Back to the Brink of Nuclear War

By Josh Gelernter

Saturday, January 09, 2016

In 1976, Iraq purchased a nuclear reactor from the French; Israel and Iran both feared it would be used to produce nuclear weapons. In 1980, before it was completed, Iran launched an attack on it, which failed; Israel attacked it in 1981, and succeeded. Needless to say, Iraq’s WMD program never recovered.

According to Defense Secretary Ash Carter, plans for a similar American attack were drawn up for North Korea’s Yongbyon reactor. But the spirit of enlightened diplomacy prevailed, and a deal was worked out wherein the United States, South Korea, Japan, and the European Union would send aid to North Korea, in exchange for which North Korea would abandon its plans to develop nuclear weapons. The deal was signed in October 1994, over the opposition of congressional Republicans, and without Senate approval. (This should ring some bells.)

In 2002, after eight years of aid, it was discovered that North Korea had been enriching uranium in secret. North Korea formally pulled out of the agreement in 2003; in 2005, it announced it had built a nuclear weapon, and it tested one in 2006.

By 2007, North Korea had helped Syria build its own nuclear reactor. As it had in Iraq, Israel destroyed Syria’s reactor with an airstrike. Consequently, Syria has no nuclear weapons.

Neither does the Islamic State, which appears now to control the area where the Syrian reactor once stood.

Meanwhile, our deal with North Korea continues to bear fruit. Pyongyang has developed long-range missiles, which it had promised not to, testing them in April 2009 and April 2012, and successfully launching one in December 2012. And now — this past week — the North Koreans have detonated another nuclear bomb, which they claim was a hydrogen-fusion bomb. That is, an H-bomb rather than a simpler and less powerful Hiroshima/Nagasaki–style A-bomb. (Whether or not they’re lying remains to be seen.)

If the Clinton administration had carried out the plan to blow up North Korea’s nuclear reactor in 1994, would it have caused a war? Maybe. Neither Iraq nor Syria went to war with Israel, but Pyongyang is erratic. Ash Carter says the Defense Department was confident that, if the strike had led to war, the U.S. would have won it in a matter of weeks. The death toll would have reached into the tens of thousands, though, and that was enough collateral damage to persuade the Clinton administration to pursue the diplomatic option instead.

(On the other hand, winning that war would have ended North Korea’s Communist dictatorship, which would have headed off the North Korean famine that began in the mid-Nineties and has killed between 240,000 and 3.5 million people. And it would have closed North Korea’s death camps.)

Along the same lines, the Obama administration has told us repeatedly that the only alternative to the Iran nuclear deal is war. Maybe, maybe not. But I’ll leave you with two thoughts: First, the North Korean deal was negotiated in large part by the Clinton administration’s North Korean policy coordinator, Wendy Sherman. As journalist Katie Pavlich pointed out this week, Wendy Sherman did such a good job with North Korea that the Obama administration brought her back as the chief negotiator for the nuclear deal with Iran.

Second, according to the Wall Street Journal, after the Obama administration discovered that Israeli jets had secretly flown through Iranian air space — evidently probing Iran’s defenses in preparation for an airstrike on the Fordow nuclear facility — the administration insisted Israel cancel the attack.

Chew on that.