Hey you guys, welcome to the show.
Sorry I haven't been doing as many interviews lately.
I've been wrapping up this book.
It's almost done.
It's really almost done.
So that's why I haven't been doing too many interviews, but back to work for you here.
Let me just tell you real quick, here's how you can sign up for the feeds.
You go to scotthorton.org or go to iTunes or Stitcher and search for Scott Horton Show there.
Help support at patreon.com slash Scott Horton Show if you want to donate per interview.
Check out scotthorton.org slash donate for PayPal and monthly subscriptions and all that kind of stuff if you want to do that.
I got great kickbacks.
Also shop amazon.com by way of my link on the front page.
I know it was gone for a little while.
Well it's back now.
So do all your Amazon shopping by way of scotthorton.org to help support and give me a good review on iTunes, Stitcher, help share the show on Facebook and Twitter, would you?
All right, thanks.
All right you guys, introducing John Pfeffer.
He runs Foreign Policy in Focus, the great website of the Institute for Policy Studies.
Welcome back to the show, John.
How are you, sir?
Good, thank you for having me back on the show.
Very good to have you here.
Very good to have somebody who knows something or other about Korea.
And, you know, I don't know.
You do know that I got a book coming out because you gave me a great blurb for it.
Thanks.
And my book's all about Afghanistan and then I'm reading the headlines and I'm thinking, jeez, we're all gonna die in a war over North Korea and it's not gonna matter what happens in Afghanistan.
But I don't know, maybe that's just the TV.
It seems like every year the North Koreans say a lot of belligerent things and every year the Americans fly some B-1 H-bomb delivery devices over their border and then they kind of shut up again and then we sort of go through this like the Afghan fighting season.
Is that all this is or is there a real problem now that they've got a better, more advanced missile and the Americans seem to be saying that a red line is drawn and crossed and worse problems are soon to come here?
Well, let's hope that it's simply a repeat of previous altercations between North Korea and the United States.
It's true that Donald Trump tweeted back in the earlier part of this year that if North Korea were to test an ICBM, which Kim Jong-un promised in his New Year's address, that would be a red line.
In other words, he said, we will not let this happen.
But of course, North Korea did do it more or less.
In other words, it tested a missile that went about as far as up in the air, mostly, as an ICBM would if it were to go horizontally and reach parts of Alaska.
That doesn't mean, of course, that North Korea would be able to accurately target any place in Alaska, but at least it seems as though it has mastered some of the basic requirements of an ICBM. That leaves Donald Trump in a position of having to figure out what to do next.
Now, Trump has, of course, demonstrated he's perfectly happy in reversing himself from one day to the next.
Something that he tweeted six months ago is certainly not going to, you know, bind him to a particular course of action.
So it's not necessary that the two countries will move in a trajectory, you know, inevitably toward armed confrontation.
But it is unsettling for the United States to ramp up its rhetoric, for North Korea to ramp up its rhetoric.
On the other hand, on the more optimistic side of things, you know, the United States has undergone any number of reviews and analyses of the situation, and concluded that war on the Korean Peninsula would not be in US interest, nor would it be in the interest of our allies.
So the notion of a preemptive strike, for instance, against North Korea's missile capabilities, or its nuclear capabilities, is probably off the table.
And North Korea, given that it has very modest nuclear capability, and a very modest, one could even say, largely non-existent long-range missile capability, is not going to go ahead and preemptively strike any of its neighbors or attempt to strike the United States.
So all of that is good.
But, you know, wars happen as a result of miscalculation rather than as a result of calculation.
So for that reason, it's still a concern.
John Greenewald Right.
Yeah, this is, you know, the great example of the First World War that the learned are always bringing up on this show.
Eric Margulies likes to say this, that, hey, just because the unthinkable is unthinkable, doesn't mean it's impossible.
You know, governments can absolutely cause crises far beyond what they ever meant to happen.
And it happens all the time, in fact.
David Robinson Yeah.
Yes, they call it stumbling backward into war.
And it's certainly conceivable that the United States or North Korea, or the two combined, could link arms and stumble backward into war.
You know, there are, again, some other mitigating factors, you know, China and Russia are doing their damnedest to rein in their erstwhile ally.
South Korea, under its new leader, Moon Jae-in, is interested in engaging North Korea economically, even possibly politically.
So all of these kind of serve as, you know, damper rods, if you will, that could contain any kind of reaction.
But still, you know, we have two very unpredictable leaders in Pyongyang and in Washington.
So that's a cause for concern.
John Greenewald Well, so, you know, the rhetoric in DC is always, oh my god, it's a threat, it's a threat, threat, threat, they're starting it, their aggression, they're holding a gun to our head, what are we going to do about it?
It's the way that they always frame it.
And that works on people.
Someone just asked me on Twitter the other day, well, geez, when is it okay for me to go ahead and preemptively take out somebody who's threatening me?
When of course, just because you live here doesn't mean that the real situation isn't the other way around.
We're the ones threatening them.
And they're the ones finally saying that, you know, hey, they have a deterrent.
And if you turn the question around, does North Korea have the right to launch a nuclear weapon at the United States in a preemptive strike right now?
Or at American forces in Korea, if we're flying B-1 bombers over their country, if we have the right to preemptively strike them, seems even more the case that they have the right to strike first against us when it comes to who's threatening who.
And I don't know, but you say, oh, come on, they're not going to use it in a first strike against us.
Why are you so sure about that?
Maybe to be that calm is to be that crazy.
Well, the kind of central task, if you will, of the North Korean government is to ensure its own survival.
And generally speaking, the North Koreans have been pretty rational about that.
They haven't done anything too crazy that could jeopardize the survival of the regime.
So they know much better than we do how outgunned they are.
I mean, we are somewhat in the dark as to how many nuclear weapons they have, what their precise missile capabilities or their ability to deliver a nuclear weapon is.
They, on the other hand, are quite clear on what they have and what they don't have.
And when they measure it up to what they know the United States has, not to mention the United States plus its allies, I think they have a pretty good sense that if they were to launch any kind of strike preemptively or preventively against the United States or its ally, North Korea would cease to exist as a country and therefore the government would cease to exist as a government.
Yeah, sure.
They have underground bunkers.
They could retreat to them.
They could, you know, crawl out at the end of the barrage and try to reconstitute themselves.
But that's not really a likely scenario that will make them happy about the future.
So that's why I feel reasonably confident that they wouldn't launch a preemptive strike.
The United States, on the other hand, is reasonably confident that it as the United States could survive if it struck North Korea first.
What it's worried about is North Korea attacking U.S. soldiers in South Korea and Japan, and of course, also killing lots of citizens and civilians in both South Korea and Japan.
So that is kind of restraining the U.S. at this point.
Yeah, I mean, Secretary of Defense Mattis went on one of the Sunday morning news shows and said that, you know, it absolutely would be a catastrophe.
I forgot his exact words, but I think he said it would be some of the toughest fighting we've seen in generations, meaning, you know, since the first Korean War, probably, for our side, for the South Koreans, as well as the North Koreans.
Although maybe they would just drop H-bombs on Pyongyang and just wipe them out.
You think they'd go that far?
Or they'd try to, if there was a war, the U.S. would try to keep it as conventional, conventional as long as they could?
Or is that assuming too much?
Well, we would certainly try to keep it conventional.
I think we would try to avoid having boots on the ground as much as possible.
We can certainly carpet bomb North Korea with conventional weapons that would destroy it almost as thoroughly as if we use nuclear weapons.
And it would also contain the damage, so to speak.
In other words, if we were to use nuclear weapons, given what the, you know, the wind currents were at any given time, it could either severely affect South Korea or China or Japan, and that would not be in U.S. interest.
So if we use conventional weaponry, we can certainly be much more precise, at least in terms of keeping it within the borders of North Korea, even if we're not precise in terms of distinguishing between military and civilian targets.
Yeah.
Well, and I guess there is a discrepancy between using H-bombs to completely erase the capital city versus using, you know, small yield tactical A-bombs against, you know, armored columns or something like that.
Yeah, I mean, we've, of course, never used tactical nuclear weapons.
So we have no idea what they would be like in battlefield conditions.
And in fact, I mean, there have been a number of studies show that, you know, they would put our own forces in as much danger as the adversary.
But, you know, the concern, I think, for the U.S. has been in any kind of situation in which there was political instability in Pyongyang or in battlefield conditions, would be to secure the so-called least nukes in North Korea to ensure that, A, they would not be used by the North Korean regime, and B, that they would not fall into the hands of some other power.
So I think that's, you know, to the extent that we put boots on the ground, that's what we would be focused on.
In fact, that's been the rationale for having Marines, for instance, in Okinawa, so that they can be deployed very quickly to a crisis situation, either in the Taiwan Straits or more likely in North Korea.
Well, it seems like that may be the most likely scenario for the use of American nukes, too, would be, you know, as plan B, if you can't put special operations troops on the ground to try to seize them, then you just nuke the the factory or the store facility where you think they are.
After all, if the choice is either that or let the North use them, you know, that's the kind of, once you're in a war, these are the kinds of decisions Donald Trump is making, right?
Correct, correct.
All right, so now you mentioned China there.
Trump has said, oh yeah, well, what we're going to do is we're going to make China make the North Koreans get in line.
And so, I guess, to what degree is China interested in doing that?
Obviously, they have their own interests, and I guess, you know, to what degree can they influence the North Korean government to do what they want?
China has, you know, attempted to influence North Korea, both in its nuclear policy, its economic policy, its agricultural policy, for decades.
And China has largely not had much influence at all.
Chinese routinely complain about the reluctance of North Korean leaders to listen to them.
And on the North Korean side, of course, North Koreans say, you know, we are an independent country and we don't follow anybody's orders.
And it's particularly frustrating to have China as the big brother telling us the little brother what to do.
So North Korea has consistently pushed back against Chinese efforts to change its policy.
Nevertheless, we have had every single U.S. administration believe somehow that China can be the force in the region to rein in North Korea.
And it's been a governing fantasy of U.S. administrations going back to the Clinton administration.
And it's understandable why Washington policymakers fall into this error.
I mean, North Korea is a wicked problem.
It's a problem that has no good solution.
And it's comforting to imagine that there is somebody out there who can solve the problem if only they would decide to do so.
And I think that's why we have consistently tried to subcontract our foreign policy to China on the North Korea issue.
Trump is but the latest in the series of U.S. presidents to fall into this error.
And he is the latest, of course, to be disappointed by China's inability, or as it's interpreted sometimes in Washington, its refusal to follow U.S. dictates.
I don't think we'll see China do much more than what it's already done.
I mean, China has already imposed some sanctions against North Korea, but not as many as the United States would like.
Nor has China kind of shut down all economic interaction with North Korea, though it has limited it over the last year or so.
So I don't think that Trump will continue to kind of harbor this illusion that Beijing will somehow solve this problem for him, which means that he will have to choose among three at the moment unpalatable options.
One is to continue to ignore North Korea, which would be a continuation of the very Obama administration policy of strategic patience that he and his administration has roundly criticized.
The second, of course, is the one we already talked about, which is going to war, which also is largely considered off the table, at least pragmatically speaking, although rhetorically it remains on the table.
And then third would, of course, be negotiating with North Korea, which is the position that every administration, again, ultimately comes to in trying to kind of hammer out some kind of modus operandi with North Korea.
Trump so far hasn't attempted to do so.
It usually takes a year to two years before an administration kind of comes around to that position.
Perhaps the Trump administration will come to it a little sooner than the others, but that remains to be seen.
All right, well, but what if it was President Ron Paul and I was the Secretary of State and I just went over there and said, we promise not to bomb you.
We're pulling all our troops out of Korea.
We're dropping all sanctions and we're doing everything we can to open up trade relations with you and renew the sunshine policy.
And the Bushes and the Clintons are gone and it's a whole new era, man.
Let's be friends, just like Nixon was friends with Mao Zedong.
If he can do it, I can do it.
Let's go to a basketball game.
Is that just the dumbest damn thing you ever heard or would that actually work or something in between?
Something like that, I think would work with North Korea.
I mean, they're very mercantile in their approach to the world.
If you can come up with a set of offers that appeal to them, taking sanctions off the table, setting up economic relations with North Korea, making a promise that you won't attack North Korea, a kind of security guarantee.
I think that North Korea would respond in a couple of ways.
It would enthusiastically embrace much of the economic part of the offer, though there might be some economic exchanges that they would find threatening to their current political order, but that's something you would deal with down the road.
The security guarantee, well, they like promises.
They prefer to see something more concrete and that would perhaps include removal of U.S. troops from South Korea, but probably they'd be more enthusiastic about a reduction of actual U.S. firepower in the region, not simply troops.
But I think that ultimately what they want is some kind of a positive relationship with the United States and what you would be offering, or what Rand Paul would be offering...
Not Rand, Ron.
I'm sorry, go ahead.
Sorry, Ron Paul.
I just love picking on the boy.
One of the Pauls, Mrs. Paul, would be offering to...
I met Ron Jr.
He was great, man.
I'm sorry, go ahead.
And in return, North Korea would probably still try to hold on to its nuclear capability as a bargaining chip, because who knows who would be the next inhabitant of the White House, but they would probably also embrace a moratorium on missile launches.
And this is something that they maintained for about seven years, between 1996 and 2006, and which they renewed again as an offer during the Obama administration.
So I would see that as something that would be very concrete, which any administration would be happy to secure as a promise from Pyongyang.
All right.
Hang on just one second.
I got to take this break.
Hey, guys, check out The War State by Mike Swanson.
It's a great history of the early days of the Cold War.
The War State by Mike Swanson.
And check out his great investment advice at wallstreetwindow.com.
And then when you go to buy some precious metals, you go to Roberts and Roberts Brokerage, Inc.
That's rrbi.co.
Get Liberty Stickers at libertystickers.com.
And listen, Anne from 3T Editing did such a great job in helping me with my book, worth every penny.
And so if you are a writer and you need a good editor, go to 3tediting.com and you will absolutely not regret it.
And by the way, you can still buy Darren's Coffee at Darren's Coffee Company.
Darren'scoffee.com.
Stop by scottwharton.org slash sponsors for the link there.
And Go Kart Galaxy.
If you got a mini bike or a go kart, they got all the parts you need there at Go Kart Galaxy, too.
All right.
Now, I won't make you tell us the story again of the agreed framework and all that, but actually, yeah, I will.
You know, I just saw a thing the other day, John, where Barbara Slavin, who I like, even though she's at the Atlantic Council and she's not good on everything, she's good on a lot of things, and I personally think she's a nice lady.
And she was arguing with Eli Lake, who is a completely irredeemable, horrible person in every way.
And anyway, so they were arguing about North Korea, and she was saying to Eli Lake, yeah, but you know what?
Uranium enrichment wasn't even part of the agreed framework deal anyway.
It wasn't under their safeguards agreement with the IAEA either.
And so, even if there was some uranium shenanigans going on in 2002, that was no need to break the deal, Eli.
And I just thought, you know what?
Even in my own memory, and I know for everybody else this is true, the fall of 2002 is the history of getting us into the Iraq war, right?
The UN vote, the congressional vote, the aluminum tubes debunked, even in the Washington Post.
But nobody knows the other story of the other aluminum tubes, and how Pakistan had sold some AQ Khan stuff to North Korea, and there was a controversy over whether or not there was actually some secret uranium enrichment going on there.
And the Bush administration took the opportunity to break the deal with the North Koreans when they were inside the nonproliferation treaty, they were inside the safeguards agreement.
Maybe there was a discrepancy, I'll let you iron out the discrepancy.
But they weren't making nuclear weapons in 2002.
So what happened, John?
Well, that's correct.
And as you know, the AGREE framework covered plutonium processing.
And that was the focus, because there wasn't any expectation that North Korea had a uranium enrichment capability or even intended to develop one.
And so the AGREE framework, which was signed in 1994, focused simply on freezing and rolling back plutonium processing.
And in exchange, North Korea got some heavy fuel oil, and it got the promise of two light water nuclear reactors.
And the nuclear reactors were designed to provide North Korea with the energy that it said it needed from its nuclear program.
But it was supposed to be kind of proliferation proof.
In other words, North Korea would not be able to use what came out of a light water nuclear reactor to further whatever potential military goals it had for weaponizing nuclear energy.
So that was the AGREE framework.
But by 2002, already, North Korea was unhappy with the way things were going.
It was getting heavy fuel oil, it wasn't always coming on time.
But that was raising some kind of problems with Pyongyang.
But more irritating for the North Korean leadership was the fact that these two light water reactors, there was really no effort to construct them.
I mean, there was a big hole in the ground.
It was supposed to be part of a larger consortium, including South Korea, building these things, but it just never got off the ground.
I mean, there was some responsibility laid on the shoulders of North Korea for hemming and hawing over certain points.
But basically, the responsibility lay with the United States, the allocation of funds, and the decision to move forward with construction.
So by the late 1990s, North Korea was already unhappy.
I suspect that the North Koreans took a look at the political situation in the United States.
And they were very concerned about increasing congressional criticism of the AGREE framework, increased criticism of the Clinton administration's North Korea policy in general, criticism of North Korean human rights.
And they made a determination that the United States was no longer committed to the AGREE framework.
That's my guess.
We don't have evidence of that.
And they got this offer to pursue a nuclear capability through the second path of uranium enrichment, as you said, through the good services of Pakistan.
You're right.
This should not have been a...
I mean, it was a problem, let's be honest about it.
But it should not have been a sticking point for the continuation of the AGREE framework.
The United States and the Bush administration could have sat down, if it wanted to, and ironed out the problem.
But it wasn't interested in doing that.
It had been looking for a reason to cancel the AGREE framework ever since it got into office in the same way that it wanted to pull out of the ABM treaty with Russia.
I'm sorry to interrupt here, but can you remind me again about just what degree it's a proven fact that they had a secret uranium enrichment program then?
Because to me, it seems a discrepancy that when they did finally start making nuclear weapons, all indications are that they were all made out of plutonium, which is a much more difficult bomb to make.
An implosion device versus a simple gun-type nuke that you can make out of uranium and have a virtually guaranteed successful test to show the world, and yet that's never happened.
So it seems like if they had a secret uranium enrichment program, it really raises the question of why haven't any of their nuclear bombs that they've tested so far been uranium weapons, as far as anybody knows?
Well, initially the proof, so-called, was that the North Korean representative said that it could have a uranium enrichment facility if it wanted to.
And then the Bush administration took that to mean that it did, not just that it could, but that it did.
But I do think that since then, there's been enough kind of circumstantial evidence, if you will, that North Korea did set up the uranium enrichment capability.
And that's largely from the visits of Sig Hecker, who went there and toured what North Korea had.
And his conclusion was that they did have the uranium enrichment capability.
Whether that was up and running in 2002, sufficient to actually generate enough uranium for bombs, that's hard to know.
Also, whether they've continued to build on it, given that they really don't need to since they could ramp up their plutonium program quite quickly once the agreed framework was no more, and again later after the Six-Party Talks agreement fell apart.
So that's perhaps why we haven't seen a direct correlation between what they've tested and their uranium enrichment program.
All right.
Now, I'm sorry.
So if you could go back to 2002 then and how it all fell apart, this deal.
Because what a great deal, no matter really what the details were, even though it was Donald Rumsfeld's company that got the contract to get paid anyway to not build a light water reactor or whatever the deal was.
Who cares?
I mean, I'm a libertarian.
I'm against all taxation.
But if we got to pay direct massive billion-dollar welfare payments to North Korea to keep them from making atom bombs, I'll look the other way for a little while.
You know what I mean?
This is not a bad deal.
And now here we are, and the guess is they probably have a dozen, and we're sitting here wondering if we're going to have a nuclear war against them.
Right.
We'll be the subject of a nuclear war from their side.
Yeah.
Well, I think, you know, you're right in kind of enlarging the context to understand why the agreed framework died in 2002.
The Bush administration after 9-11 was looking at an array of new enemies, this kind of access of evil that they constructed that included Iran, Iraq, and North Korea.
And these were kind of the major threats, according to the administration, to the world through either their existing nuclear capabilities or the capabilities that they were hoping to construct, as well as their support, theoretically, of terrorism around the world.
Of course, North Korea really was not supporting terrorism in any form, even itself not really engaging in terrorism activities and hadn't for some time.
But the Bush administration was gunning for North Korea.
It was looking for excuses to end any kind of engagement with the country, no matter how useful the agreed framework might have been.
So they also not only kind of upped the rhetoric against North Korea by including it in the access of evil, but they started to twist the screws economically going after entities like Banco Delta Asia, which was a bank in Macau that was dealing with North Korea, in other words, providing some funds to North Korea, largely with Chinese investments going through there.
But when you started to choke North Korea economically, then it became quite anxious, if you will.
So that was the kind of climate around which the agreed framework finally died.
But it's important to note that there was only a short period of time, a couple of years between the end of the agreed framework and the real kind of negotiations that took place in the Six-Party Talks.
And the Six-Party Talks began in 2003, a year after the end of the agreed framework.
They didn't really get going, however, until maybe 2005, 2006.
And the agreement that came out of that was equally powerful.
I mean, here you had North Korea agreeing again, not only to freeze, but it actually began to dismantle its nuclear program, its plutonium program, in exchange for lifting of sanctions and removal from the terrorism list.
So again, the Bush administration, even though it took perhaps the most uncompromising position toward North Korea to the extent that it canceled what was at that time a very useful agreement, turned around and basically renegotiated something very similar to it within a couple of years.
Now, this is the one, wait, what year was that agreement reached?
You're talking about the Christopher Hill deal or something between?
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
And this was the one where they started, am I right, they started to tear down one of their old reactors and then Bush turned right around.
It was like he took them off the terrorist list, then he put them right back on in the spring or summer of 2008 or something like that, and scotched his own deal, right?
Well, I mean, he- I'm going from memory here, sir.
He didn't put them back on.
He took them off.
He threatened to put them back on, and that was around a couple of different issues around missile launches, again, around some economic issues.
But even by the end of the Bush administration, the deal was more or less still in place.
There's some controversy over whether North Korea was still maintaining its moratorium on missiles and whether it had stopped or not stopped its nuclear program.
But I mean, more or less, it was in a holding pattern when Obama took office.
And basically, the Obama administration could have, in its first months, kind of pushed forward with North Korea, could have indicated more resolutely that it supported engagement and wanted to continue the deal that had been brokered near the end of the Bush administration.
But it basically allowed, I would say six or seven months to elapse before even getting in touch with North Korea.
And North Korea interpreted that as, you guys are not interested.
Well, you know, I certainly saw that Obama didn't do a thing to pursue peace with them, but I guess I really had not realized that when Bush left, that the window was still open there for a while, that it was real negligence there on his part beyond just he didn't do anything, but that there was already something in motion that he refused to follow up as a whole other level of betrayal.
I would say that.
I mean, you know, again, it's a matter of interpretation.
The Obama people might have said, look, you know, North Korea had given all these indications that it wasn't any longer party to this agreement.
The Bush administration had heightened its rhetoric.
But a lot of that was, in my interpretation, kind of just maneuvering, posturing, you know, and the Obama administration should have seen through that.
It could have made a kind of dramatic, you know, statement or offer to kind of double down on negotiating with North Korea.
But at the time, remember, Obama's foreign policy was perhaps his weakest link.
I mean, he himself didn't have much experience in foreign policy.
And they were just kind of getting their feet wet, trying to figure out how to fulfill the promises they've made during the election with respect to Iraq in particular.
He's trying to figure out how to re-engage with the Arab world, Muslim world.
He's kind of formulating this new policy on nuclear disarmament.
So he has these grand initiatives, and that's what he's focused on.
In North Korea, it's a difficult problem.
They just throw up their hands basically and say, look, we're not going to win any political points working on this issue.
Let's just, you know, let's put it to the side.
I think that was their decision.
And unfortunately, North Korea doesn't really like being put to the side.
And I think that led to a significant deterioration, a reversal of whatever progress had been made at the end of the Bush administration.
But again, you know, just as it happened in, you know, during the Bush years, Obama reverses and, you know, tries once again to, with a leap day agreement, negotiate another agreement with North Korea, once again, to freeze its nuclear program to get some kind of deal on missiles.
It doesn't, again, last very long as North Korea resumes missile launches.
And whatever, whatever promise that existed at the end of the Bush administration, and then a briefly around leap day agreement, again, evaporate.
Yeah.
All right.
And now, was this missile really an ICBM?
It was just a two stage rocket.
And the LA Times said that it was the military originally called it an intermediate range rocket.
And then so I wonder whether it was science and mathematics that made them update that estimation or politics?
I honestly don't know.
I mean, it, I think they were making the determination based on its ability to go very far up and come down more or less where it was supposed to.
And the distance it traversed in doing so, and then kind of applying that intercontinentally.
And that was their determination.
Again, whether that means that North Korea has an actual ICBM capability, I would say, no, I mean, its ability to deliver something accurately to Alaska is really, it's up in the air.
I mean, Apparently, they've had enough problems just getting their bombs to work at all, much less miniaturizing where they could fit on the delivery vehicle on a rocket like that.
That's correct.
And I mean, in addition to the fact that these are very expensive programs to run, you know, obviously the United States has been involved in some kind of effort, similar to what they were involved in with Iran and Stuxnet, to disrupt North Korean launches.
And it's hard to know the degree of success the United States has had.
I guess whenever there's been a failed launch, the United States can claim some kind of victory, even if the launch failed for some other reason.
But those two things combined, the sheer cost of this program plus interference from outside, I mean, it makes it extremely difficult for North Korea to construct a viable delivery system for whatever nuclear weapons it might or might not have miniaturized.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, I'm sorry I've kept you way over time here.
I'll let you go, but I really appreciate your time on the show always, John.
It's always a pleasure.
All right, you guys, that is John Pfeffer.
He runs foreign policy and focus.
That's fpif.org, fpif.org, the Institute for Policy Studies there.
And his latest article is honoring Otto Warmbier.
I guess I should have mentioned that at the beginning about North Korea, of course.
All right, fpif.org for him.
I'm Scott Horton.
Thanks, everybody, for listening.
Check out the full archives at scotthorton.org.
Sign up for the podcast feed there and all that stuff, libertarianinstitute.org.
And follow me on Twitter at scotthortonshow.
Thanks.
