North Korea Must be Stopped
So North Korea thinks they can test nuclear weapons now... just great. Even though it was a huge dud, just like some of their missile launches, this event is nothing short of a disaster, one of the biggest of the century thus far. North Korea is one of the biggest arms dealers in the world, and its leader is totally insane - significantly more insane than Iran's Ahmadinejad, who is loved by millions of moderate and intelligent Iranian citizens. In North Korea, if you are caught speaking out against the government, you are sent to the gulag to suffer, along with three generations of family closest to you. So if a college-age kid speaks out against the regime, his parents and grandparents get to be worked to death too.
It is thought that as many as a million of North Korea's 23 million people are imprisoned in these camps. Saddam Hussein may have killed hundreds of thousands, and silenced those who spoke out against him, but he did not maintain an institution of suffering of this size and breadth. We can see the prison camps with our spy satellites. Defectors have spoken about the circumstances there at length - that in these camps, human life has no value. The guards can and do shoot people with impunity. Extreme torture is common; a frequent punishment for even the smallest offense is to put you in a prison cell the size of a refrigerator for several days, in extreme cold or heat and no room to even stretch out your legs. Google "north korean prison camps" and you'll find thousands of articles and testimonials.
North Korea must be stopped, now. Their government is fatally flawed. Their national newspapers run articles daily on the supposed evils of the United States and South Korea. Even listening to South Korean radio from North Korea can have you sent to the torture camps. A typical sentence length is twenty years, but few make it out alive. The North Korean military uses prisoners as guinea pigs to test chemical and biological weapons. Having read in detail about both North Korean and Soviet Russian prison camps, I can say that Kim Jong Il is more cruel than Stalin was.
The North Korean state must be dismantled before it is too late. Bin Laden killed thousands, but he never tortured millions or even had the ability to do evil on this scale, and we (the US) invaded Afghanistan in an attempt to take him down. We invaded Iraq to repossess of weapons of mass destruction which weren't even there. In this instance, there is little doubt about the weapons - even if this test turns out to be a scam, North Korea is certainly working towards the bomb.
Kim Jong Il is obsessed with preparing for a threat from the United States. The only reason we ever pointed to them as evil is because of the sheer volume of weapons they are selling to radicals throughout the world. The weapons they have sold have probably led to the deaths of tens of thousands of people already. There is a horrible feedback loop here - NK builds up its military, the US condemns it, then NK uses that as an excuse to build up its military even more. Despite only having 23 million people, NK has one of the world's largest militaries. They refuse to cooperate with any international demands or requests whatsoever, including demands related to human rights, protecting the environment, military buildup, and so on. Six party talks are a waste of time. With this provocative nuclear test, Kim Jong Il has proved that he doesn't give a shit about what anyone thinks, and is prepared to crank out nukes by the truckload to make certain his regime doesn't have to answer to anybody.
North Korea has said that the it will see the imposition of sanctions as equivalent to a declaration of war. Sanctions are inevitable. So the gears of war have already been set in motion. China has said it will not protect Kim Jong Il if he is so brazen and psychotic to test a nuclear weapon. The threat must be stopped before the nations of South Korea and Japan are put at serious risk (if they aren't already). An international coalition must invade North Korea and topple its vile leader. Preventing nuclear proliferation should be a top priority of even the most liberal and war-averse leaders.
Update: Brian Wang's view, which I now largely agree with.
October 10th, 2006 - 07:29
and supposing they do have nukes – which doesn’t seem so clear judging from today’s news – do you think there would be a better excuse for firing them against japan and south korea than actually invading their country? the principle of nuclear determent is that anything like an invasion becomes impossible without the attackers taking extreme risks.
besides, a sentence like “What happens after that should be for the North Koreans to decide” sounds somewhat blue-eyed to me, especially after what happened in iraq. i also do not think it is a good base for discussions on this topic to simply state that it would be ok to invade north korea because the u.s. invaded iraq for less. if we took that as a measurement level, another 30+ invasion candidates would pop up immediately.
October 10th, 2006 - 08:18
I think that the standard statement of the problem is that North Korea can destroy much of South Korea with missles and artillery if invaded.
October 10th, 2006 - 08:26
The situation differs from Iraq in many ways, not least that N. Korea’s neighbors feel genuinely threatened. Also, China would love to handle this problem to further demonstrate and establish influence in the region.
October 10th, 2006 - 08:28
There is no greater invasion candidate than North Korea. Even if yesterday’s test was fake, you can expect a real test within a year. To make the world safe, it may indeed be necessary for 30+ nations to be invaded and prevented from acquiring apocalyptic weaponry. It may simply be a natural sequence of maturation for any developing technological civilization.
As Michael Vassar reminds us, NK may already be too powerful to attack. The only possible route to success without too many casualties might be a decapitation attack that kills or captures every single general within hours of it being launched.
And sure, if you want, what happens after may not be for North Koreans to decide. It may be for the world to decide. Presumably most North Koreans do not want to be annexed to China. I just say that their future should be for them to decide because, all else equal, I value democracy as a politically sustainable form of government.
October 10th, 2006 - 09:23
Soon, those kind of very hard problems will mount. Will not be possible to resolve without some ultratechnology.
The Singularity will eventually become necessary – just to survive!
October 10th, 2006 - 09:49
All nations should have the right to nuclear weapons or none. Yhe U.S should destroy their _huge_ stockpiles of nukes and then start complaining about NK. They can do whatever they want on their own land. I see this as pretty good news, now the imperialists are too afraid to invade NK, which will safe hundreds of thousands of Korean lifes.
My memory is abit fuzzy, but what was the last and only country to actually use nuclear weapons? Iraq maybe? No, can’t be. That country never had any weapons of mass destruction.
October 10th, 2006 - 11:02
I would hate to see yet another questionable US invasion of a country. Technically it wouldn’t really be an invasion, just a resumption of the Korean war from the 1950s which never officially ended.
I’m not an expert in moral philosophy, but it seems to me to be inconsistent to condemn a country for developing (or aspiring to develop) nuclear weapons whilst simultaneously having no intention to relinquish them yourself.
Possession of a nuke is perhaps the ultimate deterrent against foreign invasion. In this sense what North Korea has done seems quite logical. They may have a sizable military, but their hardware is old and out of date (soviet-era stuff). In a conventional battle North Korea probably wouldn’t be able to hold its own against the Americans.
October 10th, 2006 - 11:11
They must be stopped? How do you propose to do that? Who’s going to do the stopping when our military is overtaxed and dislocated?
If they do have a nuke, they could kill 30,000 US soldiers in ten minutes.
Their rocket artillery emplacements have been holding Seoul hostage for decades. They’re so well entrenched that even indirect nuclear attack wouldn’t destroy them.
“Must be stopped” is all good and well, but containment has worked so far. It worked with Hussein, it worked on Russia who were indeed armed with nuclear weapons.
Jong-Il’s artillery hostage policy can’t be allowed to extend to Japan. But do you have any bright ideas?
Personally, I think China is going to handle this right quick. I say let ‘em. Remember that they don’t want anything to happen to their trade partners in the US and Japan. If something did, where would they hawk their low quality fiberglass toy canoes?
October 10th, 2006 - 11:53
Anissimov:
I find it unsettling that you, of all people, are advocating a strategy that demands the deliberate sacrifice of thousands of human lives.
October 10th, 2006 - 12:33
Peace in our time!
October 10th, 2006 - 12:36
It may not have been a fizzle…they might have been testing a neutron bomb that has a minimal blast profile.
“…To add to the riddles, Chinese officials close to the North Korean Government claimed that the device tested was a neutron bomb, designed to create massive radioactivity, focusing on killing people rather than destroying whole areas with heat and blast…”
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20560776-2703,00.html
October 10th, 2006 - 13:20
Haislip: My point exactly.
Somehow I don’t see waiflike Second Reality boy joining up to get waist deep in a winter Korea mud bog. So I guess he must be suggesting that other people do the dying…?
Drones maybe?
October 10th, 2006 - 14:22
Sorry folks, but nothing will happen.
China’s top priority is preventing a North Korean collapse. If North Korea collapses, then China will be faced with a massive influx of starving North Korean refugees. South Korea would probably end up with a lot of the responsibility for rebuilding everything, but a collapse would put a lot of wildcards with guns (and nukes) on the China-North Korea border.
It’s cheaper and easier for China to just prop up Kim Jong Il and his cronies. It’s distasteful and expensive, but to China, the alternative is probably worse.
China will not let anything happen to threaten North Korea. No meaningful sanctions or action will be taken.
Welcome to your future. A nuclear North Korea.
October 10th, 2006 - 14:24
Did anyone invade the USA for testing nuclear weapons? We tested nuclear weapons on US soil, and abroad. Who in the world has the most nuclear weapons? What give us the right to have a huge supply of weaponry & tell other countries that they are not allowed? Put yourselves in the shoes of someone living in asia or the middle east…given our long history of war and terrorism in those parts of the world, would you want to be our friend?
You want to do something about the real problems in the world? Vote for someone who wants to make the world a better place and stop being ignorant and voting for war profiteers
October 10th, 2006 - 14:25
Matt, your moral equivocation arguments don’t hold any water in international politics. You’re wasting your time.
October 10th, 2006 - 18:12
Who cares if the US has nuclear weapons? Just because someone has them doesn’t mean that everyone should. Someone had to be first (in this case several someones), and it’s our responsibility to use our overarching power to architect eventual complete nuclear disarmament.
I find it unsettling that you, of all people, are advocating a strategy that demands the deliberate sacrifice of thousands of human lives.
Michael: what strategy do you advocate?
Sometimes lives must be sacrificed in order to save more lives. Such is the reality of our harsh, pre-Singularity world. If more nations are allowed to acquire nuclear weapons, we’ll be in postproliferation land in no time, where anyone with $10 million can buy a nuclear weapon. If you don’t think that this is an eventual consequence of what we see happening here, please explain why.
I am NOT a scaremonger, I am NOT a Bush supporter, and I am NOT a war hawk in the slightest. I am a rational utilitarian altruist, and my analysis of the situation leads me to conclude that earth’s six billion are being threatened by this 23 million-person nation. If fighting North Korea were the available action with the highest expected utility, I would do it, even if it meant risking my own life. But it so happens that there are other risks to address, and more comprehensive long-term solutions than that I proposed here. But I don’t expect the United States government to start investing in Friendly AI or a Lifeboat.
If you’re talking about lives, why don’t we talk about the lives of people being murdered in the North Korean prison camps? The number of soldiers that would die in an invasion would probably be fewer than the number of people that die every year in those camps.
Did anyone invade the USA for testing nuclear weapons? We tested nuclear weapons on US soil, and abroad. Who in the world has the most nuclear weapons?
Because we have them, everyone should be allowed to have them, including those perfectly okay with using them on major cities. It will work out fine, won’t it?
Two wrongs don’t make a right… the fewer people with nukes, the better. I’m not advocating the creation of new US weapons either, I just think that the North Korean gov’t is far more insane than most.
You want to do something about the real problems in the world? Vote for someone who wants to make the world a better place and stop being ignorant and voting for war profiteers
I voted for Kerry and will vote Democrat again. If you read this blog (which obviously you don’t) you’d see that my politics are socially liberal in the extreme and economically centrist as you can get.
October 10th, 2006 - 19:38
This was an interesting, and sad, article:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2393599,00.html
October 10th, 2006 - 20:47
The article Rip posted is about the Chinese authorities handing back defectors to NK soldiers. Michael Haislip especially, read this and take a look at how the North Koreans treat their own people:
“The soldiers, who later told family members of the incident, marched the woman, who was about 30, to the mid-point of the bridge. North Korean guards were waiting. They signed papers for receipt of the woman, who kept her dignity until that moment. Then, in front of the Chinese troops, one seized her and another speared her hand — the soft part between thumb and forefinger — with the point of a sharpened steel cable, which he twisted into a leash.
“She screamed just like a pig when we kill it at home in the village,†the soldier later told his relative. “Then they dragged her away.â€
Such stories are circulating widely among Chinese on the border, where wild rumours of an American attack on nuclear test sites have spread fears of a Chernobyl-type cloud of radiation and sparked indignation at the North Koreans. “I’ve heard it a hundred times over that when we send back a group they stab each one with steel cable, loop it under the collarbone and out again, and yoke them together like animals,†said an army veteran with relatives in service.”
October 10th, 2006 - 23:09
NK is a Hell. Throwing some flower power words like “oh, Americans also have nukes …” is not productive at all. It is a kinky help for Kim to stay on power.
October 11th, 2006 - 05:38
I’m all for using drones in North Korea.
Strap a video camera and a few grams of HMX on one of these babies
http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/s948847.htm
with a longer range radio receptor and transmitter (possibly to a high altitude Balloon over North Korea), let American teenagers compete to find the elites, winning prizes if they do so. When they find targets they transfer control to actual military commanders, who can detonate the rats simultaneously.
October 11th, 2006 - 11:09
If the NK stories we read on the press are true (all seems to indicate that they are, but so it was for Iraq WMD – there are such things as political agendas and covert control of the press you know), then yes, somebody should do something to stop this brutal regime from violating human rights. Of course the big questions are who, and what.
Unfortunately the UN has never been meant to have decision making power, let alone enforcement power.
Perhaps unilateral action by the US or China (the Chinese may consider taking advantage of the NK crisis to affirm their status of world power) is the only practical way to go.
But then who is to stop the US, or China, from using the precedent to legitimize taking similar actions in the future against other parties?
October 11th, 2006 - 14:54
Good discussion so far, but now for some verisimilitude:
Ideally (please note, however, that qualifier), Krazy Kim & his Kronies should all be (more-or-less literally) decapitated—either by Asian black ops team(s)—i.e., Caucasians won’t do, infiltrationally-speaking—and/or by sufficiently-sophisticated drone(s). The asian black ops team could be NK-fluent Korean-Americans, or Chinese or Japanese. Infiltrate-&-assassinate. Or bomb Kimbo & Kronies to fucking hell w (a) drone(s).
But the reality is: (1) Black-ops infiltration, while not (quite) Tom Clancy/James Bond pie-in-sky bullshit, would nonetheless be difficult. Not impossible, to be sure. But probably difficult. At least for Korean-American agents going-it-alone w/o Chinese assistance to one extent or another. Chinese agents, on the other hand, might have a better go of it, and a joint Chinese/American op using Korean-American field agents could probably pull it off fairly easily (with proper planning and logistics). Not a cake-walk, though, to be sure. Kimbo, the little bastard, is as paranoid as Joe (Stalin) ever was…
(2) Drones, while sophisticated, would be vulnerable to various NK counter-measures (even using their decades-old, obsolescent tech). Redundancy would be key, and drones (especially ones equipped sufficiently-sophisticatedly for this sort of op) don’t come cheap.
The discussants so far have made several valid points: (A) China has a pragmatic incentive to get Krazy Kim to pipe-down. China would like to be seen as capable of doing this unilaterally. China also would (at least ideally) like to oust Kim, and install their own version of a regime for NK (definitely short of annexation, whether explicit or *de facto*). But, of course, China is only moving very slowly toward liberalization anyway (They logically-unrealistically still cling to having an authoritarian state with at least semi/quasi free markets—this will do-in the Beijing turds eventually, but it’ll take several more years–a decade or more, probably.) But China doesn’t especially like the little NK krazy-bastard anymore than we do. What China will do over the next several days/weeks will indeed be interesting… (B) It is not morally-indefensible to take a position approximately something like this: US/UK/NATO has nukes. But they’re liberal regimes with an unfortunate heavy mix-in of feudalistic fascism (but that’s another story). They therefore have both a prudent self-interest as well as moral-imperative to try to see to it that NON-liberal regimes (“rogue states”, terrorist orgs, etc.) do NOT acquire nuke tech/capability. Hence, insuring the latter allows for almost any measure necessary—including (1) &/or (2) above. (C) But the U.S. military is already stretched a bit thin–not quite thread-bare (as it were) yet, but definitely rather thin–all due to the Iraqi bull-mfing-shit. I’ve long wondered whether most countries in THAT particular region have the cultural-memetic infrastructure and “mind-set” to even support liberal-democratization. Iraq, I’m sad to say, is indeed Vietnam all over again. Toppling Sodomy Insane–oh, uh, excuse me, Saddam Hussein–was one thing. Filling the utter vacuum left afterwards has turned into a night-fucking-mare. But, back to military-thinness: Given our “committments” in Iraq/Afghanistan, a similar op in NK is simply off-the-table…ain’t gonna happen (nor, indeed, should it) A joint- Chinese/American/SK invasion could theoretically be mounted, but u’d have to be sure to completely take-out the missiles & artillary aimed at the south (which, again theoretically, could fairly straightforwardly be done…). But American forces going-it-alone, as in Iraq? No f’ing way! (D) So we’re back to either containment (which, pragmatically may work for quite a while, but which I, personally, find both strategically distasteful and morally-problematic) or some sort of black-ops decapitation op (probably as a joint task force, unless China lacks the juevos for it). The small-force, infiltrate-&-assassinate op is better than the full-scale invasion scenario, anyway, both in terms of lives, munitions, and moola-koola. Hell, the Israeli Mossad been doin’ it for decades… I’m not necessarily pushing for the latter (i.e., black op decapitation)…but if we could get China to sign-on to such an op, either in a support function or as field-agents on-the-ground, then such a decapitation op might be the best overall, medium/long-term strategy. One way or another, if at all strategically & pragmatically feasible, Krazy Kim, the little bastard, really does need to GO.
October 13th, 2006 - 07:30
Killing the leadership by currently plausible means would still start a war and destroy a good chunk of South Korea, even as North Korea collapses. The NK military is that fanatical. The ‘send in the drones’ idea would only work if all of the artillery and armoured vehicles could be simultaneously sabotaged (and to be safe, all of the NK army barracks levelled too). I can think of one non-ultratech way of doing that; GPS-guided hyperkinetic orbital bombardment. Construct several million tungsten rods with a heat-shielded guidance capsule on their tails, pack them into stealthy satelites, maneuver those satelites into the appropriate orbits and then unleash a time-on-target mass bombardment of every single satelite-visible military structure in NK. Shame the US doesn’t have the infrastructure to launch several thousand satellites a year and a plausible cover story really.
Seriously though, if you just wanted to save lives you’d get much better return-on-investment invading failed African states and preventing the ongoing genocides. On a personal level, all we can do is keep working towards the creation of benevolent transhuman intelligences.
October 13th, 2006 - 08:17
Must agree with Starglider.
Except maybe, that an intervention to an African failed state would be too expensive. Just like Iraq. I was all for going there and to do what is right … but you see. Like they are in a killing spree of some kind. Where then, under Saddam, and are now.
We need some ultratechnology, soon.
October 13th, 2006 - 11:50
Morals have very little to do with international politics.
N korea’s leaders are gangsters.
They will not overplay their hand and proliferate their nukes or use them. If they do that they are dead.
The greater risk is that they lose control and sink into chaos.
They are using the situation to blackmail the world for billions. They can do this because they are a multi-trillion dollar mess to be cleaned up.
they can be contained at the bargain price of billions per year.
Hopefully some plans are in place to nation build if at some point in the next ten years they do collapse. They are about 5% of the problem of the old Soviet Union. the relative good (Partial) end to that situation is the best we could hope for.
October 13th, 2006 - 11:51
One of the main reasons for not doing too much negotiation with N Korea is to prevent encouraging copycat dictators.
October 13th, 2006 - 13:35
Nice article.
“The Singularity will eventually become necessary – just to survive!”
That time is upon us.
“On a personal level, all we can do is keep working towards the creation of benevolent transhuman intelligences.”
Exactly.
October 13th, 2006 - 17:37
Reluctantly, I have to agree (at least partially) with the subsequent musings here. Even the black ops assassination task force could be pulled-off, it’s correct that, ideally, we’d need to take the entire military upper leadership. And even so, some fanatical little lieutenant or major bastard might try to promote himself to military dictator.
Brain Wang is—it galls me to say [not toward Brian himself, of course, just at the way-sub-ideally-optimal situation itself]—right, alas, from a pragmatic point of view. Better to by the little bastard off. Ideally, though, China should step up to the plate, and do a regime change of its own in Pyongyang. The ancient Chinese *curse* has descended upon the whole world (and, indeed, has for some time now): We live in VERY interesting times…
October 15th, 2006 - 05:12
Demonizing your enemy is the easiest way to lose the ability to comprehend the situation.
Just another proof that even the best and brightest of transhumanists can and actually do succumb to cognitive biases all the time.
October 15th, 2006 - 14:42
We can subtract all demonization, and the threat of proliferation is still right there, staring us in the face. Rather than saying I’ve lost the ability to comprehend the situation, this issue is so intensely polarizing that we feel compelled to think that the person we disagree with is suffering from a cognitive bias.
Different people have different conditions under which they themselves would declare war, and determining those conditions has probably led to some of the most contentious arguments in history. My call for war here is conditional on the truth of an empirical claim: if we don’t stop North Korea’s weapons program immediately, they will eventually either use a nuclear weapon on an allied nation or proliferate their weapons. If this claim is false, then invading to shut down the program is probably not worth it.
I never said that Kim Jong isn’t human. It’s just a fact that his regime has little respect for human life or freedom. Sooner or later, the entire planet must be governed by those with a love of human rights and happiness, preferably sooner than later. The long-term negative utility represented by oppressive governments is simply too great to shrug off.
Also, my aim is to ensure that the world has a minimal number of tyrannical dictatorships around the time when molecular nanotech rolls around. When it does, the threat they represent will multiply by orders of magnitude.
Danila, are you defending North Korea because it’s a communist country? Just because North Korea’s leaders are trying to blackmail the world into listening to it with nukes doesn’t mean that communism can’t work, just that the current government in North Korea is a bad one.
August 20th, 2010 - 22:56
If I had not already decided long, long ago that Bill Bonner is just right when he says that people come to believe the things they need to believe when they need to believe them, I would have no logical explanation for how anybody can believe in “the peace process.” Israel is not going to give up Jerusalem, nor allow itself to be un-Jewished at a blow by granting the “Right of Return.” The Palestinians are not going to settle for Jerusalem being held by Israel, nor will the surrounding Arab countries ever grant the sixty-year-plus “refugees” citizenship or take them out of their reverse Potemkin-villages.
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