to sell more weapons.
One
Pentagon hobby horse is the THAAD medium range
missile defense systems that will now be
stationed in South Korea. This even as it is
incapable to defend South Korea from short range
North Korean missiles. It is obviously targeted
at China.
The Reagan wannabe currently ruling in the White
House may soon revive Reagan's
Strategic Defense Initiative,
aka "Star Wars", which was first launched in
1984. SDI was the expensive but unrealistic
dream of lasers in space and other such
gimmicks. Within the SDI the U.S. military threw
out hundreds of billions for a Global Ballistic
Missile Defense which supposedly would defend
the continental U.S. from any incoming
intercontinental missile. The program was buried
in the early 1990s. One son of Star Wars
survived. It is the National Missile Defense
with 40 interceptors in Alaska and California.
It has never worked well and likely never will.
If NMD would function as promised there would be
no reason to fear any North Korean ICBMs.
Missile defense is largely
a fraud to
transfers billions of dollars from U.S.
taxpayers to various weapon producing
conglomerates.
I
expect that the North Korean "threat" will soon
be used to launch "SDI - The Sequel", another
attempt to militarize space with billions thrown
into futuristic but useless "defense" projects.
It will soothe the Pentagon's grief over the
success North Korea had despite decades of U.S.
attempts to subjugate that state.
This article was first published by
Moon Of Alabama
-
The
views expressed in this article are solely those
of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
opinions of Information Clearing House.