North Korea, Sanctions, and Kim Jong-un

[Imari]

I think the two countries that those rules have been applied to are Iran and NK. It's historically complicated for both but the TLDR is that both have strongly claimed an intention to use them first (one against Israel, one against the US). For the MAD countries the deterrent is, in theory, going to be annihilating in retaliation for a first strike.

For NK they may use nukes before the US uses nukes, but it's still only in response to actual imminent threat to the country.

https://www.vox.com/world/2017/8/8/16112046/north-korea-threat-nuke-us-attack

NK is I'm sure well aware that the moment the US launches a serious attack on them, even with conventional weapons, their ability to launch could be disabled very quickly. As their nuclear weapons are really the only thing that they have that allows them to credibly threaten the US, the correct defensive strategy is to make their use conditional on the US attacking. That is then a nuclear deterrent.

I think in a situation where the survival of your country is at stake (or you reasonably believe it to be so), using nuclear weapons against the enemy is a valid option. Some people wouldn't take that option, but it's not hard to understand the sort of patriotism that would lead someone to do so.

As far as Iran, when was this? All the statements from Iran regarding nuclear technology in the last decade or so have been that they want all the benefits of nuclear industry (and there are many) except for weapons. Or at least all the ones that I've seen.

We have already expressed our views about nuclear bombs. We said those who are seeking to build nuclear bombs or those who stockpile, they are politically and mentally retarded. We think they are stupid because the era of nuclear bombs is over."

"Iran, for example, should continue its efforts and tolerate all international treasures only to build a nuclear bomb or a few nuclear bombs that are useless? They can never be used? And is not capable of confronting with the U.S. nuclear arsenals? The overall budget of our national atomic energy agency is $250 million, and the whole budget is aimed at peaceful activities."

"But the government of the United States only allocated $80 million for rebuilding the nuclear bombs. I think Iranians are clever enough to see that with this limited amount of money, $250 million, we are not able to be at war with the other side."

http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn...leged-plot-nuclear-weapons-and-americas-role/

Seems like a pretty sensible and rational stance to me. They're also part of the non-proliferation treaty and have repeatedly had inspections from the IAEA. How is Iran even on the same page as NK? You know, apart from them being fairly solidly anti-American?

 

[TenEightyOne]

NK is I'm sure well aware that the moment the US launches a serious attack on them, even with conventional weapons, their ability to launch could be disabled very quickly. As their nuclear weapons are really the only thing that they have that allows them to credibly threaten the US, the correct defensive strategy is to make their use conditional on the US attacking. That is then a nuclear deterrent.

I agree with most of what you say, the fly in the ointment is NK's very recent claims that the weapons they're developing will be used to strike Guam if the US continue air operations over South Korea. That sounds like the first strike to me, however threatened they feel by one country's military flights in another country's airspace.

Russian nuclear bombers regularly cruise along the coast of Britain (in international airspace) with their transponders off but we're not sending Boris in with a nuclear backpack.

As far as Iran, when was this? All the statements from Iran regarding nuclear technology in the last decade or so have been that they want all the benefits of nuclear industry (and there are many) except for weapons. Or at least all the ones that I've seen.

There's an element of "well they WOULD say that, wouldn't they?" about Iran's nuclear quotes. Khomeini said "this occupation regime over Jerusalem must vanish from the arena of time", a sentiment which Ahmadinejad has repeated. That kind of rhetoric has led to an impression that Iran would indeed strike first if the mood so took them.

 

[Famine]

Why should those who have them be allowed to keep them? The arguments I've heard amount to either "just cause" or "it would be to difficult to enforce removal". Which are both fair points, but hardly good reasons. I mean, there was nowhere near this much fuss over Israel becoming a nuclear power, and they're actually in a shooting war with another state.

I often get the impression that the rules that are applied to NK are not the same rules that apply to other states. Probably simply because they're the "bad guy", which means that they happened to be on the wrong side of a geographical line back when the powers that be divided Korea in half.

I honestly don't see anything worse about NK having defensive nukes than anyone else. I don't like it, but I don't like anyone having nukes. I figure if America and Russia and China are allowed nukes, so is anyone else. To try and claim otherwise is just the big kids trying desperately to maintain their military stranglehold on the world, because a nuke is only really useful if your enemy doesn't have one to fire back.

Fair play to them for trying, but I'm a little more equal minded than that. I don't think little countries should be forced to kowtow to bigger ones simply because they didn't exist at the start of the nuclear game. If NK and Iran and whoever else want into the nuclear power club I say the more the merrier. And maybe everyone will realise that actually no one should have these things before we all destroy ourselves.

There's a few things here.

Firstly, there's the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. That essentially defines nuclear and non-nuclear nation and establishes differing rules for the two. A nuclear nation is one which has built and tested a nuclear weapon before 1/1/1967 - USA, Russia, France, China and the UK. Everyone else isn't a nuclear nation.

The central tenet of NNPT is that non-nuclear nations agree not to pursue the goal of building nuclear weapons, while nuclear nations agree to share knowledge and benefits of nuclear technology and, in principle, nuclear disarmament. There is also a testing ban.

190 nations signed this agreement voluntarily. Five did not. The five were India, Pakistan and Israel, the then-unformed state of South Sudan (although other new states like Macedonia, Timor-Leste and Palestine have joined the treaty since their formation), and Taiwan, which is a state not recognised by the UN because China. France and China only joined NNPT in 1992.

In essence, this is the rules of nuclear weapons. If you signed the treaty and had them, you can keep them, but help out with nuclear power in other countries. If you signed the treaty and didn't have them, you can't make them. If you didn't sign the treaty, you can do what you like. In essence, the treaty says:

Can build and keep nuclear weapons, but can't test them
China, France, Russia, USA, UK
Can do what they like with nuclear weapons
India, Israel, Pakistan, South Sudan
Cannot build nuclear weapons
Literally every other nation

Iran and North Korea both joined NNPT, in 1970 and 1985 respectively. This means that any attempt by either state to create and test new nuclear weapons is contrary to the terms of the treaty that they signed - and thus illegal by the terms of the United Nations. This is why when India and Pakistan build and test nuclear weapons, the UN tuts because Nuclear Weapons Are Bad™, but when Iran or North Korea starts making weapons-grade uranium and plutonium with no civilian use, the UN imposes sanctions.


However, North Korea's situation is a little more complicated. The nation signed NNPT, but withdrew from it in 2003 - the only nation ever to do so. The NNPT allows for any nation's withdrawal, under the terms that "extraordinary events, related to the subject matter of this Treaty, have jeopardized the supreme interests of its country", with a 90 day notice period.

North Korea gave this notice in 1993, although no-one is quite sure what the extraordinary event related to NNPT that allowed it to do so. An IAEA inspection in 1992 revealed that the North Koreans had been illegally enriching uranium (ie weapons-grade uranium - of no use for nuclear power) and extracting plutonium from the research reactors given to it by Russia. It refused to allow the IAEA any further access and expelled the inspectors, then announced its withdrawal.

It froze that 89 days later, when it was agreed to help North Korea build light water reactors in exchange for North Korea ceasing enriched uranium and plutonium production. By 2003 the LWRs hadn't materialised (in part thanks to the withdrawal of $1bn in aid for the program by Japan, following a North Korean "satellite" launch in 1998 that saw a rocket fly over Japan) and North Korea was accused by the USA of enriching uranium again.

North Korea claimed that as it had already given 89 days' notice, it only needed to give a further day's notice of its NNPT withdrawal and left the treaty. Not everyone was particularly happy with this rather creative interpretation, and various bodies like IAEA rejected it, saying that a new 90 day notice period was required. Ultimately that now seems rather irrelevant as, either way, the notice period has now passed, and the UN seems to accept that North Korea isn't technically part of NNPT.

However, for the notice to be valid, there needs to be a basis for the "extraordinary events" and that has never been established. Being caught breaking the rules doesn't really count - and even if it did, the fact is that North Korea was caught breaking the rules about creating nuclear weapons as far back as 1992, when it was part of the NNPT that it had voluntarily signed. It denied it as American propaganda at the time (and again in 2003 when it made the second withdrawal notice) but has since been considerably more brazen about it and confirmed that it actually was enriching uranium from spent nuclear fuel rods, just as the US said it had been - with the help of a rogue Pakistani nuclear scientist who'd provided gas centrifuges before the original 1992 breach - making its second claim of "extraordinary events" and one-day withdrawal notice even more paper-thin that it had been.


tl;dr the above
Ultimately the situation is this:
* NNPT is a voluntary agreement that means nuclear nations can keep nukes but not test them, while non-nuclear ones can't make them.
* North Korea signed NNPT, but was caught breaking the rules of the NNPT in 1992 and subjected to sanctions.
* In response to sanctions North Korea gave notice it was leaving NNPT, on dubious and not legally sound grounds.
* North Korea agreed to stop breaking the rules in 1993 in exchange for oil and two civilian Light Water Reactors.
* After ten years, the LWRs had not been provided, against the terms of the agreement with North Korea. This is partly due to a North Korean "satellite" launch missile violating Japanese airspace.
* North Korea gave second notice it was leaving NNPT, on even more dubious and not legally sound grounds.
* As a result, it may still be required to abide by the terms of NNPT.

And the facts are that whether it's allowed to or not, by voluntary agreements (not forced) it has made with other nations, North Korea has continued the pursuit of nuclear weapons completely unabated. The rules appear to be applied differently to North Korea than to other nations because North Korea is the only NNPT nation that has broken the rules!



As for no-one having nuclear weapons, I entirely disagree. Nuclear weapons are the most powerful tool we have available, and capable of significant destructive power. There are potential uses for them that do not require the obliteration of people, facilities and resources to help further humanity and our survival.

Research has been conducted into using them on natural disasters. This includes, topically, destabilising Atlantic hurricanes before they pose a significant threat, although word is that it probably wouldn't work particularly well. Also volcanos, but that probably wouldn't work that well either. Fortunately NNPT and the various test-ban treaties mean we've never actually tried to do either. We have tried using them to dig canals and harbours though - Russia has built a lake with a nuke and Germany of all places came up with a plan to string 200 nukes together to build a 50 mile long canal to bring seawater into the Egyptian desert for hydroelectric power. And we've thought about using them to mine ore. And to seal gas well fires - again, Russia achieved this pre-NNPT/PTBT. The USA briefly considered nukes to seal the Deepwater Horizon leak.

And while using a nuclear weapon on Earth to plug an oil leak sounds absolutely horrifying if you think of nuclear weapons as a mushroom cloud and a metric giga****tonne of invisible death, it's not directly a given that using a nuclear weapon to stop a catastrophe creates a further catastrophe. Radioactive fallout comes from the creation of heavy radioactive elements (strontium, iodine) from fission mixed with particulates from the ground. The closer a weapon is to the ground when it detonates, the more fallout in generates result of ejecta. Airbursts generate less, because the fission products rise into the stratosphere and mix with the outer atmosphere rather than falling to ground. The most devastating nuclear weapons are fusion - or 'thermonuclear' - bombs which use a fission bomb (uranium, plutonium) to create the apocalyptic conditions required to kickstart nuclear fusion (hydrogen and isotopes).

The largest weapon ever detonated on Earth, Tsar Bomba (although it was 4km above Earth), was a fusion bomb specifically designed to limit fast fission, and 97% of its yield was from fusion alone. It was one of the cleanest nuclear explosions to ever occur, with minimal radioactive fallout. Probably because Russia was nuking a bit of Russia and didn't want any fallout to land on Russia. There's a national park nearby. No, really.

Also, they're the only extraterrestrial defence we have. They could be used to destroy, destabilise or divert asteroids that pose significant threat - and (although their effectiveness depends upon the rock's composition, they are potentially orders of magnitude better at it than other technologies.

A nuke specifically designed to do incredible damage without chucking out that much particulate radiation - of course it would still barf out a ludicrous quantity of gamma rays, but they're rather local, especially underwater - would be a potentially useful tool.


It's something we shouldn't reject out of hand simply because we've used them twice to kill people and it was absolutely awful. However, preventing their proliferation by international agreement, limiting the chances of someone terrible and at the head of a dictatorship with no oversight getting hold of one and being able to use it at their own whim, seems wise.

 

[ryzno]

That was a long tl/dr.

 

[Spurgy 777]

That was a long tl/dr.

Was a whole 35 words shorter than the bit that was "too long"

 

[Famine]

That was a long tl/dr.

Was a whole 35 words shorter than the bit that was "too long"

The tl;dr is 8 lines long and summarises the first half of the post...

 

[m8h3r]

The tl;dr is 8 lines long and summarises the first half of the post...

It was a well written and informative post however which educated me on a few different things I was unaware of. Glad I read it all. 👍

 

[Dennisch]

Silly Kim has fired another missile over Japan.

We need more sanctions!

 

[TenEightyOne]

We need more sanctions!

Well... yes. But China needs to really take part in it.

What's your alternative? Bear in mind that if it's a military plan you need to locate, identify and neutralise all NK's artillery and nuclear capabilities in the first minute. Over to you...

 

[Milouse]

Can't we just wait until he self-implodes? A few more years should do it.

Also, his wife is ageing badly.

 

[Dotini]

Silly Kim has fired another missile over Japan.

We need more sanctions!

Yes, but against whom ?

Get this, the missile rose over 400 miles high and traveled over 2000 miles. Not long ago, another attained an altitude in excess of 300 miles and traveled even further. The progress North Korea has so blatantly exhibited over the last 6 months or so has convinced some (hint, CIA) that Kim has obtained highly efficient and reliable rocket engines of Soviet/Russian design/provenance through the auspices of, wait for it, none other than Ukraine, i.e., our very own client breakaway democratic kleptocratic republic we need to sanction!

edit: We may easily imagine the situation has gone so far out of hand that Japan must now go nuclear, the militarist Abe being delighted to accommodate.

 

[Famine]

Japan signed the NNPT and so must demonstrate extraordinary circumstances relating to the NNPT that jeopardise its safety and give a 90 day withdrawal notice before it can even think of "going nuclear".

 

[Blitz24]

Japan signed the NNPT and so must demonstrate extraordinary circumstances relating to the NNPT that jeopardise its safety and give a 90 day withdrawal notice before it can even think of "going nuclear".

And the withdrawal might convince North Korea that they must attack immediately. Japan has to play by decency rules. North Korea apparently have no such restrictions.

 

[Grayfox]

Can't we just wait until he self-implodes? A few more years should do it.

View attachment 672718

He will obtain orbit first before he implodes.

He is nearly there ATM.

The whole world seems to revolve around hearing about him, soon we will all revolve around him or we will be sucked in him.

 

[Com Fox]

He is big enough for his own gravity to get our attention that's for sure

 

[Grayfox]

He is big enough for his own gravity to get our attention that's for sure

 

[TenEightyOne]

Magnitude 3.4 earthquake detected in NK about 50km from a known nuclear test site. Unknown at this time if natural or Kim-made. BBC.

EDIT: Looking at the USGS map they locate it in exactly the same place as the large hydrogen bomb test. Quite likely Kim-made?

 

[Famine]

I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the quake is 'natural'.

Having vaporised the rocks in the same cave network five times, the mountain probably just collapsed onto it.

 

[TenEightyOne]

Having vaporised the rocks in the same cave network five times, the mountain probably just collapsed onto it.

Seems quite possible now - USGS have updated their reports to put the epicentre at a depth of 5km. The magnitude is in the same order of the known tunnel collapse after the last known test. SK reports that none of the "artificial" sonic signatures that normally accompany a test have been detected.

So, either a tunnel collapse or... US special forces have snuck in Bond-style and exploded the tunnels. More likely the former though the second makes a better film.

 

[TenEightyOne]

US bombers are flying close to North Korea in a show of force that can't possibly go wrong.

 

[TenEightyOne]

US bombers are flying close to North Korea in a show of force that can't possibly go wrong.

NK has stated that America has "declared war" on them and that they therefore have the right to shoot said bombers down, even in international airspace.

We've become slightly immune to the hardening rhetoric of the last few weeks but this particular round of playground-style one-upmanship is as worrying as it's been and could prove to be a terrible turning point.

The whole world should clearly remember it was the U.S. who first declared war on our country....Since the United States declared war on our country, we will have every right to make countermeasures, including the right to shoot down United States strategic bombers even when they are not inside the airspace border of our country

 

[Blitz24]

NK has stated that America has "declared war" on them and that they therefore have the right to shoot said bombers down, even in international airspace.

We've become slightly immune to the hardening rhetoric of the last few weeks but this particular round of playground-style one-upmanship is as worrying as it's been and could prove to be a terrible turning point.

When was war declared? Or are they misinterpreting Trump's threats?


Edit: They are interpreting his comments as declaration of war. I think twitter needs to screen people before they sign up.

 

[TenEightyOne]

When was war declared? Or are they misinterpreting Trump's threats?

Never, and probably.

The question isn't really "Are North Korea right to think they're now at war?" but "Holy crap! Now what?!". If their view of the situation makes them feel that shooting at American planes is a legitimate action then the outcome is probably going to be horrible for a lot of people.

 

[BobK]

When was war declared? Or are they misinterpreting Trump's threats?


Edit: They are interpreting his comments as declaration of war. I think twitter needs to screen people before they sign up.

The US never declared war on North Korea, not even in 1950. That's why for a long time it was referred to as a "police action" and not a war.

 

[Blitz24]

The US never declared war on North Korea, not even in 1950. That's why for a long time it was referred to as a "police action" and not a war.

The 6 decades long not a war has been revived then as a war that hasn't actually ever been formally declared. Formality with wars is so passe apparently.

 

[DQuaN]

Has anyone seen the latest episode of South Park? They really hit the nail on the head. Someone needs to get Trump off twitter before he brings about the end of the world!

 

[Zona]

Has anyone seen the latest episode of South Park? They really hit the nail on the head. Someone needs to get Trump off twitter before he brings about the end of the world!

Trump is the best thing on Twitter though!

 

[Liquid]

The US never declared war on North Korea, not even in 1950. That's why for a long time it was referred to as a "police action" and not a war.

And there was never any sort of peace treaty signed in 1953. Only a ceasefire. And it's been a long-enduring ceasefire so far...

 

[LMSCorvetteGT2]

NK has stated that America has "declared war" on them and that they therefore have the right to shoot said bombers down, even in international airspace.

We've become slightly immune to the hardening rhetoric of the last few weeks but this particular round of playground-style one-upmanship is as worrying as it's been and could prove to be a terrible turning point.

It'd be quite unwise for them to do that, it would probably give the U.S. the go ahead and not much China could do to stop it from happening. Or for that matter defend NK if they were to shoot down a plane over international waters.

 

[Touring Mars]

And there was never any sort of peace treaty signed in 1953. Only a ceasefire. And it's been a long-enduring ceasefire so far...

Let's hope it lasts until Trump is out of office. Ironically, with both sides in this particular fight having nuclear weapons, a permanent ceasefire is the smartest and most likely option.