[Occupymendocino] Finding Delight in Avoiding War With North Korea

[Lewallen]

Finding Delight in Avoiding War With North Korea

--by John Lewallen <avoidingnuclearwar.com>

Feb.9, 2018

Howdy Neighbors,

I'm here on a beautiful day in Mendocino County, California. For me, my
sense that the risk of nuclear war is rather high just now is exacerbating
my delight in my wife, my friends, and the delightful world we share.
Psychologically, it is to me like the Reagan years. We made it through
Reagan and we can make it now!

I'm inviting you to come with me as I find delight in trying to understand
the ecology of the nuclear weapons industry, and to join with people
worldwide to avoid nuclear war and eventually eliminate the threat of
nuclear war completely. I'm 75 now, which is about the same age as the era
of nuclear weapons. All my life I have felt the terror of impending nuclear
war, and have avoided despair by studying nuclear confrontation and working
with activists to reduce the threat of nuclear war. So far, so good! There
hasn't been a nuclear weapon detonated in battle since the U.S. dropped an
atomic bomb on Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945.

                I'd love to hear from people who are thinking and organizing
to avoid nuclear war. May we enjoy each amazing day on this Earth free of
nuclear war! 

                I'll be a bit loose and reflective in this writing. It is
urgent right now to advocate for no war with North Korea! The president said
that North Korea would be able to strike the United States with nuclear
missiles "in a few months" in his State of the Union Address a few days ago.
Vice President Pence is in Japan demanding that North Korea give up its
nuclear weapons. The implication of impending U.S. military attack on North
Korea soon is obvious. 

                All my heart and soul is with the Koreans at the Olympics in
Seoul, especially the five hundred peaceful envoys from North Korea. It is a
macabre nightmare that the U.S. is imposing what Pence called the "heaviest
sanctions ever" on North Korea, and organizing nations in Vancouver.B.C. for
a possible military attack on North Korea (China and Russia, not invited,
denounced this rally of Korean War allies as "Cold War mentality"). At the
same time. North and South Korea are earnestly beginning peace talks. The
U.S. should stop threatening and sanctioning North Korea, and begin peace
talks to end the Korean War.

When the 1953 armistice in Korea stopped the bombing which had completely
leveled North Korea, neither North Korea nor its ally, China, had nuclear
weapons which could reach the United States. Now both these nations have
focused on having nuclear weapons primarily to deter attack from the U.S.,
to prevent exactly the sort of "nuclear blackmail" President Trump is using
to demand that North Korea give up its nuclear weapons. Yet President Trump
and other "experts" believe they can keep any war in Korea, as he has said,
"over there." 

The idea that North Korea can't reach the United States with a thermonuclear
weapon yet is a catastrophically dangerous misconception. Here's the lead
paragraph from Professor Scott D. Sagan's article "The Korean Missile
Crisis" in the Nov/Dec. 2017 Foreign Affairs :

"It is time for the U.S. government to admit that it has failed to prevent
North Korea from acquiring nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic
missiles that can reach the United States.The gravest danger now is that
North Korea, South Korea, and the United States will stumble into a
catastrophic war that none of them wants."

We're being dragged into a war with North Korea by President Trump and
everyone who follows his military orders, and it's time to start kicking and
screaming! Trump et.al. are playing it like it is a Western movie: the bad
guys are holed up in the barn and threatening to kill attackers and
hostages, and the good guys are screaming "Drop your weapons and come out
hands up-you're surrounded and cut off from supplies!"

                The real world is an integrated global society utterly
dependent on interconnected, computer-dependent systems worldwide. Now North
Korea has the ability to use a high-altitude nuclear EMP weapon, one bomb,
to damage or destroy computerized civilization throughout the continental
United States, and in satellites in line of sight of the blast. This was the
first thing mentioned by the North Koreans when they tested what they said
was their first thermonuclear bomb on Sept 3 last year: now we could do a
high-altitude EMP attack!

                Also, China has strongly hinted in public that it would
intervene to prevent the U.S., from overthrowing the North Korean
Government, if the U.S. launched a first-strike on North Korea (see my post
"China Draws Red Lines to Restrain Both U.S. and North Korea"). China is
fully able to disable the U.S. in many ways, military, economic, and
financial.

                It is virtually unthinkable that North Korea would launch a
first-strike against the U.S. North Korea was leveled by U.S. bombers by
1953, and will do anything to avoid being destroyed again. They clearly
believe in classical Nuclear Deterrence Theory: They believe only way they
can deter overwhelming attack by the United States is by having
"Second-Strike Threat Credibility", defined as being able to strike the
United States causing unacceptable losses even if they suffer a U.S. first-
strike completely disabling their nuclear forces on land.

Trump et.al. are blindly focused on seizing land-based nuclear facilities in
North Korea, ignoring nuclear weapons and missiles possibly in orbit, on
submarines, smuggled into the U.S., or delivered some other way.
Unfortunately, deterrence theory is effective only against rational and sane
commanders, and Trump seems simply not to believe in thermonuclear EMP
weapons. Question: Is this why North Korea has threatened to do an
atmospheric H-bomb test, which inevitably would put out some damaging EMP,
maybe a lot of it?

Let's all cheer on the Koreans who are struggling for peace in their
homeland, and demand that the U.S. immediately stop all war threats against
North Korea. With the North Koreans believing they absolutely need a nuclear
force capable of reaching the U.S. to effectively deter being attacked, and
the U.S. threatening to attack unless they give up their nuclear weapons,
it's a nightmare showdown that must stop to prevent a war of "suicidal
omnicide," a thermonuclear exchange destroying the U.S. and possibly much
more. Let's have a great time working in loving nonviolence to end this
threat to our lives and homes.         

    

 

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