Stardate 20030713.1945

(Captain's log): Richard writes:

On the NK/Iran nuke question, I think we have learned that it's not nukes that kill, it's the leaders who threaten to develop them. The lesson we need to send every thug to be is that the last thing you want the US to think is that you are developing nukes. That's the real shame of letting Saddam get away or at least not being able to identify his remains.

Thus, I would not be surprised to see a combined USA/ROK SOF take out the majority of the NK leadership. This would be much more effective than taking out the nukes and leaving the leadership in place. Sort of like Liberia without the golden parachute for Charles Taylor.

Both Iran and NK are making a gamble of their own. What they're hoping is that they can obfuscate and delay long enough so that they actually have nukes. (Saddam actually hoped the same.)

By taking that elevated risk for a short term, they hope they can reduce the long term threat from us. Once they have nukes, they're far better able to deter us from any kind of operation against their interests; not just to deter us from invading, but also the try to perform various kinds of nuclear blackmail to cause us to interfere less with other kinds of things they do.

So they're betting the farm on their ability to deny their intentions, cover up their progress, and in general muddy the waters, in hopes that they can manage to win the game by developing nukes before we make the decision to destroy their factories, or otherwise respond in a final way.

Like any other big decision, it's a balance of risk and reward, and based on their calculation of how likely it is that we'll step in and do something. Right now I think both nations think the chance of us making such an attack is acceptably low, or that the overall consequences if we do are acceptably small.

As you say, what's now needed is some sort of demonstration to other nations considering the same thing that changes that calculation. It has to make clear that the chance of success is low because we're willing to directly attack such facilities in order to prevent them from coming online. Israel did that to Iraq in the 1970's, and our attack on Saddam this year was partly motivated by our clear understanding that he hadn't yet given up his ambition to develop nukes. Nor is it clear yet that he had. It may be that there was no active program in place in the last year, but there's significant evidence that information was mothballed and that there was a clear intention to restart the nuclear program once the heat was off.

That establishment of a deterrent will be part of Bush's calculation. The decision on those attacks, should it come to that, will in part be based on the consequences specifically of those cases. But it will also be based partly on whether it's necessary to establish an object lesson for other nations who might be contemplating the same thing.

The big problem here is India and Pakistan. They did the same thing and succeeded, and it's not likely at this point that there's going to be any significant attempt by us to try to force either or both of them to disarm again. Indeed, Israel is perhaps an even more important case. They represent a positive example to those attempting to develop nukes, by showing that once you've done so, you probably won't be forced to disarm again.

South Africa did, but that was pretty much voluntary. If it had refused to, it's not clear the kind and extent of pressure which would have been applied.

A lot of pernicious precedents got set in the 1990's; part of why we're in a mess now, and part of why things have gotten as bloody recently as they have, is that we're having to change the perception of those precedents. That means in some cases we're having to perhaps use a stronger military response than might otherwise have been needed, because we need to set an example for the future. That's going to be part of Bush's decision this time, too.

That said, I do not expect such a specific attack on the NK leadership. The Special Forces are good, but they're not supermen and you have to know your limits. It's nice to think, "Fuck it! Send in the Marines!" (or "Send in the Special Forces") and assume that they'll automatically win no matter what they're told to do. It isn't quite that simple, and I think any attempt to use a conventional ground assault to try to take out the NK leaders would be a suicide mission and have only a small chance of success. If we were determined to try to kill Kim and his top advisors, we're much more likely to do so with some sort of precision bombing, similar to the attempts we made to take out Saddam during the war.

And, unfortunately, with about as much chance of success. You have to know your enemy's limits too, and they're not total dunces. Our chance of bagging them that way is low, just as it turned out to be with Saddam. (Though it remains fuzzy just how close we came; it may be years before we find out what really happened in those attempts.)

If we decide to take out the NK nuclear facility, I do not expect it to be part of a larger assault aimed at other targets. Doing that virtually guarantees that a new Korean war would start. I think the hope would be that such an attack would monumentally raise the bluster and rhetoric and threat level, but that ultimately NK would not move to war. Eventually the rhetoric would die down and NK, having lost its only major credible threat, would eventually be forced to negotiation on rational term