Exclusive: The revelation that North Korea hacked into South Korea’s
military secrets and found U.S. plans for a preemptive “decapitation” of
Pyongyang’s leadership explains its rush to build a nuclear deterrent, says
Nicolas J S Davies.
By Nicolas J S Davies
The Western media has been awash in speculation as to why,
about a year ago, North Korea’s “crazy” leadership suddenly launched a
crash program to vastly improve its ballistic missile capabilities. That
question has now been answered.
In September 2016, North Korean cyber-defense forces hacked into
South Korean military computers and downloaded 235 gigabytes of
documents. The BBC has revealed that the documents included detailed U.S.
plans to assassinate North Korea’s president, Kim Jong Un, and launch an
all-out war on North Korea. The BBC’s main source for this story is Rhee
Cheol-Hee, a member of the Defense Committee of the South Korean National
Assembly.
These plans for aggressive war have actually been long in the
making. In 2003, the U.S. scrapped an agreement signed in
1994 under which North Korea suspended its nuclear program and the U.S.
agreed to build two light water reactors in North Korea. The two countries also
agreed to a step-by-step normalization of relations. Even after the
U.S. scrapped the 1994 Agreed Framework in 2003, North Korea did not restart
work on the two reactors frozen under that agreement, which could by now be
producing enough plutonium to make several nuclear weapons every year.
However, since 2002-03, when President George W. Bush included
North Korea in his “axis of evil,” withdrew from the Agreed Framework, and
launched an invasion of Iraq over bogus WMD claims, North Korea once again
began enriching uranium and making steady progress toward developing
nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles to deliver them.
By 2016, the North Koreans also were keenly aware of the horrific fate of Iraq and Libya and their
leaders after the countries did surrender their unconventional
weapons. Not only did the U.S. lead bloody “regime change” invasions but the
nations’ leaders were brutally murdered, Saddam Hussein by hanging and Muammar
Gaddafi sodomized with a knife and then summarily shot in the head.
So, the discovery of the U.S. war plan in 2016 sounded alarm
bells in Pyongyang and triggered an unprecedented crash program to quickly
expand North Korea’s ballistic missile program. Its nuclear weapons tests
established that it can produce a small number of first-generation nuclear
weapons, but it needed a viable delivery system before it could be sure that
its nuclear deterrent would be credible enough to deter a U.S. attack.
In other words, North Korea’s main goal has been to close the
gap between its existing delivery systems and the missile technology it would
need to actually launch a retaliatory nuclear strike against the
United States. North Korea’s leaders see this as their only chance to escape
the same kind of mass destruction visited on North Korea in the first Korean
War, when U.S.-led air forces destroyed every city, town and industrial area
and General Curtis LeMay boasted that the attacks had killed 20 percent of the population.
Through 2015 and early 2016, North Korea only tested one new
missile, the Pukkuksong-1 submarine-launched
missile. The missile launched from a submerged submarine
and flew 300 miles on its final, successful test, which coincided with the
annual U.S.-South Korean military exercises in August 2016.
North Korea also launched its largest satellite to date in
February 2016, but the launch vehicle seemed to be the same type as
the Unha-3 used
to launch a smaller satellite in 2012.
However, since the discovery of the U.S.-South Korean war plans
a year ago, North Korea has vastly accelerated its missile development program,
conducting at least 27 more tests of a wide
range of new missiles and bringing it much closer to a credible
nuclear deterrent. Here is a timeline of the tests:
–Two failed tests of Hwasong-10 medium-range ballistic missiles
in October 2016.
–Two successful tests of Pukguksong-2 medium-range ballistic
missiles, in February and May 2017. The missiles followed identical
trajectories, rising to a height of 340 miles and landing in the sea 300 miles
away. South Korean analysts believe this missile’s full range is at least
2,000 miles, and North Korea said the tests confirmed it is ready for mass production.
–Four medium-range ballistic missiles that flew an average of
620 miles from the Tongchang-ri space center in March 2017.
–Two apparently failed missile tests from Sinpo submarine base
in April 2017.
–Six tests of Hwasong-12 medium-range ballistic missiles (range:
2,300 to 3,700 miles) since April 2017.
–A failed test of a missile believed to be a “KN-17” from
Pukchang airbase in April 2017.
–Test of a Scud-type anti-ship missile that flew 300 miles
and landed in the Sea of Japan, and two other tests in May 2017.
–Several cruise missiles fired from the East coast in June 2017.
–A test of a powerful new rocket engine, maybe for an ICBM, in
June 2017.
–North Korea tested two Hwasong-14 “near-ICBMs” in July
2017. Based on these tests, the Hwasong-14 may be capable of
hitting city-sized targets in Alaska or Hawaii with a single nuclear warhead,
but cannot yet reach the U.S. West Coast.
–Four more missiles tested in August 2017, including a
Hwasong-12 that flew over Japan and travelled 1,700 miles before breaking up,
maybe as a result of a failure in a “Post Boost Vehicle” added to improve range
and accuracy.
–Another ballistic missile flew 2,300 miles over the Pacific on
September 15, 2017.
An analysis of the two tests of the
Hwasong-14 in July by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS) concluded
that these missiles are not yet capable of carrying a 500 kg payload as far as
Seattle or other U.S. West Coast cities. BAS notes that a first generation
nuclear weapon based on the Pakistani model that North Korea is believed to be
following could not weigh less than 500 kg, once the weight of the warhead
casing and a heat shield to survive reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere are
taken into account.
Global Reaction
Awareness of the role of the U.S. war plan in spurring the
dramatic escalation of North Korea’s missile program should be a game changer
in the world’s response to the crisis over Korea, since it demonstrates
that the current acceleration of the North Korean missile program is a
defensive response to a serious and potentially existential threat from
the United States.
If the United Nations Security Council was not diplomatically
and militarily intimidated by the United States, this knowledge should trigger
urgent action in the Security Council to require all sides to make a firm
commitment to peaceful and binding diplomacy to formally end the Korean War and
remove the threat of war from all the people of Korea. And the whole world
would unite politically and diplomatically to prevent the U.S. from using
its veto to avoid accountability for its leading role in this crisis. Only a
unified global response to potential U.S. aggression could possibly convince
North Korea that it would have some protection if it eventually halted its
nuclear weapons program.
But such unity in the face of a threat of U.S. aggression would
be unprecedented. Most U.N. delegates quietly sat and listened on Sept. 19
when President Donald Trump delivered explicit threats of war and aggression
against North Korea, Iran and Venezuela, while boasting about his missile
strike against Syria on April 6 over dubious and disputed claims about a
chemical weapons incident.
For the past 20 years or more, the United States has swaggered
about as the “last remaining superpower” and the “indispensable nation,” a
global law unto itself, using the dangers of terrorism and weapons
proliferation and highly selective outrage over “dictators” as propaganda
narratives to justify illegal wars, CIA-backed terrorism, its own weapons
proliferation, and support for its favored dictators like the brutal
rulers of Saudi Arabia and other Arab monarchies.
For even longer, the United States has been two-faced about
international law, citing it when some adversary can be accused of a violation
but ignoring it when the U.S. or its allies are trampling on the rights of some
disfavored country. When the International Court of Justice convicted the United States of aggression (including
acts of terrorism) against Nicaragua in 1986, the U.S. withdrew from the ICJ’s
binding jurisdiction.
Since then, the U.S. has thumbed its nose at the entire
structure of international law, confident in the political power of its
propaganda or “information warfare” to cast itself as
the guardian of law and order in the world, even as it systematically
violates the most basic rules spelled out in the U.N. Charter and the Geneva
Conventions.
U.S. propaganda treats the U.N. Charter and the Geneva Conventions, the world’s “Never again”
to war, torture and the killing of millions of civilians in the Second
World War, as relics of another time that it would be naive to take seriously.
But the results of the U.S. alternative — its lawless
“might makes right” war policy — are now plain for all to see. In the past 16
years, America’s post-9/11 wars have already killed at least two million people, maybe many more,
with no end in sight to the slaughter as the U.S.’s policy of illegal
war keeps plunging country after country into intractable
violence and chaos.
An Ally’s Fears
Just as North Korea’s missile programs are a rational defense
strategy in the face of the threat Pyongyang faces from the U.S., the exposure
of the U.S.’s war plan by American allies in South Korea is also a rational act
of self-preservation, since they too are threatened by the possibility of war
on the Korean peninsula.
Now maybe other U.S. allies, the wealthy countries that have
provided political and diplomatic cover for the U.S.’s 20-year campaign of
illegal war, will finally reassert their humanity, their sovereignty and their
own obligations under international law, and start to rethink their roles
as junior partners in U.S. aggression.
Countries like the U.K., France and Australia will sooner or
later have to choose between forward-looking roles in a sustainable,
peaceful multi-polar world and a slavish loyalty to the ever-more
desperate death throes of U.S. hegemony. Now might be a good moment to make
that choice, before they are dragged into new U.S. wars in Korea, Iran or
Venezuela.
Even Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tennessee, chairman of the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee, is afraid that Donald Trump will lead humanity
into World War III. But it might come as a surprise to people in Iraq,
Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Libya and parts of a dozen other
countries already engulfed by U.S.-driven wars to learn that they are
not already in the midst of World War III.
Perhaps what really worries the Senator is that he and his
colleagues may no longer be able to sweep these endless
atrocities under the plush carpets of the halls of Congress without a
genteel Barack Obama in the White House to sweet-talk U.S. allies around the
world and keep the millions being killed in U.S. wars off U.S. TVs and
computer screens, out of sight and out of mind.
If politicians in the U.S. and around the world need the
ugliness of Donald Trump as a mirror for their own
greed, ignorance and temerity, to shame them into changing their
ways, so be it – whatever it takes. But it should not escape
anyone anywhere that the signature on this diabolical war plan
that now threatens to kill millions of Koreans was not Donald Trump’s but
Barack Obama’s.
George Orwell might well have been describing the partisan
blindness of the West’s self-satisfied, so easily deluded, neoliberal
society when he wrote this in 1945,
“Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits,
but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage –
torture, the use of hostages, forced labor, mass deportations, imprisonment
without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians – which does
not change its color when it is committed by our side… The Nationalist not only
does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a
remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.”
Here’s the bottom line: The United States has been planning to
assassinate Kim Jong Un and to launch an all-out war on North
Korea. There. You’ve heard it. Now, can you still be manipulated into
believing that Kim Jong Un is simply “crazy” and North Korea is
the gravest threat to world peace?
Or do you now understand that the United States is the real
threat to peace in Korea, just as it was in Iraq, Libya and many
other countries where the leaders were deemed “crazy” and U.S. officials (and
the Western mainstream media) promoted war as the only “rational”
alternative?
Nicolas J S Davies is the author of Blood On
Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq. He
also wrote the chapters on “Obama at War” in Grading the 44th President: a Report
Card on Barack Obama’s First Term as a Progressive Leader.
