“Why has this tiny nation of
24 million people invested so much of its limited resources in acquiring
nuclear weapons?...
North Korea’s stance cannot be separated out from
its turbulent history during the 20th Century, especially its four decade long
occupation by Japan, the forced division of the Korean peninsula after World
War II, and, of course, the subsequent utterly devastating war with the United
States from 1950-1953 that ended in an armistice in which a technical state of
war still exists…
…Japan surrendered on 15
August when Soviet troops had occupied much of the northern peninsula. It
should be noted that American forces played no role in the liberation of Korea
from Japanese rule. However, because the Soviets, as allies of the U.S., wished
to remain on friendly terms they agreed to the division of Korea between Soviet
and American forces…
The Soviets could easily have occupied the entirety of Korea but
chose not to do so, instead opting for a negotiated settlement with the U.S.
over the future of Korea. Theoretically the peninsula would be reunited after
some agreement between the two victors at some future date.
However, the U.S.
immediately began to favor those Koreans who had collaborated with the Japanese
in the exploitation of their own country and its people, largely the landed
elites, and Washington began to arm the provisional government it set up to
root out the peoples’ committees.
For their part the Soviets supported the
communist nationalist leader, Kim Il-Sung who had led the guerrilla army
against Japan at great cost in lives.
In 1947 the United Nations authorized elections in Korea, but the
election monitors were all American allies so the Soviets and communist Koreans
refused to participate. By then the Cold War was in full swing, the critical
alliance between Washington and Moscow that had defeated Nazi Germany had
already been sundered.
As would later also occur in Vietnam in 1956, the U.S.
oversaw elections only in the south of Korea and only those candidates approved
by Washington. Syngman Rhee became South Korea’s first president protected by
the new American armed and trained Army of the Republic of Korea. This ROK was
commanded by officers who had served the Japanese occupation…
On both sides of the new artificial border pressures mounted for a
forcible reunification. The fact remained that much of rural southern Korea was
still loyal to the peoples committees. This did not necessarily mean that they
were committed communists but they were virulent nationalists who recognized
the role that Kim’s forces had played against the Japanese. Rhee’s forces then
began to systematically root out Kim’s supporters…
In 1948 guerrilla war broke out against the Rhee regime on the
southern island of Cheju, the population of which ultimately rose in wholesale
revolt. The suppression of the rebellion was guided by many American agents
soon to become part of the Central Intelligence Agency and by military advisers…between
20,000 and 30,000 villagers died.
Simultaneously elements of the ROK army
refused to participate in this war against their own people and this mutiny was
brutally suppressed by those ROK soldiers who would obey such orders. Over one
thousand of the mutineers escaped to join Kim’s guerrillas in the mountains…
In 1950 Washington issued its famous National Security Paper-68
(NSC-68) which outlined the agenda for a global anti-communist campaign,
requiring the tripling of the American defense budget…
The Korean War seemed to vindicate everything written and said
about the” international communist conspiracy. In popular myth on June 25, 1950
the North Korean Army suddenly attacked without warning… In fact the
entire 38th Parallel had been progressively militarized and
there had been numerous cross border incursions by both sides going back to
1949…
The Korean civil war was all but inevitable. Given postwar
American plans for access globally to resources, markets and cheaper labor
power any form of national liberation, communist or liberal democratic, was to
be opposed…
Truman decided to request authorization for American intervention
from the United Nations and bypassed Congress thereby leading to widespread
opposition and, later, a return to Republican rule under Dwight Eisenhower…
The war went badly at first for the U.S. despite numerical
advantages in forces. Rout after rout followed with the ROK in full retreat.
Meanwhile tens of thousands of southern guerrillas who had originated in
peoples’ committees fought the Americans and the ROK.
At one point the North
Koreans were in control of Seoul and seemed about to drive American forces into
the sea. At that point the commander- in-chief of all UN forces, General
Douglas MacArthur, announced that he saw unique opportunities for the
deployment of atomic weapons…
Truman was loathe to introduce nukes and instead authorized
MacArthur to conduct the famous landings at Inchon in September 1950…This
threw North Korean troops into disarray and MacArthur began pushing them back
across the 38th Parallel,
the mandate imposed by the UN resolution. But the State Department claimed that
the border was not recognized under international law and therefore the UN
mandate had no real legal bearing.
It was this that MacArthur claimed gave him
the right to take the war into the north. Though the North Koreans had suffered
a resounding defeat in the south, they withdrew into northern mountain redoubts
forcing the American forces that followed them into bloody and costly combat,
led Americans into a trap.
The Chinese had
said from the beginning that any approach of foreign troops toward their border
would result in “dire consequences.”
Fearing an invasion of Manchuria to crush
the nascent communist revolution the Chinese foreign minister, Zhou En-Lai
declared that China “will not supinely tolerate seeing their neighbors invaded
by the imperialists.”
MacArthur sneered at this warning. “… They have no
airforce…if the Chinese tried to get down to Pyongyang there would be a great
slaughter…we are the best.” He then ordered airstrikes to lay waste thousands
of square miles of northern Korea bordering China and ordered infantry
divisions ever closer to its border.
It was the terrible devastation of this bombing campaign, worse
than anything seen during World War II short of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that to
this day dominates North Korea’s relations with the United States and drives
its determination never to submit to any American diktat.
General Curtis
Lemay directed this onslaught. It was he who had firebombed Tokyo in March 1945
saying it was “about time we stopped swatting at flies and gone after the
manure pile.” It was he who later said that the US “ought to bomb North Vietnam
back into the stone age.” Remarking about his desire to lay waste to North
Korea he said “We burned down every town in North Korea and South Korea too.”
Lemay was by no means exaggerating.
On November 27,
1950 hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops suddenly crossed the border into
North Korea completely overwhelming US forces…
Panic took hold in Washington. Truman now said use of A-bombs was
under “active consideration.” MacArthur demanded the bombs… As he put it in his
memoirs:
I would have dropped between thirty and fifty atomic bombs…strung
across the neck of Manchuria…and spread behind us – from the Sea of Japan to
the Yellow Sea- a belt of radioactive cobalt. It has an active life of between
60 and 120 years.
Cobalt it should
be noted is at least 100 times more radioactive than uranium.
He also expressed
a desire for chemicals and gas…
By June 1951, one year after the beginning of the war, the
communists had pushed UN forces back across the 38th parallel… the war became one
of attrition…casualties continued to be high on both sides for the duration of
the war which lasted until 1953 when an armistice without reunification was
signed.
Of course the victims suffering worst were the civilians. In 1951
the U.S. initiated “Operation Strangle” which officials estimated killed at
least 3 million people on both sides of the 38th parallel, but the figure is
probably closer to 4 million…
The North accused the U.S. of dropping bombs laden with cholera,
anthrax, plague, and encephalitis and hemorrhagic fever, all of which turned up
among soldiers and civilians in the north.
Some American prisoners of war
confessed to such war crimes but these were dismissed as evidence of torture by
North Korea on Americans. However, none of the U.S. POWs who did confess and
were later repatriated were allowed to meet the press.
A number of
investigations were carried out by scientists from friendly western countries.
One of the most prominent concluded the charges were true. At this time the US
was engaged in top secret germ-warfare research with captured Nazi and Japanese
germ warfare experts, and also experimenting with Sarin, despite its ban by the
Geneva Convention. Washington accused the communists of introducing germ
warfare.
Napalm was used extensively, completely and utterly destroying the
northern capital of Pyongyang. By 1953 American pilots were returning to
carriers and bases claiming there were no longer any significant targets in all
of North Korea to bomb. In fact a very large percentage of the northern
population was by then living in tunnels dug by hand underground…
In the Spring of 1953 US warplanes hit five of the largest dams
along the Yalu river completely inundating and killing Pyongyang’s harvest of
rice.
Air Force documents reveal calculated premeditation saying that “Attacks
in May will be most effective psychologically because it was the end of the
rice-transplanting season before the roots could become completely embedded.”
Flash floods scooped out hundreds of square miles of vital food producing
valleys and killed untold numbers of farmers.
At Nuremberg
after WWII, Nazi officers who carried out similar attacks on the dikes of
Holland, creating a mass famine in 1944, were tried as criminals and some were
executed for their crimes…
I submit that it is the collective memory of all of what I’ve
described that animates North Korea’s policies toward the US today which has
nuclear weapons on constant alert and stations almost 30,000 forces at the
ready. Remember, a state of war still exists and has since 1953…
While South Korea received heavy American investment in the
industries fleeing the United States in search of cheaper labor and new markets
it was nevertheless ruled until quite recently by military dictatorships
scarcely different than those of the north.
For its part the north constructed
its economy along five-year plans and collectivized its agriculture. While it
never enjoyed the sort of consumer society that now characterizes some of South
Korea, its GDP grew substantially until the collapse of communism globally
brought about the withdrawal of all foreign aid to north Korea.
During the late
1980s and early 1990s, as some American policymakers took note of the north’s
growing weakness, Secretary of Defense Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz talked
openly of using force finally to settle the question of Korean reunification
and the claimed threat to international peace posed by North Korea.
In 1993 the
Clinton Administration discovered that North Korea was constructing a nuclear
processing plant and also developing medium range missiles. The Pentagon
desired to destroy these facilities but that would mean wholesale war so the
administration fostered an agreement whereby North Korea would stand down in
return for the provision of oil and other economic aid.
Then in 2001, after the events of 9-11, the Bush II
neo-conservatives militarized policy and declared North Korea to be an element
of the “axis of evil.” All bets were now off.
In that context, North Korea
withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, reasoning that nuclear
weapons were the only way possible to prevent a full scale attack by the US in
the future. Given a stark choice between another war with the US and all that
would entail this decision seems hardly surprising.
Under no circumstances could any westerner reasonably expect,
after all the history I’ve described, that the North Korean regime would simply
submit to any ultimatums by the US, by far the worst enemy Korea ever had
measured by the damage inflicted on the entirety of the Korean peninsula.”
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