North Korea missile launch justifies nukes for neighbors
While political Washington indulged its obsession over the latest toxic Trump turmoil, North Korea launched another ICBM test, the second in July and 14th this year, in its relentless quest for a weapon of mass destruction to deliver upon the United States.
This is not an idle midsummer fantasy. Fourteen years ago, U.S. intelligence overestimated Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. But it has underestimated North Korean skill and speed devising the means to fulfill its promise of mass death to America.
Last week, intel warned that a two- or three-year window before Pyongyang could accomplish its intercontinental death delivery system was actually — oh, my! — one year. That could be wrong, too.
Washington politicians don’t really seem interested in doing much of anything, let alone discussing existential threats these days, given the joys of arcane procedural votes and their next summer vacation, this one five weeks long.
But how can the nation wager its literal future on intel guesses that change by the season? This is the most serious of national security concerns requiring a broad debate before encountering a thermonuclear war.
In stepped-up tests, the U.S. Air Force successfully launched another unarmed Minuteman III from Vandenberg Air Force Base, about 130 miles northwest of Los Angeles, to verify the ICBM’s effectiveness, readiness and accuracy.
Trump the campaigner vowed to shun new foreign fights. He’s relied on China exerting its enormous leverage to rein in Kim Jong Un. Worth the try. But he tweeted his disappointment July 29: “China could easily solve this problem!”
Now, Congress has levied additional photo-op sanctions on the North, as well as Iran and Russia. Who cares? Sanctions have accomplished diddly. Sanctions have become the West’s go-to cover for inaction but have failed to cause course changes.
H.R. McMaster says Trump has ordered the national security team to develop a range of options for the North Korean threat.
Let’s see: Attack or acquiesce? A July Fox News Poll found 55 percent of Americans believe military force will be necessary to halt Pyongyang’s weapons program, up from 51 percent in April.
A string of U.S. administrations have naively or disingenuously tried the negotiation route to no lasting or productive end. Defense Secretary James Mattis says the era of that “strategic patience” has expired. Unfortunately, so has the margin for error or hesitation.
Here’s the problem: The United States is developing a promising missile defense system for a limited attack. But it has no proven go-to defense.
ICBMs are vulnerable briefly at launch. They soar thousands of miles into space, then plummet like meteors upon their targets. Last week’s Korean test indicates it could have reached the U.S.
It needs a miniaturized warhead and one that can withstand atmospheric re-entry. The North is also developing submarine-based missiles, which could be launched closer to shore.
Like any president, Trump avers national security is his highest priority. No president could leave U.S. fate to the nuclear whim of a plump, unstable dictator who executes opponents with antiaircraft guns.
So, what to do? A preemptive strike in one or two places risks catastrophic responses by the North and perhaps China as it intervened in the Korean War.
Theoretically, special operators could infiltrate and take out Kim. But be careful what you wish for. That assumes some replacement general with a large hat would be less loopy, and more amenable to reason after 70 years of Hermit Kingdom isolation, malnutrition and delusional propaganda.
One complication is South Korea’s new president, Moon Jae-in, who seeks reconciliation with the North. A fond Korean dream. Good luck with that right now. He halted deployment of a modern U.S. antimissile defense system as a sop to Kim.
Is there any other leverage on China that some deal maker could use? So far, Beijing doesn’t really mind abiding a thorn in the Americans’ side. It is reportedly strengthening defenses along its Korean border against invasion, most likely by millions of North Korean refugees fleeing conflict.
But wait. China does abhor the idea of a nuclear-armed Japan or South Korea. U.S. nukes were removed from the South in the 1990s. What if, to encourage more productive Chinese cooperation to pressure Kim, Trump were to start talks with those two Asian allies about developing their own nuclear weapons?
It seems counterintuitive and dangerous to combat one nation’s nuclear weapons development by encouraging others to get their own. It is. But all reasonable alternatives are foreclosed now. And the countdown has started.