05/20/15 – John Feffer – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys.
Welcome back to the show.
Thanks for hanging around.
I promised you John Pfeffer.
I got him on the line here.
And you know, this article is right up my alley here.
You know, the worst welfare queens in America are, of course, black single mothers.
No, I'm just kidding.
It's the military-industrial complex.
And probably foremost among them all, well, I guess the F-35.
But other than that, it'd have to be the so-called missile defense industry.
They're not getting any better respect from me than that.
Welcome back to the show, John.
How are you doing?
Pretty good.
Thanks for having me on again.
Very good to have you back on the show.
Everybody, you know John Pfeffer.
He's at Foreign Policy in Focus.
I forgot the name of it.
The Center for what again?
Institute for Policy Studies.
That's exactly why I couldn't remember it because I had the first word of it wrong.
Anyway, yes, exactly.
So here we go.
Most of your stuff is reprinted at antiwar.com, original.antiwar.com slash Pfeffer.
And this one is called The Madness of THAAD, T-H-A-A-D.U.S. push for missile defense in Asia will only lead to more missiles and less defense.
Now, that sounds plausible enough to me as a tagline, but please explain, sir.
Sure.
Well, right now, the United States is basically trying to get Korea, South Korea, that is, to sign on to what is called THAAD, or the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, which is basically just, as you said, missile defense at a high altitude.
That distinguishes it from what South Korea already has, which is PAC-2 and 3, which are the Patriot systems, which are basically for not high altitude, but for lower altitude interceptive missiles.
South Korea, however, is not enthusiastic about it, because China's not enthusiastic about it.
And China and South Korea have a pretty strong trade relationship.
South Korea doesn't want to piss China off.
And China is pissed off.
Oh, that's good.
I didn't realize.
I guess I had kind of glossed over that part of it, where the South Koreans are real hesitant to do this.
And now, tell me this.
We could get to the whole ridiculous missile defense and outer space systems and all of that.
But when it comes to the Patriot systems, I know it was a bunch of hype back during the Gulf War.
But did they ever get those figured out, where they're more or less effective against whatever the North Korean equivalent of the SCUD is, medium range or short range missile like that?
Well, I mean, there hasn't been an opportunity, at least in Asia, to test that out.
So we have really no idea what would happen should North Korea send some of those missiles.
Well, like when they test the outer space ones, we know it's a hoax every time.
They have to admit it.
There's just a denying, right, that they pre-program all the coordinates and all this kind of thing.
But do you have any indication about the Patriot, whether in tests, do they have to completely rig the tests?
Or is it proven at all?
Do you know?
No, I mean, those are, you know, with lower altitude, like, you know, Israel's Iron Dome, they do hit them, some things, some incoming.
It really depends on how many incoming.
As you know, there are a number of missiles that did make it through Iron Dome and struck Israel proper.
So they're not foolproof, but they do make some hits now and then, definitely.
Those are definitely subsonic, though, right?
Whatever Hamas has are basically just, I don't want to say just bottle rockets, but they're, what, mortars at worst.
That's not quite the same thing as a real missile, I guess.
I don't know, actually, the difference between ballistic missile speeds or what.
Maybe I'm wrong.
No, I think we would see less accuracy if we were dealing with something coming out of North Korea.
I mean, obviously, North Korea has other means of attacking South Korea, namely artillery, which would be closer to what we're talking about in terms of the Hamas's capability.
And North Korea has tons of that.
And that would be, you know, given the amount of artillery that North Korea has, that would be tough to defend against.
I mean, it has considerably more than what Hamas has.
And now this may have just been propaganda by these THAAD guys or something, but I saw a headline that says, North Korea claims to have miniaturized nuclear weapons.
And I was thinking, I'm yet to see any proof that they know how to really split atoms when they try to do a plutonium bomb, much less miniaturize it.
What do you think of that?
Well, it depends on which propaganda you want to accept, because that's not only propaganda coming out of our military-industrial complex, but it's propaganda coming out of their military-industrial complex.
North Korea proudly announced that it has had the miniaturization capability.
But then again, North Korea makes all sorts of claims that it hasn't backed up.
So it really is, I mean, it's your guess as well as mine, whether North Korea is able to miniaturize, in other words, to make a warhead out of its nuclear material and put it on the end of a rocket so that it can send it somewhere.
It has shown no indication that it's able to do that.
Yeah, well, I mean, their first two tests were fizzles.
And then the third one, I guess nobody knew what happened, but I think we could probably assume the worst of that, right?
And none of those had anything to do with a miniaturized device.
They were just trying to get it to work at all.
That's correct.
I mean, those would be parallel efforts.
So you could have, they could be able to miniaturize something and put it at the end of a warhead, but it wouldn't necessarily mean that it was nuclear capable.
So, you know, I frankly have my doubts as to what North Korea has or doesn't have.
I do know that North Korea is heavily invested into getting us to think that it has these capabilities, because after all, what's the point of putting all this money into something that doesn't work?
It's supposed to have a deterrent capability.
Deterrence is all about perception.
We have to perceive that it has this capability or else deterrence doesn't mean anything at all.
And now, so you raise an interesting point in here that I think people often overlook.
I mean, it seems like all things being equal, which they never are, it would be perfectly fine to build an anti-missile shield all over the place, except for the fact, the humongous one, that America doesn't have benign intentions.
And anytime they're building a missile shield, whether they're trying to do it in Poland or in South Korea, what it looks like to the Russians and to the Chinese is we're just arming up for a fistfight, or armoring up, I guess, and creating at least our perceived ability to do a first strike without having to suffer nuclear retaliation.
If we can get them all good enough on our first go at it and shoot down what remaining retaliatory missiles they might have left at the end of that.
And so that's why, to them, they take this real seriously.
It's not like we're talking a peace-loving republic with a missile shield.
We're talking about a world empire with very explicit designs on Asia, east and west, right?
Mm-hmm, absolutely.
I mean, this is something that, you know, arms control folks have realized for more than 30 years, close to 40 years.
In other words, during the height of the U.S.-Soviet confrontation, there were anti-ballistic missile capabilities.
It wasn't quite a shield exactly that could cover enormous amounts of territory, but we did have ABM sites, anti-ballistic missile sites, that did have the capability, or at least we thought on both sides, the capability of shielding small areas like around a big city or around a missile battery.
And arms controllers in the early 70s said, hey, you know, if we permit as many ABM sites as possible, then we'll basically have not only an ABM race, in other words, both sides will be, you know, spending enormous amounts of money to create as many ABM sites around the country as possible, but both sides would also invest more money in additional missiles to overwhelm the ABM sites.
And so arms controllers thought, okay, well, one way we can block this, at least initially, is to put a limit, a cap on ABM sites.
And that was the ABM Treaty of 72.
It lasted until George W. Bush decided that he didn't want it any longer, about a year after he took office, because it stood in the way of his own idea of creating missile defense or Star Wars.
And so they abrogated the treaty.
Unfortunately, as a result, not only are we, the United States, proliferating our missile defense technology, but other countries are as well.
And at the beginning of my article, I talk about how the Pentagon has finally realized this and has gone to Congress and said, hey, we need this modernized missile, nuclear missile, because of other countries' missile defense systems.
So that's the dilemma we're in again, 40 years after the ABM Treaty.
Yeah, the mad dog chasing its tail there.
All right.
It's the madness of THAAD.U.S. push for missile defense in Asia will only lead to more missiles and less defense, more on America's Asia pivot with John Pfeffer from Foreign Policy and Focus right after this.
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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
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Okay.
John Pfeffer, he's online.
Foreign Policy and Focus is where he writes the madness of THAAD, T-H-A-A-D, all caps there.
And that's for high altitude defense.
Now, let me make sure I got your story straight here, John.
You're saying that, not as a pretext, but actually it's supposed to be geared toward North Korea, but the Chinese take it as a threat anyway.
I think implicit is because they only have a couple of dozen nukes, maybe a few dozen or something, right?
Not the thousands that the Russians and the Americans have.
And so they're really worried that this is all about them and all about first strike.
But do I read you right that you're saying it really is about North Korea, even though it's really just about selling missile defense because the North Koreans don't have any high altitude, anything to shoot down anyway.
But that's basically what the policy, at least as close as we can get to reality, that's what it's based on.
Well, you're right.
I mean, basically we're talking about something that costs upwards nearly a billion dollars for one of these systems.
And that's a lot of money that Lockheed Martin could make selling it to South Korea and potentially Japan as well.
In terms of the threat, well, of course, the United States says it's worried about North Korea.
And I trust that it is worried about North Korea, but its partner, South Korea, doesn't need THAAD to defend against North Korea because South Korea is right next to North Korea.
So there's nothing that's going to come out of North Korea, whether it has it or not, to attack South Korea that's going to be high altitude like that.
It's going to be artillery.
It's going to be something that can be addressed or not addressed by PAC, by the Patriot system.
So fundamentally, THAAD would be used in any functional way against the Chinese nuclear capability.
And while it's true that China has a nuclear capability that's far less than anything the United States or Russia has, it is in the process of modernizing it.
And one of the most recent innovations that China has been exploring is MERV, another term from the 1970s.
It's almost as if we're getting these terrible acid flashbacks from the 1970s, first the ABM with the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and now MERV, which was Multiple Independently Targeted Reentry Vehicles.
MERV was this big debate between the United States and the Soviet Union about the ability of a warhead to basically send out little warheads to sprout like a fireworks and send out these little multiple reentry vehicles or warheads that would be independently targeted.
In other words, you could target them at different sites, different missile sites, cities, et cetera.
Something that hitherto only a few members of the nuclear club capability that they had.
And China now too is exploring this as part of its overall modernization.
So again, we're getting into this dynamic where China is fearing the ability of the United States and its allies to take away its deterrent capability and therefore modernizing its nuclear arsenal in order to, again, regain that deterrent capability.
So we're going to see a nuclear arms race, if that goes through, if it's pushed onto our South Korean allies and into Japan, accelerate in East Asia.
Yeah, well, and you know, it's interesting, maybe it's just a side note and maybe the Chinese would have figured it out themselves anyway.
Nobody called them stupid, even when they adopted Maoism.
But it was Bill Clinton who hired John Wong and put him in the commerce department, James Riotti's guy, and put him in charge of licensing Loral and Hughes Corporation to transfer the multiple re-entry vehicle technology to China back in the 1990s.
Obviously, clearly in direct exchange for campaign cash.
And so they said, hey, look, everybody, Johnny Chung and Charlie Tree, when the real scandal was John Wong and his licensing of the transfers of this technology, which all got swept under the rug back then.
And we are with the Obama administration in a similar kind of licensing frenzy.
It may not be in the same exchange for political favors and contributions as we saw with the Clinton administration, but it is in exchange for contracts from the military industrial complex, which has gained tremendously.
You know, the Obama administration has surpassed any other administration in history, including the predecessor, George W. Bush, in terms of arms exports, which is really quite remarkable considering the amount of arms exports that our predecessor administrations were engaged in.
And part of that is as well licensing agreements.
In other words, agreements that provide technology so that our allies and occasionally even our competitors are able to produce competitive technologies.
So the most controversial, of course, is drone technology, which we hitherto had, you know, tried to retain our technological edge.
But now under the Obama administration, we decided we're going to go ahead and export that as well.
Yeah, it's really amazing the way they can just keep escalating this the way.
Well, can you talk to us about when China hit a satellite with a missile and what they said at the time was, hey, America, stop militarizing space.
We're just trying to prove that we can defend ourselves.
And the Americans said, oh my God, China just invented the militarization of space.
We're going to have to defend ourselves from them.
Yeah, this has been a major issue again, unfortunately, since the 1970s.
And that is the degree to which the arms race has spread to space.
It has involved as well a kind of satellite arms race or a satellite race among all the countries that are capable of launching satellites.
Because of course, the ability to launch a satellite, the ability to knock a satellite out of orbit is directly related to one's ability to launch ICBMs and to be accurate about the targeting of ICBMs.
So this was China saying, hey, you know, the United States wants to achieve full spectrum dominance, which of course includes outer space.
But there are other countries that are interested in either maintaining the demilitarization of space, or at least having some capability in space that would be rival to the United States.
Hitherto, a number of countries in East Asia had remained outside of this, Japan primarily, but Japan too basically changed its operating system, if you will, to permit its engagement in the militarization of space.
South Korea has a satellite capability.
North Korea for many years was kind of essentially hiding its nuclear program under the rubric of trying to get a satellite into space.
And it either did or didn't.
It did maybe briefly, and the satellite was up there broadcasting the song of Kim Il-sung for a period of time before it fell out of orbit.
So this is a major kind of competition in East Asia over the skies above the country.
And it's not just about the kind of ability to target ICBMs.
It's also, of course, about surveillance capabilities.
And that brings us back to THAAD because one of the things the Chinese government is worried about, not only is THAAD possibly going to degrade China's deterrent capability, but there is a surveillance capability that's built into THAAD that could get additional information about what's going on inside China.
And China's not all that enthusiastic about that.
The United States has retorted that it has other ways of getting that information.
But of course, THAAD would be an enhancement of that surveillance capability.
And now, so you mentioned the military industrial complex and all the weapon sales and all of this, but when you say, in the article, we should be paying attention to our national interests instead of letting Lockheed Martin determine the security policies, is that the proverbial Lockheed Martin or that is no really, they and their lobbyists have dreamed up this crap just to steal our money.
And that's really, right where the nexus lies in their offices in our U.S. Congress.
This would be literally Lockheed Martin because it's the producer of THAAD.
It's not the only kind of military contractor that's involved in missile defense, but this specific system is directly connected to Lockheed Martin.
And of course, you're not gonna have a lobbyist from Lockheed Martin going into Washington, D.C. and saying, hey, let's restart the six-party talks with North Korea.
That's fundamentally not in their interest.
They may be neutral on the question, but they're not going to lobby in favor of that.
And at the moment, we haven't had six-party talks for several years.
The Chinese are interested in restarting it.
Russians are.
South Korea, Japan, willing to go along.
The United States not put a lot of political capital into that.
The Obama administration, for a number of reasons, has basically been focused more on the so-called Pacific pivot, its components being either the sale of military technology to our allies, the construction of new military bases in the region, as well as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the economic component.
The six-party talks has not been part of the Pacific pivot, and certainly Lockheed Martin and its denizens are not in support of such diplomatic efforts.
Well, as you may know, Medea Benjamin and a bunch of other activists from, I guess, around the world are celebrating International Woman's Day or Women's Day this Saturday, I think it is, to just march right across the DMZ and they convince the North and the South Korean governments to allow it.
And they're saying, we're just tired of waiting on these politicians and their stupid talks and their unending peace processes that never go anywhere.
We're just going to do this thing.
I wonder what you think of that and the prospects for, I mean, what the hell?
Obama's made some kind of joke about it's his eff it years that the lame duck end of his presidency means he can either do nothing or he can do whatever he wants.
He's trying to make peace sort of, kind of with Iran.
He's making peace with Cuba.
Why not just go ahead and call this whole thing off?
It's stupid anyway.
Yeah, they're a totalitarian dictatorship, but so is America too.
So I think what Medea and Gloria Steinem and Christine Ahn are doing is great and more power to them.
What they'd like is to get a peace treaty signed.
So they are frustrated with the efforts of diplomats, but they are trying to get some kind of a peace treaty sign that would effectively replace the armistice that ended the fighting in the Korean War in 1953.
There is a possibility.
I mean, it would be great to see Obama kind of turn around and say, as you said, this is my lame duck period and hell with it.
I'm just going to do what I think is necessary in terms of kind of pushing the planet towards peace.
The initiatives with Iran, with Cuba are definitely laudatory.
And I think it would be fabulous to add a Korean peace treaty as kind of the third jewel in that crown.
Hey, listen, as long as I'm keeping you a minute over time here, is it OK if I ask you one more thing here?
Sure.
Yeah, because isn't it right that George W. Bush, when he sent Christopher Hill over there before he sabotaged his own dumb thing, was actually making some pretty good progress there in the last years of the junior administration?
That's correct.
Absolutely.
And it was a complete 180 degree turn on the Bush administration's part since it had come in in 2001 vehemently opposed to any kind of diplomatic engagement with North Korea.
So yes, by 2006, they'd realized that that effort was producing absolutely nothing and that they had to try something new.
So it is possible that we could see a similar kind of pivot, if you will, from the Obama administration realizing that its own kind of hostile policy toward North Korea has only led to North Korea having more weapons and not changing its internal policies at all.
So maybe it's time for a new kind of approach.
Yeah, it is strange that the Obama guys have decided, let's just never even mention North Korea.
Let's just pretend it doesn't exist for eight years because we've got other problems and whatever.
I guess they invoke it as an excuse to sell some missiles here and there.
But as far as diplomacy, they just don't even touch it whatsoever, huh?
Pretty much.
I mean, you know, I think it was a strategic decision that in the past, negotiations with North Korea did not yield great dividends, whereas investment into negotiations with Iran and Cuba obviously are yielding dividends.
The mention of North Korea is somewhat of an embarrassment to the Obama administration because their opponents in Congress and the Republican Party can say, hey, you know, on your watch, North Korea went nuclear, which isn't exactly true.
But anyway, they can use that argument.
And so the less they talk about North Korea, the less they open themselves up to that kind of criticism.
Yeah.
In other words, it's all about politics and not the national interest like everything else.
Correct.
Yep.
All right.
Great.
Thanks so much for your time.
I sure appreciate it, John.
Thank you.
All right, y'all.
That's John Pfeffer, director of foreign policy and focus at fpif.org.
And this one is there and at antiwar.com as well.
The madness of THAAD.
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