Noord Korea

Deze logica zult u niet snel in de Nederlandse commerciele massamedia aantreffen, terwijl deze logica toch zo voor de hand liggend is, tenminste voor onafhankelijke journalisten.

Maybe We Should Take the North Koreans at Their Word

Shortly after North Korea exploded its second nuclear device in three years on Monday morning, it released a statement explaining why. "The republic has conducted another underground nuclear testing successfully in order to strengthen our defensive nuclear deterrence."(1) If the Obama Administration hopes to dissuade Pyongyang from the nuclear course it seems so hell bent on pursuing, Washington must understand just how adroitly nuclear arms do appear to serve North Korea's national security. In other words, perhaps we should recognize that they mean what they say.

From the dawn of history until the dawn of the nuclear age, it seemed rather self-evident that for virtually any state in virtually any strategic situation, the more military power one could wield relative to one's adversaries, the more security one gained. That all changed, however, with Alamogordo and Hiroshima and Nagasaki. During the Cold War's long atomic arms race, it slowly dawned on "nuclear use theorists" - whom one can hardly resist acronyming as NUTS - that in the nuclear age, security did not necessarily require superiority. Security required simply an ability to retaliate after an adversary had struck, to inflict upon that opponent "unacceptable damage" in reply. If an adversary knew, no matter how much devastation it might inflict in a first strike, that the chances were good that it would receive massive damage as a consequence (even far less damage than it had inflicted as long as that damage was "unacceptable"), then, according to the logic of nuclear deterrence, that adversary would be dissuaded from striking first. What possible political benefit could outweigh the cost of the possible obliteration of, oh, a state's capital city, and the leaders of that state themselves, and perhaps more than a million lives therein?

Admittedly, the unassailable logic of this "unacceptable damage" model of nuclear deterrence - which we might as well call UD - failed to put the brakes on a spiraling Soviet/American nuclear arms competition that began almost immediately after the USSR acquired nuclear weapons of its own in 1949. Instead, a different model of nuclear deterrence emerged, deterrence exercised by the capability completely to wipe out the opponent's society, "mutually assured destruction," which soon came to be known to all as MAD. There were other scenarios of aggression - nuclear attacks on an adversary's nuclear weapons, nuclear or conventional attacks on an adversary's closest allies (in Western and Eastern Europe) - that nuclear weapons were supposed to deter as well. However, the Big Job of nuclear weapons was to dissuade the other side from using their nuclear weapons against one's own cities and society, by threatening to deliver massive nuclear devastation on the opponent's cities and society in reply. "The Department of Defense," said an Ohio congressman in the early 1960s, with some exasperation, "has become the Department of Retaliation."(2)
Lees verder: http://www.truthout.org/052909K