Prompting these pessimistic musings are several articles I’ve come across in just the past few days on North Korea that are worth everybody’s time to read. First, this week’s U.S. News and World Report has a depressingly horrific yet facinating overview of the North Korean gulag prison system as well as an analysis of North Korea’s warfighting capabilities. Excerpts: “Where were the camp’s fences? They repeatedly ordered the satellite to expand the frame of its pictures. Finally, a senior administration official tells U.S. News, the perimeter was located, revealing a camp larger in size than the District of Columbia…In the first hour of a war, North Korea could rain between 300,000 and 500,000 artillery shells onto metro Seoul and other points in South Korea…” Makes you wonder why we’re pulling U.S. troops back from the Korean DMZ out of artillery range for the first time in a half century. Also in the article is this statement: “I think it’s why the president is after Kim Jong Il: It’s how he [Kim] treats his own people,” [Kansas Republican Sen. Sam] Brownback tells U.S. News. “It really galls him.” Not a comforting comment to read, knowing what happens to despots who gall President Bush…
Also not comforting is a second article on North Korea I came across on Drudge today (not from an American newspaper, but instead from an Australian one quoting the Japanese Sankei Shimbun…) that Washington has advised Tokyo the North Koreans not only have more than one or two nuclear weapons, but this larger number has been weaponized and is ready for launch aboard North Korean rockets. The North Koreans keep saying they’ll use their weapons, too…
And it’s not just the U.S. and North Korea that are playing a quiet game of nuclear brinksmanship. Both the Chinese and the Russians continue to develop and maintain robust nuclear programs, despite their troubles, that will give current or future leaders there a nuclear card to play for the forseeable future. And the real threat to all of us isn’t weapons like the SS-27 Topol-Ms and DF-31s – it’s the apparently (scary) high levels of willingness to use them.