For Pacifica Radio, April 29th, 2018.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, y'all welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm here every Sunday morning from 830 to nine on KPFK 90.7 FM.
In LA, I'm the author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the opinion editor of Anti-War.com.
When the website is working and the server ain't crashed, you can find my full interview archive, more than 4,600 interviews now, going back to 2003 at ScottHorton.org.
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And you can follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
Introducing Tim Shorrock.
He is the author of the book Spies for Hire, The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing.
He writes regularly for The Nation and I don't know where else.
And he's been writing a lot of great stuff on Korea issues lately.
Welcome back.
How's it going, Tim?
Very well, thank you.
So, what a big day, huh?
We all watched last night, hopefully families all across the country gathered around their TV sets like the old days to see as the dictator of North Korea walked across the line at the DMZ and shook hands with the president of the South.
And they had a big summit and I don't know anything else.
You tell me everything.
Well, it was a huge day and that's exactly what people did in Korea, that's for sure.
Here, not so much.
But, you know, the United States here in America, we don't really focus on Korea too much in the reality of it.
But what happened was they reached agreement on ending the Korean War, which they say they're going to try to do this year, which is an enormous achievement.
And that's going to have to include negotiations with the United States and with China that this would end the Korean War and the armistice, which was signed in 1953 by China, the US and North Korea.
South Korea at the time refused to sign the armistice and they want to convert that into a peace treaty.
And so that's really an astonishing change for Korea, especially when you look at what was happening just six months ago.
And they've also agreed to try to make the upcoming summit between Trump and Kim Jong-un as fruitful as possible.
And they stated, and Kim Jong-un put his name on this, the purpose is denuclearization in North Korea and denuclearization of the entire peninsula.
Now, by the way, you know, I know that I keep meaning to ask people this and forgetting, George Bush Sr.pulled the nukes out of South Korea back when?
Who put them back?
I mean, the American ones.
I'd say, you know, first of all, the United States was the first and only country to introduce nuclear arms to Korea after the Korean War.
Very, very soon after the Korean War, the US brought tactical nuclear weapons into Korea.
This was actually a violation of the agreement, you know, the armistice, and they kept them there until 1991, which is when, you know, sort of as the Cold War was winding down, and George H.W. Bush pulled those nuclear weapons out of South Korea, as well as some other countries where the US had tactical nuclear weapons.
And by tactical, I mean, you know, they're like smaller weapons.
They're not these huge missiles.
These are actually some of these weapons where soldiers could carry them on their backs, if you can imagine that.
But anyway, so the US pulled those nuclear weapons out of the Korean Peninsula, but of course, it has nuclear weapons on many of its ships and vessels and planes that are stationed at US military bases in Japan and Okinawa and Guam, and, you know, so they've had these aimed at North Korea and other countries, of course, you know, ever since then.
So one of the key issues for North Korea is, you know, for that nuclear threat to be over.
And that was, you know, one of the reasons North Korea, you know, made advances in their nuclear program because they wanted a deterrent against the United States.
Yeah.
And now, so another big part of this is he said that, in fact, I like even the way he said it was that, well, of course, the American troops on the peninsula help create stability.
So we're dropping our demand on exactly how he said that part, but they're no longer insisting that America pull all of its troops out.
Right.
And of course, all the pundits here and the so-called experts who said that North Korea's weapons were designed to force the US to pull out their troops are wrong again.
And of course, they're not saying anything positive about this move, which is a huge concession.
You know, so I mean, you know, the lesson from this is, you know, all these people, experts and so on that are quoted in the mass media and that are quoted on cable news night after night, they've been wrong for years and they're still wrong.
All right now.
Well, so speaking of which, sometimes when I'm driving around, I like to listen to NPR.
Sometimes I do AM, sometimes I do FM.
But, you know, that's when I have time to listen to what my enemies are saying other than just reading.
And so today I was listening to NPR News and they were interviewing a guy from Tufts University and he was a professor there.
And he said, of course, the only question was, is Trump prepared?
And the answer was no.
This guy, Kim, is so crafty and he says things that sound just like what Scott and Tim and Donald Trump want to hear.
But really, it's all a ploy.
It's all a lie.
And he doesn't mean any of it.
And it's all a scam and it's all a trap.
And in the worst thing that could happen would be for Donald Trump to get tricked into lifting the sanctions.
I'm telling you, people like that have to have massive publicity efforts behind them.
I know exactly who you're talking about.
He testified before the Senate a week or so ago saying basically the same thing.
These people are completely wrong.
I mean, what an insult to the South Korean president and the South Korean government and the South Korean people, for that matter, who, you know, it's up to the Koreans what to do in their own peninsula, in their own country.
And obviously there was some very intense negotiations between North and South that led up to this.
And they, you know, both sides are assuring each other.
And, you know, Moon Jae-in himself was at the last summit of North and South back in 2000, excuse me, 2007, when the president was Noh Moo-hyun and he was the chief of staff.
So he knows these people.
He's worked with them, you know, in terms of bilateral dialogue for quite a few years, as have many members of his team.
So, you know, if this guy, people like that are going to come on and say this kind of stuff, what they don't know is that they're insulting the South Korean people.
They're insulting the South Korean leadership who's done this.
And it's, you know, they've been wrong.
They're still wrong.
All right now.
So here's a guy I really like, and he's certainly not some hawk or some, you know, NPR prostitute.
And that's Bernard at Moon of Alabama blog.
And he had a blog today where he has some really great headlines and leading paragraphs from articles in the news from 1991, 1995, the year 2000 and all these things that actually sound a lot like what we're hearing today.
They're going to have a final piece and they're going to work things out.
And they're going to obviously the denuclearization is only recently become an issue.
But anyway, from the weapons that they've had since 06.
But so what about that?
What about, you know, maybe even if both sides really mean well here, that there's just too much at stake for them to have to give away that that somehow it just couldn't work out.
And maybe even if you want to address just how devious these evil dictators are.
Right.
They're pretty devious.
Well, you know, all those previous agreements, actually, they use words from those previous agreements and the ones they what they announced last night and, you know, the next day in Korea itself.
But they draw on those because, you know, those agreements, they did pledge denuclearization and to work toward a peace process.
What happened with both of them is, you know, the South Korea after 2007 and 2008, there was two successive very right wing presidents who basically took, restored a very hard line taken by earlier presidents.
There was 10 years of progressive presidents in South Korea where they made a lot of headway in resolving and moving toward ending the war.
And then a lot of the progress that was made was undone by these conservative presidents.
And that's something that Moon Jae-in, who was elected a year ago in May, said he was going to do.
He wanted to sort of unravel this, you know, the mistakes that his predecessors had made.
Much the same way that Trump talked about his own predecessors and how they screwed things up.
So, you know, times have changed.
And before, also, the big difference is in the past, you know, the last such declaration was in 2005.
Now, in 2005, North Korea did not have a nuclear weapon.
It was trying to build one, but they did not have one.
They were processing plutonium to make a bomb, but they weren't there yet.
They didn't explode their first bomb until 2006.
And then, you know, over the years, they built their capability, particularly in missiles.
And we saw last year how they fired, you know, 10 or 11 long range missiles and they fired three ICBMs that can hit the United States.
So this time they actually have the capability to fire missiles that can hit the United States.
They never had that before.
So they actually have a lot to give up as opposed to the past, where what they were giving up was the potential to build a nuclear capability.
Now they have one, although they have not been able to put a they have not yet put a missile, a bomb on a missile that can hit the United States.
You're not there yet.
They stopped testing before they could do that.
But they still can.
You know, they still have a deterrence that.
And so they enter these negotiations from a position of strength.
It's kind of like the way Reagan used to talk, right?
Peace through strength.
Well, they did it themselves.
Yeah.
Well, so what exactly is the Trump regime's role in all this?
He certainly played bad cop if that was the part he was supposed to be playing last year.
Yes, he did.
And I think, you know, he raised the stakes to a very high level.
I mean, threatening to destroy North Korea and saying that again and again and threatening them, you know, coming close to threatening them with nuclear weapons was very dangerous and really raised the tensions in the peninsula and in the world for that matter, you know, to the highest level they'd ever been.
So, you know, I think actually his rhetoric like that really escalated the situation and convinced the North and convinced Kim Jong-un government that they really had to have this nuclear capability.
But, you know, on the other hand, I do believe that the economic sanctions, you know, although they haven't obviously have not stopped their rocket and, you know, weapons development, the sanctions, you know, hurt ordinary people, you know, stopping petroleum, you know, imports and that kind of thing, you know, and buying, you know, products from North Korea, you know, over time that can really, you know, cause some damage.
And he, Kim Jong-un wants to build his economy.
And so I think that's one of the reasons, you know, he's he's taken these steps.
So, you know, in a way, the situation has changed in a very fundamental way.
It's you know, they're not dealing with the same United States and South Korea aren't dealing with the same guy that they did before.
Yeah, he's the grandfather and the son, but he's operating in a very different way.
Right.
Yeah.
You know, Peter Van Buren was saying, look, real denuclearization is probably not in the cards.
But what could very well be in the cards is treat this guy like Deng Xiaoping, where once we're getting along with the Chinese, nobody really cares that they're sitting on a few dozen H-bombs now because we're not in a Cold War with them anymore.
Well, if you end the Korean War and there is a peace agreement, then, you know, there's no reason to have weapons.
There's no reason to have them.
I think I think actually, you know, you know, I think, you know, Peter has a pretty careful, careful analysis of what's going on in Korea.
But I think that denuclearization is possible.
And they both, you know, Kim and Moon pledged to move toward that.
I agree.
He needs he needs.
Pardon me.
I agree with that.
I mean, I think it really depends on the Americans to say, you know, to give a legit security guarantee and maybe even to say not the kind that that Bush gave to Gaddafi and Obama rescinded.
I mean, a real one like the one Kennedy gave to Castro.
We will not attack you.
We swear to God.
So seriously, get rid of your nukes.
That's what would have to happen, right?
That's right.
And what it's what the North Koreans call the hostile policy, which they say again and again in policy statements.
And by hostile policy, they mean the nuclear weapons that are pointed at them, as we talked about before.
They mean the sanctions and also the economic embargo that was imposed on North Korea at the end of the Korean War.
And and they mean, you know, they mean an end to these very what they consider very dangerous military exercises that the U.S. carries out with South Korea twice a year, which were scaled back this year.
And so if they get assurances that the U.S. is not going to attack them, that there's not going to be any kind of regime change attempt and that the U.S. will move toward normalization politically and economically, then I think they could give up their weapons.
The point is, look, I think the South Korean view is that this has to be done kind of in a step by step way.
And I think there's voices in the White House, in the Trump White House and particularly John Bolton, who think that they have to kind of, you know, make that promise up front.
But, you know, they're not going to you can't and you can't expect them to like surrender.
Right.
There's got to be, you know, step by step, you know, guarantees, you know, like, you know, for example, you know, stopping, you know, putting nuclear ships and nuclear armed planes during these exercises, you know, stopping that, you know, and then North Koreans can reciprocate it in some other way.
But I think I think it's going to take some time, but I actually do believe that it can be done.
Hey, one more thing real quick before I let you go.
I know you got to go, but I think Trump tweeted this morning.
I saw him quoted on on TV out of the corner of my eye earlier as saying, hey, don't forget China's role in this.
I think he was trying to give them credit.
What do you make of that?
Well, you know, China did slap sanctions on them and kept to them.
I mean, some of the sanctions, there is a lot of trade, obviously, that goes between China and North Korea.
But, you know, they they stopped, you know, all kinds of imports and exports as part of the U.N. sanctions.
And I think they've tried to put pressure on North Korea.
But the thing is, that's you know, that that is not the way to go with North Korea because they resent, you know, China trying to do that.
Yeah.
And invited him to Beijing recently, too.
Right.
Was that a change in policy to.
Well, they promised him that they would, you know, make sure to protect their interests one way or the other.
Well, you know, I think the Chinese were on the sidelines.
Basically, Moon Jae-in took the initiative and this whole peace arrangement is being done by Moon Jae-in, Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump.
It's a three way thing.
And China is not part of that.
And I think the Chinese felt they wanted to know what was going to happen and what Kim was up to.
And so invited him there.
And that was obviously, you know, important because that was his first visit overseas and his first visit with the Chinese.
And they really have been the relations between China and the PPRK have not been very cordial at all in the last few years.
But, you know, China is as a signatory to the 1953 armistice, you know, can and must play some kind of role in the peace process and also in the guarantees, peace guarantees for North Korea.
So, you know, I think they're, you know, they're they're they're playing an important role in this, maybe not in the way that Donald Trump thinks.
But, you know, I don't discount their their assistance in this at all.
All right.
Well, listen, thanks again very much for your time, Tim.
Appreciate a lot.
Thank you.
All right, you guys.
That's Tim Shorrock.
He's got this.
It's the spotlight today on antiwar dot com.
South and North Korea prepare to discuss an end to the Korean War.
That is at the nation dot com.
And, you know, it's particularly good for its scolding of the horrible liberals and centrists and hawks who keep trying to pour cold water on this thing.
And I really appreciate it extra for that.
And again, his book is called Spies for Hire.
All right, you guys.
Now, since this interview was short, I have a few minutes here.
So I figured I would just explain to you real quick why the entire Korean nuclear crisis, such as it is, is George W.
Bush's fault and how it got this way.
So when Kim Il-sung, the grandfather and the founding dictator of North Korea, died in 1994 and Kim Jong-il took over, he started making a bunch of noise about how he was going to leave the nonproliferation treaty and start making nuclear weapons.
And so Bill Clinton sent Jimmy Carter and William Perry and others over there to work out this deal that ended up becoming the agreed framework, is what it was called, of 1994.
Now, what the agreed framework did was it had the North Koreans promise to stay within the nonproliferation treaty and then thereby their safeguards agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency and refrain from making or proliferating nuclear weapons or nuclear weapons technology.
And in exchange, America would give them some money, not that much, some fuel oil, some grain and emergency food shipments, as well as help them construct two light water reactors.
Now, the significance of that is that the North Koreans have a heavy water reactor at Yongbyong, which I'm sure I'm pronouncing wrong.
But anyway, it can produce electricity, but its waste is easily reprocessed into weapons grade plutonium.
But with a light water reactor, it does produce some plutonium 239, but it's too heavily polluted with all different other isotopes.
And as such, it's virtually impossible to reprocess the waste from a light water reactor into weapons fuel.
So it is funny, interesting side note, it was Donald Rumsfeld's company that got the contract to build the light water reactors, but they never did it.
And it was Newt Gingrich and the Republicans in Congress basically refused to let Bill Clinton live up to the American side of the deal.
So they got, I think, some fuel oil and some of the food shipments, maybe even a little bit of the money.
They certainly never lived up to all that they had promised.
And but then when the Bush government came into power against the Secretary of State Colin Powell's wishes, the Bush-Cheney regime with John Bolton, our current National Security Advisor under Donald Trump, serving as point man for Dick Cheney at the State Department, set about to torpedo the agreed framework.
And this is what led to the current crisis.
And it took a while to convince Kim Jong-il to quit the NPT.
First, George Bush insulted Kim and called him a pygmy, which I don't know if George Bush knows that's a real kind of human being.
I guess he doesn't.
But anyway, so that was an insult to the high honor of the, you know, deity, the way that the propaganda in North Korea has it, you know, tearing him down like that was a huge affront.
And then they were named in the axis of evil.
Get this.
Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, the Ayatollah, and Kim Jong-il are all in a giant axis of evil against you.
Axis like, right, Germany, Italy and Japan in World War Two.
Except that none of these, you know, Al-Qaeda and none of these states had anything to do with each other.
And the North Koreans had sold some medium range missile technology to the Iranians.
But that was about it.
Of course, Iran and Iraq were enemies and Osama's enemies of Iran and Iraq, both.
Anyway, so they add them to the axis of evil.
Then they claim, I guess they discovered that the North Koreans had purchased from the Pakistanis some uranium enrichment technology, which is a possible second path to a bomb.
Now, there's no evidence that they were enriching up to weapons grade and that they were trying to make nuclear weapons with this uranium.
In fact, now that they've had nuclear weapons for a dozen years, none of them have been uranium bombs.
They've all been plutonium bombs, as far as anybody can tell.
So anyway, and in fact, this wasn't even in violation of the agreed framework deal that they would have uranium enrichment technology.
That is their right.
It's protected by the NPT.
And unless they're actually making nuclear weapons with it, then they're really not in violation.
They should have declared to the IAEA that they had some.
But again, unless actually unless they're literally introducing nuclear materials into the centrifuges, they don't they're not even really in technical violation of their safeguards agreement.
Anyway, there's certainly no reason to break the deal if it was a problem they could have negotiated over this, you know, separate parallel uranium enrichment program.
But they use that as an excuse to abrogate the deal.
And they just canceled it.
The Bush government in 2002 just outright canceled the deal and said it's over.
A lot of us were distracted with the run up to Iraq War Two at the time.
It didn't make as much headlines, but then they added new sanctions and they created a thing called the proliferation security initiative, which was this extra legal, you know, under international law declaration that the Americans had the right to seize all North Korean boats on the high seas under the guise that they're smuggling illicit weapons, technology, et cetera.
And then in December of 2002, they released the nuclear posture review that cited North Korea as on the list for a possible nuclear first strike regime change attack.
And only then did Kim Jong Il announce he was leaving the nonproliferation treaty.
And just like in the treaty, six months later is the rule he did and kicked the IAEA inspectors out of the country.
And only then did they restart the Soviet era heavy water reactor and start harvesting plutonium out of it to make their nuclear weapons program that they have now.
So the idea was either one, they would get in there after Iraq, they would go to North Korea and they would get a regime change before this actually resulted in the creation of a nuclear weapons arsenal, or they just didn't care because they figured, you know what, a nuclear armed North Korea is a great way to prevent reconciliation with the South.
And it's a great excuse to sell bogus missile defense technology to the Pentagon for trillions of dollars, hundreds and hundreds of billions anyway.
And that giant boondoggle.
So it just took them a few years.
They detonated their first A-bomb in 2006, although, in fact, the first two or maybe even three were classified as fizzles, I guess, which is a takeoff on fizzle, but just means that they didn't quite detonate the way that they were supposed to.
And then in their later tests, they buried them so far underground that the information was much harder to come by and measure by outsiders, but apparently were more successful.
And then most recently, they claimed to have successfully tested a hydrogen bomb, a fusion bomb, although it was probably just boosted with some isotopes, some tritium and whatever.
Anyway, even then, boosted A-bombs, that's still something.
So and then, of course, they've also made these significant advances in their rocket technology.
And the Americans have not made any real significant advances in their missile defense technology other than just cashing their checks.
So as we found out last year, the North Koreans succeeded in making missiles that have the range to hit Washington, D.C.
And so they finally brought America to the table.
And Kim and Moon, the president of South Korea, has taken advantage of the increase in tensions and the crisis, as Mr.
Chorok was explaining there, to go ahead and say, all right, that's it.
Let's put an end to this before it gets too far out of control.
So that's everything in the world is George W.
Bush's fault.
Korea edition for you there this morning on anti-war radio.
Now, the very best article that tells this story in the step by step here and why is, of course, by the great Gareth Porter.
It's at Truthout.org.
It's called How Cheney and His Allies Created the North Korea Nuclear Missile Crisis.
The one that apparently Kim Jong-un and Moon Jae-in are now solving for us.
All right, y'all.
And that is it for anti-war radio for this morning.
Thanks very much for listening.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm here every Sunday morning from 830 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
Find my full interview archive at Scott Horton dot org or YouTube dot com slash Scott Horton Show and follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
Thanks.
See you next week.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
