Escaping the Nuclear Neither-Land

On 27 July 1953, the Korean War Armistice was signed, suspending hostilities (after 4 million deaths, mostly civilian, in three years) “until a final peaceful settlement” was “achieved at a political conference” to be convened “within three months.”

Sure enough, less than 90 days later, a treaty was concluded: the October 1st ‘Mutual Defense Treaty’ between the United States and South Korea, stating that “the Republic of Korea agrees, and the United States of America accepts, the right to dispose United States land, air and sea forces in and about the territory of the Republic of Korea as determined by mutual agreement.” From 1958-1991, there was ‘mutual agreement’ those forces should include hundreds of nuclear weapons (aimed at North Korea, China and the Soviet Union), a plain mockery of the Armistice pledge to “cease the introduction into Korea” of new weapons systems.

The Armistice then, though still in effect, was only honoured by Washington during the infancy of its now 65-year-long life, a grim existence scarred by hundreds of ‘minor’ violations (incursions, raids, exchanges of fire) on both sides, a state of ‘neither-war-nor-peace’ producing the predictably perverse effects listed by the international ‘Women Cross DMZ’ peace group:

• 10 million families separated by the DMZ (the Demilitarized Zone ‘temporarily’ designated as a dividing line between North and South in 1953)
• 70 million Koreans living in a state of war due to unresolved conflict
• 60+ years of waiting for a peace treaty
• $1 trillion spent by the US, China, Russia, Japan and South Korea on militarization, “fueled by unresolved conflicts.”

By the time the US withdrew its nuclear forces from the Peninsula — while keeping the North in the cross-hairs of its long-range weapons — Pyongyang was pursuing a Bomb of its own.

In 2006, after a series of diplomatic near-misses (under President Bill Clinton) and squandered and/or sabotaged opportunities (under President George W. Bush), the North conducted its first nuclear test, a 1 kiloton ‘fizzle’ (Hiroshima = 20 kilotons) that nonetheless demonstrated its deadly intent.

In 2017, after four more increasingly powerful tests and eight years of dour ‘strategic patience’ from the Obama Administration, Pyongyang detonated a 200+-kiloton warhead, almost certainly a thermonuclear hydrogen bomb and staged multiple test-flights of missiles capable of reaching the continental United States (though perhaps not able to ‘successfully’ deliver a miniaturized nuclear ‘payload’). The ‘era of neither’ was clearly over, and as 2018 opened the Armistice seemed far more likely to be superseded by apocalypse than peace.

 

As covered extensively by the Spectator, the massive War Scare was defused primarily by the emergency diplomatic intervention of South Korea’s new, détente- and disarmament-minded president, Moon Jae-in. An intervention to which the previously insult-hurling leaders of the North (‘Little Rocket Man’) Kim Jong-un and the US (‘Dotard’) Donald Trump responded  with unexpected boldness.

The improbable reprieve, however, will not lead to an ‘escape from the neither-land’ until the key, interlocking commitments made at the inter-Korean Panmunjom Summit in April and the US-North Korea Singapore Summit in June are met: the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and the signing of a Peace Treaty.

Why interlocking? To bring peace, ‘denuclearization’ of the Peninsula must mean not just the progressive, verifiable elimination of the North’s extensive programs but an end to the South’s ‘dependence’ on US nuclear weapons: the Armistice-breaking Mutual Defense Treaty also needs ‘de-nuking.’ And any peace treaty would logically incorporate mutual, legally-binding security guarantees of non-aggression, preceded and accompanied by not just nuclear but chemical, biological, and conventional disarmament.

All of which will take time, though in the grand, Armistice-era scheme of things, not much: quite realistically, a five-year plan could be developed aiming at achieving enough denuclearization and building enough confidence in each side’s intentions to allow a peace treaty to be signed in 2023, the 70th anniversary of the 90-day Armistice. And as both the North – “Peace can only come after the declaration of the termination of war” — and South — “declare an end to the war this year”  – are arguing, such a process could and should begin now with a political statement the war is over, never to return: a Korean War equivalent of the famous, non-binding but galvanizing declaration of Presidents Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev at their 1985 Geneva Summit that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”

Denuclearization absent such a declaration is too much of a gamble for Kim (bearing the fate of Saddam and Gadhafi in mind) to take; and the spirit and letter of both the Panmunjom and Singapore Statements identify such an ‘end to enmity’ not as the culmination but part-and-parcel of denuclearization, just as denuclearization is part of the ‘price’ paid for peace.

In Singapore, Kim and Trump committed:

1.  “to establish new relations in accordance with the desire of the peoples of the two countries for peace and prosperity;”
2.  “to build a lasting and stable peace regime on the Korean Peninsula;” and
3. “to work towards complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”

While this ordering is clearly not meant to be sequential, with denuclearization coming last in the process, neither does it mean denuclearization has to come, and finish, first. Yet that seems to be the interpretation of both US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Adviser John Bolton who claim Kim (improbably) agreed to this sequencing.

What does President Trump himself (now pushing hard for a follow-on summit with Kim) think? Before Singapore, he mused openly about an ‘end to enmity’ declaration. At the Summit he told reporters:

Nearly 70 years ago, think of that, an extremely bloody conflict ravaged the Korean Peninsula. Countless people died…Yet while the armistice was agreed the war never ended…Now we can have hope it will soon end — and it soon will. The past does not have to define the future. Yesterday’s conflict does not have to be tomorrow’s war.

While he is in many ways a corrupt, prejudiced fool, those sentiments are not foolish. Foolish is corrupting American foreign policy with often racialized prejudice against ‘the enemy’ (North Korea, China, Iran, Russia), opting for dominance over détente. It is also possible that anti-Trump animus may be blinding some progressives to the importance of moving beyond the Armistice. During the Singapore Summit, for example, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow described the fact the Korean War has yet to be formally ended as “just one of those strange bits of trivia,” while her colleague Richard Engel stated derisively “everyone knows the war is over!”

Tell that to President Moon, Chairman Kim, Women Cross DMZ…

 

It is not, though, just Korea that needs to escape from the neither-land: in Europe, the abject failure, initially by the needlessly-expanding NATO Alliance, to grasp the ‘nuclear nettle’ has predictably produced a new Cold War.

Here again, by meeting ‘the enemy’ as he did in Helsinki on July 16, Trump was right to “take a political risk in pursuit of peace” rather than “risk peace in pursuit of politics,” and to insist “constructive dialogue between the United States and Russia forges the opportunity to open new pathways toward peace and stability in our world.”

Equally rational was his emphasis on re-opening the ‘old’ pathway of arms control:

We are the two great nuclear powers and we have 90 percent of the nuclear and it is not a good thing, that is a bad thing. I think hopefully we can do something about that because it is not a positive force, it is a negative force, so we will be talking about that among other things.

The problem was twofold: the miasma of scandal surrounding Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, rendering deeply suspicious any attempts by the president — ‘Putin’s puppet’ — to resuscitate détente; and the seeming failure of the two leaders to advance the arms control agenda in any serious way. This despite Putin’s declared determination to “fully work through the military-political dossier,” as outlined in “a note” to Trump “with a number of specific suggestions” including “the renewal” of the 2011 New START (Strategic Arms Reduction) Treaty; recognition of “the dangerous situation surrounding the development if the US global missile defense system;” the “implementation” of the still-pivotal 1987 Intermediate Nuclear-Forces (INF) Treaty; and “the topic of deploying weapons in space.” 

While this list could easily be extended — to address, for example, dangerous plans on both sides to modernize short-range, ‘low-yield’ (maximum 5 kilotons) ‘battlefield nukes’ —  it could still serve to advance both sides’ national interests. Most urgently, perhaps, New START, capping strategic warheads at 1,550 each, is due to expire in 2021 but can be extended by mutual consent until 2026. Putin’s note, later obtained by Politico, urged talks on agreeing such an extension, a goal broadly supported by Pentagon officials, including Defense Secretary Jim Mattis.

The other subjects raised are more vexed: each side accuses the other of violating the INF Treaty (see the Spectator); Moscow is still smarting from George W. Bush’s destruction of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty which radially limited missile defenses (thus avoiding the need to build more missiles); and while the note urges Washington to “discuss the non-placement of weapons in space,” the Pentagon (at Congress’s urging) is actively exploring such options, while Trump has ordered the creation of a US ‘Space Force,’ an entire new branch of the US military, by 2020.

If, however, the low-hanging fruit is seized — a New START extension, ideally coupled with a reaffirmation of the Reagan-Gorbachev Geneva formula — it may buy time to build broader confidence, at least partially re-normalizing relations and so lessening the perceived need, on both sides, for dangerous new weapons and doctrines. As is so often the case in the nuclear neither-land, if arms control diplomacy fails to apply the brakes, the military-industrial complex will happily press the accelerator, as witnessed by the Pentagon’s new, hyper-bloated $717 billion defense budget — compared to Russia’s $61 billion last year  – fast-tracked by Congress and receiving a staggering degree of Democratic support (40 Senators, 139 Representatives).

 

But brakes, while necessary, are far from sufficient — what the world needs is a radical reversal, away from the Bomb altogether. The demand is as old as the nuclear age: in 1946, the inaugural UN General Assembly resolution called for the elimination of all weapons of mass destruction from national arsenals; in 1970, the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty mandated “good faith” negotiations on reductions leading to a nuclear-weapon-free world; and last July, with biological and chemical weapons long-outlawed, two-thirds of the General Assembly (122 states) adopted the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (‘Ban Treaty’), passing its first birthday – or ‘Banniversary’ – moving steadily toward entry-into-force, and already radicalizing public and political opinion in both pro- and anti-Ban states.

On August 6, commemorating the 73rd anniversary of the destruction of his city, the Mayor of Hiroshima, Matsui Kazumi, excoriated the neither-forever doctrines of “nuclear deterrence and nuclear umbrellas” which “flaunt the destructive power of nuclear weapons and seek to maintain international order by generating fear in rival countries,” an “approach to guaranteeing long-term security” both “inherently unstable and extremely dangerous. “Please listen,” he begged, “to what I say next as if you and your loved ones were there”:

At 8:15 comes a blinding flash. A fireball more than a million degrees Celsius releases intense radiation, heat, and then, a tremendous blast. Below the roiling mushroom cloud, innocent lives are snuffed out as the city is obliterated. From under collapsed houses, children scream for their mothers. “Water! Please, water!” come moans and groans from the brink of death. In the foul stench of burning people, victims wander around like ghosts, their flesh peeled and red. Black rain fell all around. The scenes of hell burnt into their memories and the radiation eating away at their minds and bodies are even now sources of pain for hibakusha who survive.

“Today,” the Mayor broke the silence, “with more than 14,000 nuclear warheads remaining, the likelihood is growing that what we saw in Hiroshima after the explosion that day will return, by intent or accident, plunging people into agony.” If “world leaders,” he continued, “have this reality in mind,” they will “strive to make the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons a milestone along the path to a nuclear-weapon-free world.”

Our days in the Neither-land may well be numbered. We should act as if they were.

Featured photo: Hiroshima Peace Memorial, also known as the Atomic Bomb Dome (“Genbaku Dome”). An exhibition hall, it was the only thing left standing in the area after the bomb. Photo by Kiyokun, GFDL, from Wikimedia Commons.

 

 

 

Sean Howard is adjunct professor of political science at Cape Breton University and member of Canadian Pugwash. He may be reached here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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