Man goes to North Korea and interviews his North Korean tour guides about what is happening there. They are surprisingly intelligent and well informed.
First of all, I would like to say that I support North Korea 100% in their confrontation with the US. However, they are not going to shoot a nuke at us. What is bothering them is the yearly, in this case highly aggressive, war games that the US is playing South Korea right now. This always sets the north off. We really ought to stop these belligerent war games and quit antagonizing them.
North Korea is not going to start any kind of war with anyone and they are not going to shoot any missiles, nuclear or otherwise, at anyone. So we might as well calm down. But the response of Obama, to send B-1 bombers loaded with nuclear weapons to fly up and down the South Korean peninsula, was an extreme provocation. There was no need for this.
Why did the North Koreans build nuclear weapons? Because the lesson they learned after Serbia, Iraq and Afghanistan is that countries without nuclear weapons tend to get attacked by the United Snakes. This lesson was absolutely correct.
The US has been threatening to attack North Korea ever since the end of the Korean War in 1953. The US presently has an incredible 1,000 nuclear weapons in South Korea now, including nuclear artillery, nuclear missiles, nuclear bombers and nuclear mines. The US has had these nuclear weapons in South Korea for decades, and they have been threatening to attack the North with them all this time. Under nuclear control treaties, all nations being threatened with nuclear weapons have a right to develop nuclear weapons to defend themselves. Therefore, the North has a right to develop nuclear weapons as a deterrent against constant nuclear threats by the US. This is right and proper.
How many nukes does the North have? At the moment, they may have around 3 working nuclear weapons, however, they have enough material for more. And thankfully, they have just started up some of their nuclear reactors so they can make more fissile material and hopefully more bombs. The bombs seem to be small, and the general theory is that they are around 1/3 the size of a Hiroshima bomb. They are apparently plutonium bombs and not uranium bombs. Keep in mind that the North also wishes to develop nuclear power for peaceful purposes and they have that right under nuclear treaties.
The north also has missiles, but they don’t work very well. They often fall apart in mid-air. Their longest range missile can hit the eastern part of Alaska. The north has no missiles that can reach the US mainland. Missile technology is however rapidly improving.
The most important thing that we do not know is whether the north has mastered the technique of putting a nuclear warhead on a missile in such a way such that it can be detonated. You need a detonation device to do this and it must be accurate down to the thousands of a second. If you don’t get it right, you will shoot your nuke, and it won’t even blow up. Getting this detonation device correct is maddeningly difficult for any nation. However, with this latest underground test, observers feel that the north may have an operational warhead.
The US embargoes the North, and now the whole world has leveled sanctions on the North via the UN, which is just a tool of US imperialism anymore (I strongly supported the Iraqi resistance car bomb attack on the UN headquarters in Baghdad in the early days of the Resistance.). These sanctions have been strengthened three times now.
These are “dual use sanctions” of the sort that completely devastated Iraq, murdering 500,000 Iraqis, mostly children, via the US and the UK sanctions. Remember how utterly devastated the Iraqi economy was due to dual use sanctions, especially Iraqi medical care? Iraq didn’t have a Communist government, and the sanctions ruined them. These sanctions will destroy the economy of any state.
Under the dual use rubric, most medical supplies and drugs coming into the North are banned under sanctions rules. This is the same mess that devastated Iraqi medicine and the water supply. North Korean medicine has been completely devastated by these dual use sanctions.
In addition, the sanctions mean that most countries have to decide if they are going to trade with North Korea or they are going to trade with the rest of the world. That is because the sanctions also apply to any nation trading with North Korea. The US threatens and punishes any nation who tries to trade with North Korea. Most of the world has decided to trade with the rest of the world instead of trading with North Korea alone, so the North is completely isolated. Almost all of their trade is with China alone.
It is true that agriculture has collapsed, but North Korea fed themselves just fine for 40 years under the same collective agriculture. Soviets ate very well under collective ag until 1991. Cubans eat just fine under a system of collective agriculture. So it’s dubious that collective agriculture can be blamed for North Korea’s food problems.
The US has repeatedly withheld food aid to North Korea, and then they scream that people are harmed or killed by malnutrition. So the US is basically deliberately starving North Koreans to death. In addition, the US bullies and threatens any other country or group who tries to provide food aid to the North. The US’ reason for withholding food aid to the North is that most of it is diverted to the military, but this is not true, and at any rate, the military has to eat too, and obviously they get first priority.
The US under Democratic and Republican Presidents has torn up every agreement that they ever signed with the North. Clinton demanded that the North stop developing nukes in return for providing them with a light water reactor. The reactor was never forthcoming because Clinton was trying to make the regime collapse. Along the same lines, sanctions and suspension of food aid are all intended to cause the collapse of the North Korean regime. It hasn’t happened.
The North’s position is completely reasonable, and I support them 100% in their resolve to stand up to US aggression.
