“If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of the nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima. The people of this world must unite or they will perish… This war that has ravaged so much of the earth, has written these words. The atomic bomb has spelled them out for all men to understand. Other men have spoken them in other times, and of other wars, of other weapons. They have not prevailed. There are some misled by a false sense of human history, who hold that they will not prevail today. It is not for us to believe that.”
Nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, 1945, one of the fathers of the atomic bomb
In early August of 1945, the United States dropped two nuclear bombs over Japan, one over Hiroshima and the other over Nagasaki. The majority of the casualties were burned, most beyond recognition. Many were disfigured. Others were killed by falling debris or by a slow death from radiation poisoning. The maimed and the dead were overwhelmingly civilians. And while World War II came to a rapid close after these explosions, the United States remains the only country on earth to have deployed nuclear weapons in any combat situation.
The expected miniaturization of North Korea’s warheads – a literal fraction of the physical size and weight of the two World War II era bombs – is expected to deliver approximately the same explosive equivalency. While Kim Jong-Un is working on submarine missile platforms, reducing the reaction time from launch to impact, he is currently limited to traditional, land-based ICBMs. There is a hot debate as to how far and how accurate his best missiles are, but with an apparent boost in solid fuel engine design from a Ukrainian source, it is only a matter of time until his missiles can reach any target on U.S. soil. Larger payload equivalencies are contained in the expected U.S. attack platforms: Ohio Class submarines, each with up to 24 missiles (with each missile carrying 8 nuclear multi-targetable warheads).
Dictator Kim sees his nuclear program as existential. He and his regime, he passionately believes, will be destroyed by the United States without the threat of nuclear weapons. No amount of sanctions – even if half his population were to starve to death – is likely to deter his continued development of nuclear weapons and their delivery systems. China’s pressure, fairly light to date, is unlikely to change that direction. Etched in his mind is the pledge the United States and the West made years ago to protect the regime of Libyan dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, in exchange for his relinquishing his nuclear weapons program. He was toppled and killed during an Arab Spring revolution with lots of support from the West.
North Korea’s media are completely controlled by Kim’s regime. He has executed scores of top-level officers – including a close uncle – who have questioned him and his decisions at even a minimal level. Concentration camps are filled with dissidents – often including their extended families – for a lifetime (or several lifetimes) of torture and brutal confinement.
Stories proliferate about his excellence. At seven, his first gunshots produced many consecutive bullseyes. When he plays golf, he shots are often recorded as real-world-exceptionally-rare holes in one. He is revered as a god by a mass of brainwashed followers. The North’s media show Kim and the North Korean Army as able to humble, humiliate and then destroy the United States, an inferior and morally bankrupt nation run by sub-par white traditionalists led by an ignorant and unprepared president. Kim also loves military parades showcasing his weapon systems and the largest standing army on earth. He has been engaged in bombastic rhetoric during his entire, if fairly short, tenure as the North’s leader.
But the hard facts clearly favor the United States in a one-on-one nuclear war. We would overwhelm the North, literally able to bomb them into the Stone Age. That the North would have time to unleash non-nuclear artillery fire from approximately 8,000 canons against Seoul a scant 30-40 miles from the well-entrenched emplacements – a field of fire that could reach 25 million people – or that the nuclear fallout from U.S. nukes would drift to the south and across to Japan killing masses more… or that Kim just might be able to launch a spray of nuclear-tipped ICBMs (we don’t think he can yet… but we have underestimated him before) against U.S. regional allies and perhaps the U.S. itself (overwhelming our defenses)… well… hey… do we really believe that? Most folks think somehow even the “big issue” will be diffused. Somehow. For a while anyway. When do these still smoldering embers erupt in violent flames again?
Trump threatened “fire and fury” should the North make good on its threat to launch a four missile test that would require a fly-over Japan, landing the missiles just shy of the U.S. territory of Guam. Then, “US Secretary of Defense James Mattis warned that if North Korea fired on US territory it would be ‘game on.’… Speaking at the Pentagon Monday [8/14], Mattis told reporters: ‘You don't shoot at people in this world unless you want to bear the consequences.’
“The KCNA [the North’s state media] report Tuesday [8/15] said Kim had ‘examined the (strike) plan for a long time and discussed it with the commanding officers in real earnest.’… The statement then appears put the onus to act on Trump, saying Kim would ‘watch a little more the foolish and stupid conduct of the Yankees.’” CNN.com, August 15th. Does that read: matter diffused?
And where is Donald Trump on all this? The same president who threatened possible military action in Venezuela, bringing almost immediate uniform condemnation from most of the leaders of Latin America. The same president who believes that there were two equally culpable sides in the Charlottesville confrontation, where only one side (overwhelmingly comprised of neo-Nazis, KKK members and other self-admitted white supremacists) came prepared with guns, batons, Klan-inspired torches, racist-labeled shields uttering unequivocal anti-Semitic and racist slurs – the same one side that killed one and severely and critically injured others – bringing massive global condemnation, including strong negative comments even from powerful GOP elected officials. The same Donald Trump whose continued threats to end the nuclear accord with Iran that have led that nation to begin preparations to restart their nuclear program with a vengeance.
We’ve spent all those post WW II years (a war where the primary enemies were Nazis and Fascists), the entire Cold War, and until now, relying entirely on the MAD principle – the deterrent effect of mutually assured destruction – plus nuclear containment treaties all over the globe. But recent developments in targeting have made the thought of a “limited nuclear war” appear possible. Really? But how does the rest of the world react when the nukes start flying? Want to place any bets? And what exactly is Donald Trump’s history with nuclear weapons?
Writing for the August 14th FastCompany.com, Sarah Kendzior responds: “These decades of uneasy limbo were followed by the election of Donald Trump: a pathological narcissist obsessed with nuclear weapons since 1984, when he proclaimed he could learn all he needed to know about them in an hour and a half.
“While Trump’s policy positions shifted over the years, his obsession with nukes remained steady, whether when he was betraying his openness to dropping them on Pakistan and France in 1987, proclaiming their use was inevitable in 1990, or musing in 2016, ‘If we have them, why not use them?’ Last week [second week of August], Trump followed that daydream up with a specific threat against North Korea, stating the authoritarian regime would see ‘fire and fury the likes of which the world has never seen’ and tweeting, ‘Hopefully we will never have to use this power, but there will never be a time that we are not the most powerful nation in the world!’
“When an autocrat is cornered and flailing–as Trump is thanks to both Robert Mueller’s Russian interference investigation and by domestic policy failures like TrumpCare – he often lashes out violently to consolidate power. Trump has thus far followed the typical autocratic pattern of scapegoating minorities, but this tactic can only take him so far, especially given the public backlash to the racism the nation just witnessed in Charlottesville. There is only one domain where Trump wields absolute and unparalleled power, free from the Congress he despises and the public he reviles, and that is his control over the nuclear arsenal. He already wields these weapons rhetorically, and it is naive to assume he will stop there.
“Given how chaotic Trump’s six-month rule has been, it is tempting to label Trump’s rhetoric as a distraction–but a domestic American distraction does not translate abroad. North Korea’s bloody leadership, upon hearing Trump’s threat of ‘fire and fury,’ is not going to think, ‘Oh, Trump’s just trying to divert the U.S. media from the Russia scandal’ but will instead accept his words as a threat. Their vow to take out Guam, however abhorrent, was in response to a statement from the President of the United States.
“Might Trump actually use nuclear weapons? He certainly isn’t ruling out the option, and there is nothing to hold him back from doing so: No congressional approval is needed. If Trump decides to use them, he will use them because he can, and because he does not appear to adequately process the consequences of using them. When addressing North Korea’s aggression toward Guam, Trump told its governor the nuclear threat will improve tourism.
“Trump’s rise was predicated on denial: that he’d lose the primary, that he’d lose the general election, that his autocratic ambitions would be curtailed by our systems of checks and balances. It all happened anyway. It is time for the GOP and others wielding power to accept that with Trump, the worst-case scenario is the most likely scenario. It took the GOP two years to staunchly condemn Trump’s embrace of neo-Nazis. When it comes to nuclear weapons, there is no such luxury of time.
“The ‘false sense of history’ of which Oppenheimer warned has made willful blindness the default response to rising autocracy and growing nuclear threat. For that trajectory to change, U.S. officials must confront not only the horrors of the past, but the urgent threat of the present, and take any steps possible to curb the president’s ability to obliterate our future.”
Republicans and Democrats are watching these stories unfold, equally aghast at the provocative naiveté of a horribly under-informed president, struggling with instability and in-fighting among his top advisors. When will the threshold of “unacceptable” be reached… that point when responsible politicians say “enough” and take the necessary steps to preserve this nation… and perhaps the world… from this missteps of an autocrat? Luckily, Kim backed down from his threat to launch four missiles towards Guam. On August 17th, Trump tweeted: “Kim Jong Un of North Korea made a very wise and well reasoned decision. The alternative would have been both catastrophic and unacceptable!” Assume the situation is diffused… for now… North Korea continues to improve their military capacity.
But is Donald Trump’s braggadocio hell-bent on provoking Kim Jong-Un into an evitable nuclear confrontation? Does it matter that Donald Trump believes that the nation will rally behind him, as it often has in the past, if he can escalate the U.S./North Korean animus into war? It sure would refocus the body politic from the Russia investigation and the missteps and misstatements surrounding the Charlottesville debacle.
I’m Peter Dekom, and sometimes it is not just “It’s the economy, stupid”; sometimes it’s a matter of life and death for us all.
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