Daily Archives: April 28, 2017

Paul Atwood, a Senior Lecturer in American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, provides a concise summary of the history that informs North Koreas relations with the United States and drives its determination never to submit to any American diktat.

Excerpts from Atwoods summary are here used as a framework, with other sources where indicated.

Atwood notes it is an American myth that the North Korean Army suddenly attacked without warning, overwhelming surprised ROK defenders. In fact, the North/South border had been progressively militarized and there had been numerous cross border incursions by both sides going back to 1949.

Part of what made the USs ultimate destruction of Korea (which involved essentially a colossal version of one of the cross-border incursions) inevitable was the goal of US planners to access or control global resources, markets and cheaper labor power.

In its full invasion of the North, the US acted under the banner of the United Nations. However, the UN at that time was largely under the control of the United States, and as Professor Carl Boggs (PhD political science, UC Berkeley) puts it, essentially was the United States. (28)

While it is still today the worlds most powerful military empire, the US was then at the peak of its global dominance the most concentrated power-center in world history. Almost all allies and enemies had been destroyed in World War II while the US strategically preserved its forces, experiencing just over 400,000 overall war-related deaths after Germany and Japan declared war on the US, whereas Russia, for example, lost tens of millions fending off the Nazi invasion. Boggs further notes that as the UN gradually democratized, US capacity to dictate UN policy waned, with the US soon becoming the world leader in UN vetoes. (154)

In South Korea, tens of thousands of guerrillas who had originated in peoples committees in the South fought the Americans and the ROK (Republic of Korea), the Southern dictatorship set up by the US. Before hot war broke out, the ROK military over mere weeks summarily executed some 100,000 to 1 million (74) (S. Brian Wilson puts the figure at 800,000) guerillas and peasant civilians, many of whom the dictatorship lured into camps with the promise of food. This was done with US knowledge and sometimes under direct US supervision, according to historian Kim Dong-choon and others (see Wilson above for more sources). The orders for the executions undoubtedly came from the top, which was dictator Syngman Rhee, the US-installed puppet, and the US itself, which controlled South Koreas military.After the war, the US helped try to cover up these executions, an effort that largely succeeded until the 1990s.

At a point in the war when the US was on the verge of defeat, General Douglas MacArthur

announced that he saw unique opportunities for the deployment of atomic weapons. This call was taken up by many in Congress.

Truman rejected this idea and instead authorized MacArthur to conduct the famous landings at Inchon in September 1950, which threw North Korean troops into disarray and MacArthur began pushing them back across the 38th Parallel, the line the US had arbitrarily drawn to artificially divide Korea, where there was overwhelming support for unification among the countrys population as a whole. The US then violated its own artificial border and pushed into the North.

China warned the US it would not sit by while the its neighbor was invaded (China itself also feared being invaded), but MacArthur shrugged this off, saying if the Chinese tried to get down to Pyongyang he would slaughter them, adding, we are the best. MacArthur 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 Koreas 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.

Lemay estimated the US killed off some 20% of the [North Korean] population.(For comparison, the highest percentage of population lost in World War II was in Poland, which lost approximately 16.93 to 17.22% of its people overall.) Dean Rusk, who later became a Secretary of State, said the US targeted and attempted to execute every person that moved in North Korea, and tried to knock over every brick standing on top of another.

Boggs gives many examples of mass atrocities, one taking place in 1950 when the US rounded up nearly 1,000 civilians who were then beaten, tortured, and shot to death by US troops, another in Pyongyang when the US summarily executed 3,000 people, mostly women and children, and another when the US executed some 6,000 civilians, many with machine guns, many by beheading them with sabers. He notes this list, just of the major atrocities, goes on endlessly. (75)

Above: US/UN forces in Korea in tanks painted to look like tigers.

When Chinese forces followed through on their threat and entered North Korea, successfully pushing back US troops, Truman then threatened China with nuclear weapons, saying they were under active consideration. For his part, MacArthur demanded the bombs As he put it in his memoirs:

I would have dropped between thirty and fifty atomic bombsstrung across the neck of Manchuriaand 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.

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 [mostly civilians and mostly resulting from US aerial bombardments in which civilians were deliberately targeted (54, 67-8), as were schools, hospitals, and churches (65). Estimates for the death toll also go much higher than 4 million (74)].

Boggs notes US propaganda during this time period (the US was a world leader in eugenics scholarship and race-based legal discrimination) dehumanized Asians and facilitated targeting and mass executions of inferior civilians: the US decision to target civilians was planned and systematic, going to the top of the power structure. no one was ever charged Some in the US forces, such as General Matthew Ridgeway, claimed the war was a Christian jihad in defense of God. (54-5) Analysts at George Washington University, looking at US contingency plans from this era to wipe out much of the worlds population with nuclear weapons, determined a likely rationale for the USs doctrine of targeting of civilians is to reduce the morale of the enemy civilian population through fear the definition of terrorism.

Atwood continues:

The question of whether the U.S. carried out germ warfare has been raised but has never been fully proved or disproved. 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 [including non-consensual human experimentation] with captured Nazi and Japanese germ warfare experts, and also [conducting non-consensual human experimentation on tens of thousands of people, including in gas chambers and aerial bombardments, with mustard gas and other chemical weapons,] experimenting with Sarin[later including non-consensual human experimentation], despite its ban by the Geneva Convention.

Boggs notes the US had substantial stocks of biological weapons and US leaders thought they might be able to keep their use secret enough to make a plausible denial. They also thought that if their use was uncovered, the US could simply remind its accusers that it had never signed the 1925 Geneva Protocol on biological warfare. (135-6)

A 1952 US government film made to instruct the US armed forces on the USs offensive biological and chemical warfare program says the US can deliver a biological or chemical attack hundreds of miles inland from any coastline to attack a large portion of an enemys population. The film shows US soldiers filling bio/chemical dispersal containers for contamination of enemy areas, and then a cartoon depiction of US bio/chem weapons agents being delivered from US ships, passing over Korea, and covering huge swathes of China.

Boggs notes

the US apparently hoped the rapid spread of deadly diseases would instill panic in Koreans and Chinese, resulting in a collapse of combat morale. (136)

Atwood adds that as in the case of the Rhee/US mass executions of South Koreans, Washington blamed the evident use of germ warfare on the communists.

The US also used napalm, a fiery gel that sticks to and burns through targets,

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. A British journalist wrote that the northern population was living a troglodyte existence. In the Spring of 1953 US warplanes hit five of the largest dams along the Yalu river completely inundating and killing Pyongyangs 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.

Atwood concludes it is the collective memory of the above that animates North Koreas policies toward the US today.

Under no circumstances could any westerner reasonably expect 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.

Robert J. Barsocchini is an independent researcher and reporter whose interest in propaganda and global force dynamics arose from working as a cross-cultural intermediary for large corporations in the US film and Television industry. His work has been cited, published, or followed by numerous professors, economists, lawyers, military and intelligence veterans, and journalists. He begins work on a Masters Degree in American Studies in the fall.

Source

Boggs, Carl. The Crimes of Empire. London; New York: Pluto; Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Print.

See the rest here:

Endless Atrocities: The US Role in Creating the North Korean Fortress-State - Center for Research on Globalization

RAVEN ROCK: The Story of the U.S. Governments Secret Plan to Save Itself While the Rest of Us Die

By Garrett Graff. Simon & Schuster. 529 pp. $28

Garrett Graff says that his new book, Raven Rock, a detailed exploration of the United States doomsday prepping during the Cold War, provides a history of how nuclear war would have actually worked the nuts and bolts of war plans, communication networks, weapons, and bunkers and how imagining and planning for the impact of nuclear war actually changed ... as leaders realized the horrors ahead.

But if there is anything that Raven Rock proves with grim certitude, it is that we have little idea how events would have unfolded in a superpower nuclear conflict, and that technological limits, human emotion and enemy tactics can render the most painstaking and complex arrangements irrelevant, obsolete or simply obscene.

These contradictions are evident with each commander in chief Graff considers. During an apparent attack that proved to be a false alarm, Harry Truman refused to follow protocol and instead remained working in the Oval Office. Same with Jimmy Carter, who after a 1977 drill wrote in his diary that my intention is to stay here at the White House as long as I live to administer the affairs of government, and to get Fritz Mondale into a safe place to ensure the survival of the presidency. And after Richard Nixons first briefing on the use of nuclear weapons there were only five possible retaliatory or first-strike plans, and none involved launching fewer than 1,000 warheads national security adviser Henry Kissinger was blunt about the presidents dismay with his alternatives: If thats all there is, he wont do it.

Graff, a former editor of Washingtonian and Politico magazines, covers every technicality of the construction of underground bunkers and secret command posts, every war game and exercise, every debate over presidential succession planning and continuity of government, every accident that left us verging on nuclear war. It is a thorough account, and excessively so; the detail is such that it becomes hard to distinguish consequential moments from things that simply happened. He describes one presidential briefing on nuclear tactics as a blur of acronyms and charts, minimizing the horror and reducing the death of hundreds of millions to bureaucratic gobbledygook, and at times this book commits the same offense.

Its power, however, lies in the authors eye for paradox. The plans for continuity of government and nuclear war are cumulative, developed in doctrines, directives and studies piling up over decades; yet it is up to short-lived and distracted administrations to deploy or reform them. War planning hinges on technology that constantly evolves, so plans invariably lag behind. More specifically, continuity of government depends on keeping top officials alive, yet the precise moment when evacuating would be most important also was precisely when it was most important to remain at the reins of government, Graff writes. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld proved the point on Sept. 11, 2001, when he stayed at the Pentagon and dispatched Paul Wolfowitz to Raven Rock, the Pennsylvania mountain hideaway north of Camp David that serves as the namesake for this book. Thats what deputies are for, the Pentagon chief explained, in a beautifully Rumsfeldian line.

[Trumps new Russia expert wrote a psychological profile of Vladimir Putin and it should scare Trump]

There are more personal reasons people would choose not to leave Washington in the case of looming nuclear war. For years, evacuation plans excluded the families of senior officials. Apparently the wives of President Dwight Eisenhowers Cabinet members were less than pleased to learn that they had not made the list, even while their husbands secretaries had. And when an administration representative handed Earl Warren the ID card that would grant him access to a secure facility in an emergency, the chief justice replied, I dont see the pass for Mrs. Warren. Told that he was among the countrys 2,000 most important people, Warren handed the card back. Well, here, he said, youll have room for one more important official.

Perhaps the presence of the Supreme Court would prove inconvenient, anyway, because a post-nuclear America could easily become an executive branch dictatorship, Graff explains. Eisenhower worried about this, though it did not stop him from establishing a secret system of private-sector czars who would step in to run massive sectors of the U.S. economy and government, with the power to ration raw materials, control prices and distribute food. When President John Kennedy discovered this system, he quickly dismantled it, even if his younger brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, carried around a set of prewritten, unsigned documents providing the FBI and other agencies sweeping powers to detain thousands of people who could be deemed security threats in wartime. And the Eisenhower-era Emergency Government Censorship Board, rechristened the Wartime Information Security Program under Nixon, was finally defunded after Watergate. However, as Graff notes, the executive orders all still remained drafted ready for an emergency when it arrived.

For all the ominous directives and war scenarios, there is something random and even comical about planning for Armageddon. How many Export-Import Bank staffers rate rescuing? How many from the Department of Agriculture? A Justice Department public affairs official was once even tasked with compiling a lineup of Washington journalists who should be saved. I remember painfully going over a list of people and wondering how do you balance a columnist I didnt think very much of as opposed to a reporter who I thought really did work, he said. And then, what should the chosen few take along? The congressional bunker at the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia, for instance, included a stash of bourbon and wine; staffers swore that the stockpile was to be used only to aid a hypothetical alcoholic congressman who might need to be weaned off.

Raven Rock revels in the expensive machinery and elaborate contingency formulas presidents had at their disposal to command the nuclear arsenal. High-tech ships known as the National Emergency Command Post Afloat (nicknamed the Floating White House) were ready for use from 1962 into the Nixon years, while a string of EC-135 aircraft flights (code-named Looking Glass) began continuous shifts on Feb. 3, 1961, ensuring that one senior military leader with the proper authority would always be available to order a nuclear strike. Not breaking the chain of these overlapping flights became an U.S. military obsession, and it remained unbroken until the end of the Cold War.

Some efforts were low-tech, too: In 2009, President Barack Obama signed an executive order decreeing that the Postal Service would be responsible for delivering medical countermeasures to homes across America in case of biological attacks, because it had a unique capacity for rapid residential delivery. (Neither snow nor rain, nor germ warfare.)

Technology meant to defend can prove risky. In November 1979, NORAD computers detected a massive Soviet assault, targeting nuclear forces, cities and command centers. Turns out someone had mistakenly inserted a training tape into the system. Six months later, a faulty 46-cent computer chip briefly made it seem like 2,200 Soviet missiles were soaring toward U.S. targets. And in September 1983, Soviet satellites identified five U.S. missiles heading toward the U.S.S.R. except the satellites had mistaken the sun reflecting off cloud cover as the heat of a missile launch. The Soviet early warning system was a dangerous mess, Graff writes. Ours wasnt that great, either.

[How an American slacker caught a Russian spy at a New Jersey Hooters]

Over the decades, shifts in nuclear policy reflected presidents views on what was possible, technologically and strategically. Eisenhower planned for massive retaliation attacks, Kennedy relied on the notion of mutually assured destruction, and Carter imagined a drawn-out war, in which an initial nuclear exchange could produce weeks of inaction before follow-up strikes. Ronald Reagan issued a presidential directive suggesting for the first time that the United States should prevail in a nuclear war, even if the 1983 television movie The Day After later left him feeling greatly depressed, as he wrote in his diary.

For all the horrors it contemplates, Raven Rock proves most depressing for those of us left outside the bunkers. Though early on, Cold War administrations regarded civil defense as a priority, officials quickly realized how hard it would be to protect the American population from nuclear attack, especially as the shift from bombers to missiles reduced response times from hours to minutes. Rather than remake the entire society, Graff writes, the government would protect itself and let the rest of us die.

But every mushroom cloud has a silver lining: Graff reports that the IRS considered how it would collect taxes in the post-nuclear wasteland and concluded that it seemed unfair to assess homeowners and business owners on the pre-attack tax assessments of their property.

Leave it to a nation founded in opposition to unfair levies to study the tax implications of the end of the world.

Follow Carlos Lozada on Twitter and read his latest reviews, including:

Trumps national security adviser says hes ready to fight another world war

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See the rest here:

How US presidents prepare for the end of the world - Washington Post