All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and our first guest on the show today is Charles Armstrong.
He is the Korea Foundation Associate Professor of Korean Studies in the Social Sciences Department in the Department of History and the Director of the Center for Korean Research at Columbia University.
Welcome to the show, sir.
How are you doing?
Fine, thanks.
Nice to be here.
Well, I really appreciate you joining us today.
And so I have a late-breaking update from The Wall Street Journal.
The US envoy to North Korea condemned the country Tuesday over a deadly exchange of artillery fire with South Korea, but urged restraint from both sides of the divided peninsula.
And I guess for those people just tuning in, they might know that last night, our time, there was about an hour-long exchange of artillery fire on some islands west of the Korean Peninsula there.
And I guess the last I've heard, the firing has stopped.
Two were killed on the southern side.
Casualties on the northern side, as yet, are unknown.
Do you have any more information about just the facts on the ground before we get further into it?
No, that's all I know as well.
Two casualties on the south Korean side, maybe a dozen or 15 injured.
And on the north, we really don't know.
OK, and now, can you explain to us your understanding of how this skirmish began?
Well, I don't know all the details of how this particular skirmish began.
What the media we get from South Korea says is that this was a sudden, unprovoked attack from the north, which may or may not be the case.
But the important thing to remember is the dividing line between the north and south is one of the tensest, most militarized places on Earth.
And the boundaries out to the sea, to the west, including these islands, have never been accepted by North Korea.
So it's not surprising that an incident like this would happen.
In fact, it's almost surprising it doesn't happen more often.
But of course, it can lead to an escalation that could be very dangerous.
Well, there's an AP piece here that has a quote from a South Korean official that says that they were doing some exercises, firing south and away from the north, they said.
But then they got a warning from the North Koreans that said, stop your war games right now or we'll shoot.
And then they refused to stop their war games.
That was what started it.
I'm not saying that's justified or anything like that.
But it's a little bit more nuanced than just a surprise attack or something like that.
Yes.
Well, I didn't say it was a surprise attack.
It was portrayed as an unprovoked attack.
In other words, that the south was not doing anything to provoke such fire.
And the provocation is the eye of the beholder.
The North Koreans are very suspicious, if not a little paranoid, some might say, about any kind of military action on the part of the south, particularly in this area, which they claim as their own, where the boundary hasn't been accepted.
So there are exchanges of fire fairly often, but they usually don't result in casualties.
And this one did.
Well, and I guess part of the problem here is that all we have is armistice, no peace agreement, no real peace terms.
Just we promised to stop shooting for now, and that's lasted since 1953, right?
That's correct.
The Korean War, some people might be surprised to know, has never ended.
We have a ceasefire in place since July 1953, but the state of war has never gone away.
We've never found a way to bring a true and lasting peace to the Korean Peninsula.
And under those circumstances, dangerous events like this are bound to happen at some point.
Well, it's always interesting to me the story of how the North Koreans were, in my view at least, pushed by the Bush administration out of the nonproliferation treaty and their safeguards agreement and toward nuclear weapons.
And Bush, I remember there was a press conference with the South Korean president, Roh, I believe is the same guy that ended up committing suicide later, but they had a problem in translation, where Bush said, yeah, we'll do some nuclear talks and some reunification talks or something.
And the South Korean president said, whoa, hey, did I just understand you right, Mr. President?
Did you just say that we could have reunification talks along with the nuclear talks?
And Bush said, no, no, no.
I said, we have to have our nuclear talks, and they have to give up their nuclear weapons that they never would have had except for him in the first place, and only then can we have reunification talks.
And it seems like when the North and the South are trying to work together, they're letting family members cross the border to see each other again after all these years, and opening up a business park on the North side where Southerners work and that kind of thing, trying to integrate, it's always the United States that stands in the way of moves toward peace and reunification on the Korean Peninsula.
Is that right?
I think there's a lot of truth to that.
The US has 34,000 troops still on the ground in South Korea.
They've been there since the Korean War 60 years ago.
And they're very hesitant to support real movement toward integration between North and South.
And the North Koreans have developed their nuclear weapons, they say, out of self-defense, because they see a very hostile US with its own nuclear forces surrounding the Korean Peninsula.
And the Obama administration has inherited a problem that became quite serious in the Bush administration of pushing North Korea into this hostile position.
So how to get back from that, from where we are now, is going to be very, very difficult.
Do you know if the United States has nuclear weapons deployed in South Korea or on Navy ships near South Korea now?
Officially, the United States removed its tactical nuclear weapons from the South in 1991, under George H.W. Bush.
But everyone is aware that there are nuclear-capable submarines in the sea around the Korean Peninsula, and the nuclear weapons could be easily redeployed on the Korean Peninsula if the United States wanted.
They've got forces in Guam and Japan and so forth.
So the North Korean claim that their existence is threatened by US nuclear weapons is not just paranoia.
I think it's real.
Well, and you know what?
Even if they can't deliver a workable plutonium implosion bomb, they still have how many?
50,000 artillery tubes pointed at Seoul?
Something like that?
Yeah.
And Seoul is just south of the border, right?
About 25 miles south.
So they could basically obliterate the South Korean capital in a few minutes.
And how many people live in Seoul, South Korea?
The greatest Seoul population is about 12 million, about a quarter of the population of all of South Korea.
So we're talking about a lot of people who would face death and destruction if a real war were to break out.
Well, do you have any advice for the American State Department, how they might settle this down, how they even come up with a real peace deal, a real agreement, with or without including reunification?
Well, the first thing to do is not to overreact and to realize that military options are not seriously feasible because of the catastrophe that that would result.
And the second thing to remember is that the sanctions that you've been on North Korea haven't worked very well either.
So like it or not, we've got to get back to negotiation directly with North Korea to see if we can calm down this crisis, and then let the Koreans work out the problems between themselves.
Well, now, Kim Jong-il is a dictator.
But is he crazy, like they say?
No, he's not crazy.
He's a shrewd guy.
He knows what he wants, and that is to keep himself and his regime in power.
And if it takes nuclear weapons to do so, then he's shown that he will do it.
So he can be negotiated with.
We just need to figure out exactly the best way to go forward with that.
He's not crazy.
He may not think the same way that many of us over here think, but he's a rational, smart person in my view.
Well, now, this will never be the way that our government handles it.
But if it was me, I would just say, hey, North Korea, let's be friends.
I'll give you a permanent security guarantee.
We'll never attack you in a million years.
We'll drop all the sanctions, and we'll be friends, and we'll trade.
And you guys, we'll buy you right out of communism the way we did the Chinese.
Let's do that.
Is that workable?
I think that's a great idea.
I wish our government would do that.
But unfortunately, it doesn't seem very likely that's going to happen anytime soon.
Well, what do you think their reaction to that would be if we really did make an offer like that?
Well, they'd be stunned.
And then they'd try to scramble to see what they could do.
But if they really took us up on that, I think you'd see significant changes in North Korea and inevitably a movement toward a different kind of regime.
Well, I'm at least thankful I'm hitting refresh on antiwar.com here.
And the headline has not been updated, so I guess that means that the firing has stopped for today.
That's good to hear.
But yeah, boy, talk about playing with fire, huh?
Nuclear fire.
That's right.
All right, well, I hope they call you and ask you for advice.
I like yours.
Thank you very much.
I hope so, too.
All right, well, I really appreciate your time on the show today.
Thank you.
Good talking to you.
Everybody, that is Charles K. Armstrong.
He is all kinds of things.
Korean Research, the director of the Center for Korean Research at Columbia University.
We'll be right back with more antiwar radio after this.
