The US has tried negotiating with North Korea

The negotiations room at Panmunjom

North Korea is ruled by a murderous totalitarian government that has committed acts of terrorism.   But that government has been willing to make arms agreements with the United States in the past, and it is the U.S. government that has broken these agreements.

 The first agreement was the 1953 Armistice that ended the Korean Conflict.   Under this agreement, the two sides agreed to stop fighting, pull back, respect and demilitarized zone and not introduce any new weapons into the Korean peninsula, pending signing of a peace treaty.

That is, each side could replace weapons, rifle for rifle and tank for tank, but they couldn’t increase the total number of weapons or introduce new weapons.   The U.S. renounced that part of the treaty in 1958 by bringing atomic weapons to South Korea.

Now, you can make the argument that this action was necessary to preserve the balance of power.   And later on, the North Koreans were discovered to have dug tunnels under the DMZ for the purpose of sending spies and agents into South Korea.   But still: It was the United States, not North Korea, that broke the terms of the Armistice.

Sometime in the 1980s, North Korea began work on a nuclear bomb.  In 1994,  President Bill Clinton sent ex-President Jimmy Carter to North Korea, where he persuaded the North Korean government to shut down its plutonium test reactor and put it under the control of international inspectors.   In return, the North Koreans got shipments of oil for its power grid and two light water reactors built by an international consortium.   All this was supposed to lead to normal relations between the two countries—which didn’t happen.

In 2002, President George W. Bush canceled the agreement.   His administration claimed the North Koreans  were cheating, by working on a uranium bomb.   The evidence for this is unclear, and the North Koreans claimed that the U.S. hadn’t fulfilled its part of the agreement.

Be that as it may, the North Koreans sent the inspectors home and resumed their work on a plutonium bomb.   By 2007, they exploded their first nuclear device.   Ending the agreement accomplished nothing.

The Bush administration resumed negotiations and arrived at a new tentative agreement to freeze nuclear weapons development at the new level.   But President Barack Obama didn’t follow through.   Maybe he thought that he didn’t have enough political capital to try to make peace with Iran, Cuba and North Korea, too.

Instead the U.S. government tried to pressure North Korea by means of economic sanctions.   North Korea responded by doubling down on its nuclear weapons program.

Now President Donald Trump threatens “fire and fury”.   The government of North Korea says that it will never give up its nuclear weapons so long as the United States is hostile and threatens North Korea with its own nuclear weapons.   Which is a way of saying it might give up its nuclear weapons if the U.S. was genuinely willing to make peace.

An open letter to Presidents Trump and Putin

The following is an open letter to Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, signed by David Krieger, president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, and others.  The Bertrand Russell Society, of which I am a member, endorses it.

This may be the most dangerous time in human history.

In a dramatic recent decision, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved its iconic Doomsday Clock ahead from three minutes to only two-and-a-half minutes to midnight.

Humankind faces two existential challenges of global and potentially apocalyptic scope: nuclear weapons and climate change.

Our focus here is on nuclear dangers, but we strongly encourage you, Presidents Trump and Putin, to undertake in a spirit of urgency all necessary steps to avert further global warming.

As the leaders of the United States and Russia, the two countries with the largest nuclear arsenals, you have the grave responsibility of assuring that nuclear weapons are not used — or their use overtly threatened — during your period of leadership.

The most certain and reliable way to fulfill this responsibility is to negotiate with each other, and the other governments of nuclear-armed states, for their total elimination.

The U.S. and Russia are both obligated under Article VI of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to engage in such negotiations in good faith for an end to the nuclear arms race and for complete nuclear disarmament.  Your success in this endeavor would make you heroes of the Nuclear Age.

US reserves right to ‘first use’ of N-weapons

Source: Arms Control Association

Russia, China and now North Korea have renounced “first use” of nuclear weapons.   The United States has never done so.

I believe North Korea’s leaders because they would be fools to launch a nuclear attack, knowing that their nation would literally be obliterated by the USA in response.

They also would be fools to give up nuclear weapons so long as they are threatened by the USA.  Only possession of nuclear weapons prevents North Korea from meeting the fate if Iraq and Libya.

The United States has never renounced “first use” of nuclear weapons because US conventional forces are not a match for Russia’s in eastern Europe and possibly not for China’s in the South China Sea.

The U.S. government seeks to be the dominant military power in every region of the globe.  The tools for doing this are sea power, air power, flying killer drones, Special Operations troops and subsidized foreign fighters.

But the ultimate backup consists of nuclear weapons, and the power to make a credible threat to use them.  So long as this is U.S. policy, no other nation with nuclear weapons will disarm.  So long as this is U.S. policy, a global nuclear holocaust is still a possibility, just as in the days of the Cold War.

Iran and the nuclear proliferation problem

War hawks in Israel, France and the U.S. Congress say there can be no peace with Iran unless that country gives up the possibility of developing nuclear weapons.

The Ayatollah Khamenei has said that use of nuclear weapons is contrary to Islam, but there are subtle, but important differences, between using nuclear weapons, having nuclear weapons and having the capacity to someday develop nuclear weapons.

All the countries that have nuclear weapons today, except Israel, developed them because they feared being attacked by another country with nuclear weapons.  This includes the United States.  The Manhattan Project was begin because U.S. leaders and scientists feared that Nazi Germany would develop nuclear weapons first.  And the government of Israel in its early days had a realistic fear of being destroyed by invasion by its Arab neighbors.

The Iranian government was one of the original signers of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, on July 1, 1968.   All signers of the treaty except the United States, Russia, Britain, France and China renounced nuclear weapons, the five nuclear powers agreed to gradually reduce and then eliminate nuclear weapons, and they promised to share nuclear energy technology with the non-nuclear countries.  In all, 189 countries ratified the treaty, but India, Pakistan and Israel did not, and North Korea withdrew from the treaty.

It would be unfortunate if Iran, or any other additional country, acquired nuclear weapons, but I think the only way to avoid this is for the existing nuclear powers to abide by the intent of the treaty.   I don’t think the United States is in a position to say that it is all right for nations of which our government approves can have nuclear weapons, and the ones it disapproves cannot.  The Iranian government has the same treaty rights under the ayatollahs as it did under the Shah.

Negotiations with Iran

Here is good news—maybe.   Representatives of Iran and of the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China agreed to meet in Baghdad starting May 23 to discuss Iran’s nuclear program.  The negotiations will be based on the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which Iran has signed, which gives countries the right to develop nuclear energy in return for renouncing nuclear weapons.  If Iran can demonstrate that its nuclear program is not a weapons program, then crippling economic sanctions can be lifted—maybe.

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President Obama has said that he does not rule out an attack on Iran, but only after all efforts to achieve a diplomatic solution have failed.   If negotiations are successful, and Iran’s government really does demonstrate to the satisfaction of the U.S. negotiators that it renounces nuclear weapons, then Obama’s brinksmanship will have proved successful.

But given that the U.S. government attacked Libya after Col. Qadaffi renounced nuclear weapons, and given that the U.S. government refrains from attacking nuclear-armed North Korea, I doubt that I, if I were an Iranian leader, would be willing to give up the possibility of developing a nuclear deterrent.  The main threat to Iran comes from Israel, and Israel is not a party to the talks.

Click on Agreement reached with Iran on formal talks in May for details from McClatchy newspapers.

Click on Did U.S. miss 2010 chance for Iran nuke deal? Turkey says yes for background from McClatchy newspapers.

Click on Iran nuclear talks: A positive first step? for Iranian and Russian as well as U.S. perspectives from Al Jazeera English.

Preliminary talks in Istanbul

Click on Israel’s Secret Staging Ground and False Flag articles by investigative journalist Mark Perry in Foreign Policy magazine about Israeli operations against Iran.

Click on What Iran Can Learn From Kazakhstan for the case for Iranian renunciation of nuclear weapons, and Uranium Double-Standard: The U.S., Kazakhstan and Iran for the case against Kazakhstan as a model.

One ironic aspect of all this is that the talks are being held in Baghdad because the Iranian government considers Iraq a friendly venue.  But that would not be the case had not U.S. military forces overthrown the regime of Iran’s arch-enemy, Saddam Hussein, and replaced it with government headed by Sunni Muslims friendly to the Sunnis of Iran.