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China Will Not Help To “Punish” North Korea
This "news analysis" on North Korea's latest nuke test in the New York Times is rather a lightly disguised threat to China. Starve North Korea or we will disable your strategic nuclear deterrence.
Nuclear Test Poses Big Challenge to China’s New Leader
It starts:
BEIJING — The nuclear test by North Korea on Tuesday, in defiance of warnings by China, leaves the new Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, with a choice: Does he upset North Korea just a bit by agreeing to stepped up United Nations sanctions, or does he rattle the regime by pulling the plug on infusions of Chinese oil and investments that keep North Korea afloat?
Notice how this sets up a rather infantile false choice. China could also just ignore the test and do nothing. China could also chose to do some other stuff. It could embrace North Korea by delivering more energy to it. It could ensure North Korea that it would defend it with all its might should there be any attack on it thereby rendering the North Korean nuclear program unnecessary. There are many possibilities besides punish small and punish big.
The piece continues by framing this as a China U.S. relation issue:
To improve the strained relationship with the United States, Mr. Xi could start with getting tougher on North Korea, harnessing China’s clout with the outlier government to help slow down its nuclear program. If Mr. Xi does not help in curbing the North Koreans, he will almost certainly face accelerated ballistic missile defense efforts by the United States in Northeast Asia, especially with Japan, an unpalatable situation for China.
U.S. missile defense is being build to render Russia's and China's nuclear deterrence useless. The hope is that it will enable first-strike capability. The U.S. could kill off most of Russia's or China's nukes while having some reasonable hope that its missile defense system will be capable of holding of a much diminished retaliation strike.
No one in China believes that the U.S. will ever stop its missile defense plans in Asia. It is obviously part of Washington's program to contain China. But just imagine China would really agree to some serious pressure on North Korea while the U.S. would offer a promise or even a treaty that it will not build up its missile defense. How long would such a promise hold?
The U.S. promised to North Korea to build it two reactors for electricity production should North Korea end its Plutonium program. North Korea did end its Pu program but those reactors were never build.
China knows better than to believe that treaties the U.S. signs will not be broken. It has its own experience. The current hustle with Japan about the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands is just one broken treaty example:
The Potsdam Declaration (Declaration Defining Terms for Japanese Surrender) of 1945 set the terms of Japan’s unconditional surrender. It was issued jointly by the Allied powers – the US, Britain, and China (the Nationalist or Kuomintang government); and the Soviet Union later “adhered to” the declaration. The Japanese government explicitly accepted it. The declaration said that Japan should retain no overseas territories.
A later conference issued the Treaty of San Francisco in 1951, to mark the final settlement of the war in East Asia and the official end of the Allied (American) Occupation of Japan. The US excluded China from the conference, which by then was governed by the Chinese Communist Party. (The US also excluded the Nationalist government, then resident in Taiwan but still claiming to rule the mainland.) The treaty allocated to Japan hundreds of islands south of Japan, comprising the whole of Okinawa prefecture, including the Senkaku.
In China’s eyes the Treaty of San Francisco and its restoration of offshore islands to Japan is invalid, because (1) it broke the Potsdam Declaration – the foundation of the post-war order in East Asia — and (2) it resulted from a negotiation in which the government of China (one of the four Allied Powers) was not represented. None of the overseas territories seized by Imperial Japan, including the Senkaku, should have been restored to Japan.
China needs North Korea as a buffer against U.S. troops at its borders. It will not do anything to ruin North Korea as a chaotic and dissolving neighbor would be a huge security problem for Beijing. Some slower build up of U.S. missile defense would not solve that problem.
China will probably agree to some mild sanctions on North Korea. An even better strategy would be for the U.S. to come to its senses and to make finally peace with North Korea thereby making its nuclear capabilities unnecessary. China should and could support that by giving security guarantees.
This might help explain North Korea’s “paranoia.” The recent election of the daughter of the fascist dictator Park, in south Korea is also noteworthy.
” Following the Inchon landing, US-UN forces under Gen. Douglas MacArthur carried the offensive into the North. The Air Force launched over a million sorties and 698,000 tons of bombs (compared to 500,000 in the entire Pacific theatre in World War II), including 32,357 tons of napalm. Maj. Gen. Emmett O’Donnell Jr. testified before the Senate that the goal of the air war was to “put a very severe blow on the North Koreans for going too far in what we all recognized as a case of aggression….we now have at our command a weapon that can really dish out some severe destruction, and now let us go to work on burning five major cities to the ground and destroying completely every one of about eighteen major strategic targets.”21
“Much of North Korea was left, in O’Donnell’s words, a “terrible mess,” with an estimated million civilian casualties and hundreds of thousands of refugees, some of whom were napalmed by pilots under orders to “hit anything that moved.” Eighteen out of 22 cities were obliterated, including 75 percent of Pyongyang and 100 percent of Sinaju. LeMay stated that we “burned every town in North Korea – and South Korea too.” Hungarian journalist Tibor Meray reported: “we traveled in moonlight, so my impression was that I am traveling on the moon, because there was only devastation…every city was a collection of chimneys. I don’t know why houses collapsed and chimneys did not, but I went through a city of 200,000 inhabitants and I saw thousands of chimneys and that – that was all.”22
The bombing targeted all industrial plants in Northeast Korea as well as railroads, communications centers and the country’s electrical system. 1,200-pound bombs targeted DPRK leaders who hid in deep bunkers, while villagers were forced to live in caves where disease proliferated. Thousands of leaflets were dropped warning civilians to stay off roads and away from facilities that might be bombed, but independent observers felt the American ground forces were much too “quick to call in overwhelming close air support to overcome any resistance in flammable Korean villages.”23 An official army history reported that “we killed civilians, friendly civilians, and bombed their homes, fired on whole villages with occupants – women and children, and ten times as many hidden communist soldiers – under showers of napalm, and the pilots came back to their ships stinking of vomit twisted from their vitals by the shock of what they had to do.”24
British journalist Reginald Thompson described “holocausts of death and jellied petroleum bombs spreading an abysmal desolation over whole communities…. In such warfare, the slayer merely touches a button and death is in the wings, blotting out the remote, the unknown people below.” I.F. Stone stated that sanitized reports of the air raids reflected a “gay moral imbecility utterly devoid of imagination – as if the flyers were playing in a bowling alley, with villages for pins.”25
Racial dehumanization accounted in part for the lack of restraint in targeting civilians. Douglas MacArthur believed that “the Oriental dies stoically because he thinks of death as the beginning of life.” In May 1953, in blatant violation of the 1949 Geneva Convention on the Protection of Civilians in Time of War, article 56, US bombers struck three irrigation dams in Toksan, Chasan and Kuwonga, and then attacked two more in Namsi and Taechon. The effect was to unleash flooding and to disrupt the rice supply. An Air Force study concluded that “the Westerner can little conceive the awesome meaning which the loss of this staple commodity has for the Asian – starvation and slow death.” After the war it took 200,000 man days of labor to reconstruct the reservoir in Toksan alone. “Only the very fine print of the New York Times war reports mentioned the dam hits,” Bruce Cumings notes, “with no commentary.”26
According to a UN estimate, one out of nine North Korean women and children were killed during the war. J. Donald Kingsley, head of the reconstruction agency, called Korea “the most devastated land and its people the most destitute in the history of modern warfare.”27 For all the firepower and barbarism, the DPRK government was able to mobilize people quickly to rebuild roads and bridges destroyed in aerial attacks. General Matthew Ridgeway noted in a 1956 interview in Look Magazine that he had “seen whole sections of railroad bombed into scrap iron by aircraft and yet the enemy rebuilt the tracks in a single night and the trains ran the next day.” While inflicting serious damage on Chinese forces supporting the North Koreans, bombing did not “halt their offensive, nor materially diminish their strength. [Like the Vietnamese] the Chinese traveled light, with each man carrying his arms, his food and his weapon on his back. In a striking admission, Ridgeway added that “there is nothing in the present situation or in our code that requires us to bomb a small Asian nation back to the ‘stone age’…There must be some moral limit to the means we use to achieve victory.”28
(I’m not sure where I got this!!)
Posted by: bevin | Feb 13 2013 0:01 utc | 7
@Dan R[27] Just changed my door number, then thought; R&P closed its door some time ago.
I just wish the world would turn to Thorium reactors it energy is a major concern, no more issues, but then again all would be equal or independent. But the Dragon is plotting, the thorium blueprints gathered dust in the archives until retrieved and published by former Nasa engineer Kirk Sorensen. The US largely ignored him: China did not. India has a new Thorium reactor, Norway is following.
Major players in the nuclear industry have had a vested interest in blocking thorium. They have huge sunk costs in the old technology, the weapon by-product was just to attractive, and bugger advantages regarding sustainability, reducing radiotoxicity and reducing proliferation risk, “What no War!”, likewise One of the problems is actually BIG oil, they’ve known Thorium reactors (LFTR) will deliver everything mystic elusive ‘fusion’ has promised (Rabbit hole) without the enormous difficulties (Well it’s impossible) and hell bent on a Green Bullshit path like sticking huge glass things on my roof and to assist a windmill peppered with a subsidy that will be terminated. Japan was in the most part a supply chain for the (An enrichment programme/MIL app) US and engineering by GE i.e. Washington.
So while the US is busy being Int police,and harvesting lone shooters to keep all happy, China is sitting back just watching, it is the only nation to invest in rare earth mineral processing and US slated them for doing so, but the ‘ChiCom’s’ were smart, and always have been. I expect the demonizing by the US of Thorium to start this year, I did pick up an a nutty US senator a few weeks back threatening to strike secret tunnels in China that is supposed to be a ‘Danger/threat’, but appears to be a massive thorium build, small sized underground ‘safe’ effective reactors.
Anyhow good to see you have a laugh…
@Bevin #[14]. Never really looked at the impact of the US’s insurgency on N.Korea, sounds like Cambodia etc. Will get the book and enlighten myself, yet again.
Back off on that track: The manhunt, Chris D, it is a weird saga, the manhunt went down to 25 officers once isolated, they called off other agency assistance, they burned the guy down, it was the police that set the fire. Before that, The LAPD Air Support Division resources include 17 helicopters ranging from four Bell 206 Jet Rangers to 12 Eurocopter AS350-B2 AStars. The LAPD also has one Beechcraft Kingair A200 and one unspecified and undenied drone. Just to note, I tried to post this comment on NBC a few other news sites and youtube and it was removed, freaky! I just dont get all of it, even Dorner burn his truck when he went to Bear Mountain. Wouldn’t this just tip off his location, the logic is mad.
Maggie Carranza, 47, and her 71-year-old mother Emma Hernandez were delivering newspapers in a truck not even the same color as Dorner’s when LAPD officers shot Hernandez in the back, hospitalizing her. Though Carranza was not hit by gunfire, she was wounded by shattered glass from the windshield. According to their attorney, “There was no warning. There were no orders. No commands. Just gunshots.” As I said a ‘Shoot to Kill’ was the order, extrajudicial killing of a citizen.
In a Nutshell:
Tries to steal boat to escape to Mexico, boat prop wrapped in rope (He was in the Navy)
Loses his wallet (Found in one state)
Is the first known human target for airborne drones on U.S. soil (Black guy killed by a government drone, hmmm, Rodney King revisited).
Tries to drive to Big Bear in his truck (not an old jalopy), axle breaks, so sets it alight because he is hiding.
Woman is shot without warning by LAPD since her car is like his, even though the police know its burned out. They nailed that car, 60+ rounds. Note to self: Police need training in skill at arms.
Police went an shot up a second truck. Note to self: Lesson learned lecture
Police offer 1 million reward .
Tries to hide in cabin, in a ski resort because it is a place where 270 pound black men holiday.
Police radio in for a Fuel truck to torch the ‘Coon’ they wait and find his fireproof wallet (The one he lost in another state), it’s Him.
AND
It all ends just about one hour before State of the Union when Obama will push for gun control, or not? (No).
One the bright side a business minded person is making a killing from “Not Chris Dorner, Please don’t shoot” T-shirts, ideal for 81 year old women, skinny white guys and any black man in the LA area, and Obama did mention jobs and the economy in his speech, inspiring…
What are the chances?
Posted by: Kev | Feb 14 2013 8:02 utc | 29
@b, presuming I am Ken – Proliferation is current and ongoing; fact; However, even allowing for the sheer ignorance of the basics of thorium fission pathways and MSR’s, one might have thought that a practical method of disposing of the 1200 metric tonnes of plutonium currently stored worldwide might appealing?
Hey, I am all for renewable energy, I have solar, mostly off-grid, that includes water (deep well) but that is advocated, subsidized, yet not liked by Gov/Corp.
Ok, great write up, and an argument, also ‘THE’ demonetization as stated much like Diesel V’s Petrol.
Thorium by itself does not sustain an chain reaction, but after absorbing neutrons it transmutes into Uranium-233(Key), thus an a chain reaction U233, thus in turn different nuclear properties than the Uranium-235 and Plutonium-239 that fuel all conventional light water reactors today. The difference is Uranium-233 ‘t’ is fissioned by “slow neutrons”, U233 releases more neutrons per neutron absorbed in the reaction. As a result, U233 made from thorium could enable “slow neutron breeder reactors” which is safer than the “fast neutron breeder reactors” that have been tried repeatedly in the US, France, Japan, Russia, and India without making significant commercial headway. Hence India’s recent thorium reactor.
In any breeder reactor there are opportunities to destroy nuclear waste, turn useless U238 (Th232) into useful nuclear fuel (enough in current reserves to power the entire world for thousands of years). In the past the trade-off has been between reactor core safety (PWR) vs fuel & waste economy (fast breeder). Obviously, the world has chosen core safety over waste economy, with the result that there is a lot of nuclear waste and some fuel proliferation concern.
Thorium solves nuclear waste and nuclear proliferation problems by enabling breeder reactors that work with “slow neutrons” instead of “fast neutrons.
There are of course, genuine thorium ‘enthusiasts’, who use their real names on the web. See http://energyfromthorium.com .
Thorium does offer one way forward – it is abundant, easily extracted, and produces more energy, and renders only a fraction of radioactive waste that urianum reactors do – and they decay to background levels over 300 years as opposed to 30000 years in the case of uranium. They can also be used to burn up uranium waste, solving another problem.
So what are we going to do? It is Nuclear or Coal/Gas – each as bad as each other – thorium does offer a possibility of reasonably clean and chap nuclear. And if China succeeds in developing pre-fab small reactors, that can be buried underground, and distributed close to the source of demand, then even if it does take 40 years, it is better than the largely dark future that we face otherwise.
In perspective:
(1) The Thorium Community contends that LFTRs can deliver clean, safe, and cheap power, and can also reduce the radioactivity of our existing megatons of spent fuel from a 300,000 year problem down to a 300-year problem, by using it as a secondary fuel.
(2) The pro-nuclear / anti-Thorium crowd contends that this is all pathetic nonsense.
(3) The anti-nuclear crowd agrees with the pro-nuke / anti-Thorium crowd, but they also want to permanently shut down the entire global nuclear industry forever, and switch the world over to wind and solar.
Building a test LFTR in an open forum, in front of the entire world, with the skeptics in the proverbial front row seats, is something that all three of these factions should strongly support, and it is happening, just the wrong side. Their reasons:
(1) Is self-evident.
(2) The anti-Thorium crowd should realize that the best way to end all this nonsense about Thorium is to encourage the Thorium crowd to actually go ahead and build the silly thing. And when it fails to perform, they will have made utter fools out of themselves in front of the entire world, and that will be that – However, it works and has been proven!
(3) The wind and solar proponents dearly want to abandon all things nuclear, but they have no solution to remediate the thousands of tons of existing nuclear waste. But if the LFTR works as predicted, it could become the last generation of reactors on earth, the Omega Reactor that cleans up the mess of all the previous generations of reactors, and truly buries nuclear energy forever.
Here’s another way of thinking about all this:
The US alone has 70,000 tons of spent fuel. The Thorium club claims that a 1-gigawatt test LFTR fueled by 1 ton of Thorium will open the door to a method of greatly reducing the longevity of all existing spent fuel.
(a:) If the test LFTR fails, it will increase the pile of spent fuel by 1/70,000th, or .0000142%.
(b): If the test LFTR works, we will have an actual solution to the vexing problem of long-term waste, by reducing the radioactivity of that waste down to a 300-year span.
Therefore (c): Building a test LFTR to explore the feasibility of this remediation method entails a risk factor of .0000142%.
Even the most ardent anti-nuker should like those odds. China and India has done this – Thus the fuss…
Posted by: Kev | Feb 14 2013 16:49 utc | 34
@ BOT TAK #36 – The only flaw in this ideal is China do not engage, history is a great tool when one wants to see the bigger picture, in that; yes, the US will kick-off, it’s in their nature; but – will China spar? Whatever the cause of the possible conflict scenario, whether it’s Taiwan, Senkakus/Diaoyus impasse, passage through the South China Sea, border disputes or posturing to something unique, Beijing will defuse Washington’s choice to intervene and call in its debts. The EU needs China, like the US needs China, China is a product generator, a work horse, and the sole processor of rare earth minerals sufficient for global demand, (Everything electronic) and China in ratio i.e. Chinese in the EU/US rest of the world for that matter is epic, all those little China towns! How many US citizens live in China? that sum is negligible, when a single City in the US can have millions 1st, 2nd and 3 generation, all deep down Nationalistic if pushed.
Both US and China cant afford a War, never mind that the World cant afford a War, if it did occur millions would die and it would be ugly, no more crispy Duck, world trade would stop and grind down to nothing, consumers may settle for ‘home’ products, but cant afford it, Banks and credit lines stopped, the DOW would cave and alliances would change, and the face of product sourcing would be a cluster fuck, and it is just plain stupidity for the human race and the planet. There is more chance that Burkina Faso would become the world’s largest economy than a China/US War.
What China can do (And is) is buy-in or buy-out, it has the financial sway, US is in dept, and 51% of that debt is held in Asia, China having the largest chunk. China can dump a trillion, devalue the USD still pay top $$$ to any country or sell at bottom $$$ to any country, and there would be takers, and the US will suffer in epic proportions, likewise the EU. It’s also in the Nature of China to be content with making a ‘penny’ profit irrelevant of scale, the West Nature is high profit, specific margins, if you blow that ideology, everything goes tit’s-up! The people suffer -The West cant afford to make a penny although it may say ‘in for a penny in for a pound’. War will will crush China’s economy and U.S. but who’s citizen can cope better? Look at the NY Backout, or Katrina, the population went bananas, raping, looting & pillaging, both events were a disaster, but also proves the weakness of the resilience of the people and displays the need for controlled assistance or it will create pure Anarchy. The Chinese (In China) although this generation is not a hardened have lived through decades of hardship, have farmed for food, and farmed for the Nation without any gratuity, they just accepted, we would never do the same; it’s not in our culture – We go ape when the AC is in-op, no power, heating, water, entertainment and needing to live with extended families as a food stamp Nation, it would break the camels back.
As for Kissinger dreaming of this moment; what a sick senile old prick, and does not deserve to be a part of the human race, what a twisted veil spiteful turd; the thought that he would like to see the demise of Nations to aspire to one superpower by annihilation, death and War is just grotesque. It’s insanity like that when I feel the danger, not just me, but my kids, friends, and for the people of the World, mostly who have no grievance and just want to get on.
The problem is their are many such Kissinger’s and people who support his spew.
Thanks for that BOT, you just made my day grey – WTF…I will smear that link as far as I can, people need to read shit like that and see why the World is screwed.
Lastly, sorry for all the profanity, just venting- Kissinger is anal bile that needs flushed and treatment.
Posted by: Kev | Feb 15 2013 5:15 utc | 40
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