And how, exactly, did we demonstrate our responsibility?
Read the next sentence.
It’s an aside, I know, but was Stalin actually clinically insane? Do you think he would have nuked anyone? Actually, did he ever actually invade anyone, or did he spend most of his time dealing with ‘issues’ at home?
If they’re useless in modern warfare, what are you worried about, and why do we need them again? Particularly those small ones we want…
This is what I object to - that they can’t be used against us or our mates, but we reserve the right to use them if we see fit.
And, in summary, yes, smaller words would be nice. And shorter chains of hypothetical events.
It strikes me I did that in the wrong order. Sorry.
"To be published next month under the title <ic>Stalin’s Last Crime <nm>, the study shows that Beria and his colleagues were terrified of the dictator, who by 1953 had killed tens of millions and imprisoned countless more. It found that his dinner companions appear to have waited hours before calling for medical help, and that they altered his death records to make the event appear innocuous.
“All of the indications are that Stalin was intent on launching a massive purge of Soviet society. They all knew it,” Prof. Brent said. This “second terror” would likely have killed tens of millions of Jews and other Russians, including many of Stalin’s colleagues. Aside from fearing for their own lives, Prof. Brent said, the Soviets also feared that Stalin had become dangerous enough to destroy the world.
“It wasn’t simply that they were afraid for their own lives, and they were, but it was . . . the fear of a larger nuclear holocaust that drove them.”
The study includes new, documentary evidence that Stalin was attempting to fabricate enough evidence to accuse the United States of planning a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. Among those who were aware of this plan, and feared its results, was Nikita Khrushchev, who succeeded Stalin.
Stalin himself said in public speeches at the time that there was a plot to assassinate him and other Soviet leaders, known as the doctors’ plot because his initial accusations were directed at Jewish doctors. His version of the plot grew to incorporate most of the Soviet Jewish population and the leadership of the United States."
Stalin Invaded Finland in 1940, he also annexed all of eastern europe after WW2. Those are just the countries im aware of im sure he invaded/annexed alot more.
We live in the 21st century now. biological & chemical weapons are easy to make and mass produce, and ICBMs are becoming more & more common. just ignoring dangerous, unaccountable leaders is a very poor decision as something bad is going to happen sooner or later.
Israel, India & Pakistan all have nukes but these countries are more responsible than North Korea so the fallout is not as severe when they developed nuclear weapons.
I think some posters are confusing the responses here. I don’t think anyone wants NK to have nukes, it’s just that there isn’t a real justification for the US to insist that they don’t develop that technology. We can and should try our best to ensure they don’t join the nuke club (sounds like it’s actually a bit late), but we don’t really have a lot of leverage.
Has there ever been a country that developed nukes, and then gave them up?
Au countraire. I think there is ample justification for the US – and China, Japan, South Korea, Russia, and the United Nations, all of which are working with the US in this – to make a principled stand against North Korean nukes. See my reasoning above.
South Africa is widely regarded as the world’s first former nuclear power.
Some former Soviet republics gave up nukes, right? We and the Russians have tried to reduce our suicidal stockpiles. Even the horrible headline “Usable Nukes” was making them smaller. China rushes ahead, OTOH.
Joachim Pieper, check out this al Qaeda – Communist threat thread. in GD.
What NKVD thought about Stalin – a great judge of the people around him, murderous and bloodthirsty at a moment’s notice, and itching to start WWIII.
Why not? National sovereignty is something akin to personal sovereignty. So long as I do not actually infringe others’ negative rights with my actions, I should be allowed to do as I please. Ditto for nations. Nations are not persons, of course, and really it’s only individuals who hold rights, but the principle should be extended to govern international relations until such time as everyone recognizes the primacy of the individual and stops meddling with these statist collectives.
Just because an outcome is bad for one group or another (or even for all people) doesn’t give any government the right to use force in preventing it, and just because an outcome might be good doesn’t give any government the right to compel it. Governments are limited entities, both in domestic power and in international power, and cannot just go about projecting their power willy-nilly wherever they want to so as to coercively bring about favorable conditions. Or at least they ought not to do that, though every US president since Wilson has done so anyways.
My contention is, even if we don’t like the outcome of NK possessing nukes, it isn’t our right to coercively prevent it, and they have the right to pursue such weapons. They do not have the right to use them as part of an aggressive first-strike, but that’s a completely separate issue. If I build a rifle, surely I have the right to possess it. That doesn’t mean I have the right to attack people with it, and just because you’d rather I didn’t have a rifle doesn’t make it your right to dispossess me of it. Same with the Koreans and nukes. You certainly wouldn’t want to give them nukes, but if they develope them then they’re entitled to keep them, IMHO. It’s not the USA’s business until they use them to attack us.
Oh, I see. There’s an agenda here – some kind of libertarian Star Trek style world with no countries.
This is just claptrap. The United States and five other countries are negotiating – not coercing – with North Korea in order to find a way to bring a result that would be beneficial to every country in the region (arguably including North Korea).
And I really think that you fundamentally do not understand what Woodrow Wilson stood for (re your comment about every President since Wilson) – there was a man who was one hundred percent in favor of meddling in everyone’s business in order to try to bring about national self-determination. Don’t you recall all those redrawing of borders around 1919, with civil servants crawling through backwater countries trying to figure out which nationalities lived where?
The bottom line is that North Korea made a legal commitment to share its sovereignty with almost every other country in the world in terms of forbidding itself from the pursuit of nuclear weapons. Surely one who places such a value in the rights of individuals can comprehend the importance of such an act in the same terms as a group of individuals drawing up some sort of contract among themselves.
Proceeding along this analogy, if folks are free to break contracts willy-nilly it leads to chaos – no system of free enterprise could possibly work without some sanctity of freely entered-into compacts. Same thing with the law of nations. One party disgards a treaty for no good reason, and the whole idea of having treaties is debased, with all other parties being affected. If the DPRK wanted nukes, they shouldn’t have signed the treaty (just like some other nuclear powers didn’t) and they wouldn’t have put themselves in an unsupportable position.
If negotiating is all it is, then this is just as acceptable as a contract between individuals. But contracts between individuals have limits (which I will discuss later), and if somebody absolutely refuses to agree to sell you his DC Comics book featuring the first appearance of Superman you can’t just beat him and take it from anyway. If I really believed the US and the “world community” (by which I mean the high-minded bully countries that throw their weight around meddling with everyone else) would leave it at arms-length negotiation I wouldn’t mind. As long as we recognized the NK’s right to have nukes, we could offer them things in exchange for not developing them, that’s still a trade. It’s when we act like we have the right to deny them such weapons that I object. If NK wants them, we must respect their right to develope them.
Hmmmm. Wilsonian self-determination principles good, Wilsonian meddling in stupid stupid stupid European war created by mutual defense treaties bad. How about that more nuanced appraisal of Wilson as my revision?
Contracts can be used to create rights and obilgations on the parties to them. But you cannot, through contract, create an infinite obligation, that’s unconscionable. To abstain for all time from developing nuclear weapons is not an obligation a contract can create. Consider a contract in which you agree not to enter a certain line of business, and in exchange I will supply you at a reduced rate with the parts you might have made yourself. You are still free at any time to end that contractual relationship, upon which all parties rights and obligations under the contract will cease. If the break causes damages, those can be awarded. But nobody would suggest specific enforcement as a remedy in this case, I cannot really be bound to stay out of that line of business in perpetuity, I simply lose the benefits of the bargain should I be the one to break the agreement.
Furthermore, contracts are formed by arms-length negotiated agreement between two freely contracting agents. The power disparity between the nuclear powers and those without nukes may be so great that any agreement not to develop such weapons would arise primarily through implicit threat. It’s like my neighbor showing up at my door with a big wooden bat and saying “hey youse, I want you to sign ‘dis here paper, agreein’ that you ain’t gonna go tryin’ to get a bat 'a yer own, capiche?” That he might agree to toss me some crumbs in exchange for meekly accepting my inferior status doesn’t make the agreement any less coercive.
I suppose NK should give an accounting for the crumbs they received for debasing their sovereignty over those years, but they most certainly have a right to pull out of the agreement. Treaties are not perpetual, you cannot sign away a right for an indefinite period of time. Only those rights/obligations that are natural to all men can exist in perpetuity (the obligation to non-agression, for instance.)
(BTW, any PC gamers remember the running joke in Civilization II, that the easily-breakable peace treaties were repeatedly referred to as “permanent” )
Sovereignty isn’t even an issue here, to me. North Korea IS FREE to do whatever they want. Right NOW they are reprocessing spent fuel rods into fissile material for bombs. They actually have the now famous centrifuges.
The question is, what will that cause? In the real world. I really don’t care about any nation’s hypothetical rights. Nations survive, or they don’t. North Korea has a giant military and probably nuclear weapons – but not much else.
That’s not a great negotiating position for them. Sure, they can vaporize 12 million people in Seoul, maybe. OTOH, what does that gain them? A gigantic nuclear response in return and the total destruction of their nation and military.
North Korea and China are both racing ahead with nuclear weapons programs. The US serves as a nuclear umbrella for both South Korea and Japan, just as we did for the Europeans during the Cold War – whether some of them are aware of it or not. To the extent Japan and South Korea feel threatened, they will respond. Face it, what real damage is KJI going to do with his untested ICBMs to the US? Maybe North Korea takes out Berkeley and Hollywood. Those are acceptable losses for us, karma being a bitch.
OTOH, Japan and South Korea will be devastated. This is not a zero sum game where a nation can exercise it’s so-called sovereignty without any reaction by other nations doing the exact same thing.
Then you end up with a Checkpoint Charlie, the 38th Parallel, Maginot Line, or ritual guarding of the border a la India and Pakistan. Or, if you go high tech, one can have fighters flying 20 yards from enemy bombers on reconaissance missions. National sovereignty is really fun. Wee!
Cowards When India was denied the supercomputers, we just went ahead and built our own.
Seriously though, and I’m speaking specifically of Pakistan here, being the ‘bad boy’ does bring its rewards. By virtue of having transferred nuclear weapons know-how to Iran, Libya and possible North Korea (not sure if that has been confirmed as yet) - axis of evil, remember? - Pakistan is now possibly the single greatest threat to global security. They even offered it to SH, but apparently he turned them down fearing it was a trap! That they were actively proliferating is something that has been known to intelligence agencies in several countries for years now.
And yet, now that the ‘secret’ is out, Pakistan can go ahead and pardon the man who was running the show, allow him to keep the money he ‘earned’ from his proliferation, declare he is a national hero, and then refuse to allow an independent enquiry into the mess. And still continue to get international aid and support.
OK, wait just one minute here.From where does government get its power?
Libertarian: the consent of the governed. I’ll just skip straight to the point, is there anything about North Korea that suggests to a libertarian that it should be called a “nation”?
In other words, isn’t it the most brutal dictatorship left on the planet? I’m pretty sure that the most gruesome horror stories I’ve heard have been from North Korea.
Put another way, a nation that forces total conformity to Communism through torture, murder, and death camps has “sovereignty” that is meaningful to a libertarian – you know freedom, elections, limited government, no death camps?
Seriously, a Stalinist right to contract? That warps the mind.
There is nothing preventing you from building a Brazilian Bomb. That would get you targeted with nuclear weapons also. It’s a game any nation can play. Pakistan has nukes pointed at India and vice versa. If Brazil would like to intervene to save the day, feel free.
Well, I’m not sure there’s a nation on the planet right now that truly has the consent of the governed, and is a government of the people. I got pulled over in December and fined for not wearing a seat belt in Illinois (primary ticketing offense in that state), and I sure as hell didn’t consent to having the government act like my mommy. So in the present world, it’s turned into a matter of degree, ranging from my fine for a seat-belt violation at about 1 to Tiannemen Square and “sharia law” at about 10000, but it’s the same scale. Any government that punishes victimless “crimes” is operating to some extent outside its mandate from any social contract.
Anyways, the libertarian position must weigh the actions of our government in how they affect individuals. And as the surrogate for the NK people, no matter how shitty a surrogate they are, what we do to the NK gov’t is going to affect Korean individuals. If we were pure utilitarians about this (which libertarians are not) we might conclude it would be right to topple the NK gov’t and “liberate” its people, why stop at nuclear disarmament? But we also have to consider the individuals affected here in the states. In fact, while the US gov’t is obligated not to act in abrogating the rights of any individual, the only individuals to whom it is obligated to take positive action in defense of are US citizens. That is the scope of permitted action for the military in a gov’t formed by social contract.
Giving even a dollar of foreign aid to NK to bribe them not to develope nuclear weapons violates the rights of US citizens. It is none of the US gov’ts concern what NK might develope in the way of weapons systems, and frankly it isn’t our concern what they might do to SK and Japan. Those countries can deal with it themselves (though since we wrongly imposed limitations on Japanese sovereignty for decades after WW2, we may owe them some debt, preferrably we should just throw some military tech at them to make up for our prior oppression and then walk away pledging never to do so again.)
If I were some rich fellow living in one of those gated communities, and we had our own squad of security guys who patrol the neighborhood, then it’s clear that their only mandate is to protect our neighborhood. If they used the funds we gave them to form patrols in a neighboring community, we’d be rightly outraged that they had exceeded their mandate and spent our money on another community, as that was not part of the agreement. Likewise, the American people have an agreement with the US gov’t that they will use the money they confiscate from us to protect United States citizens, not to pull South Korea’s balls out of the fire.
Nearly a hundred years after the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, and the alliance system is still entangling us in foreign conflicts we should have no part in, drawing us into infringements of nat’l sovereignty we should leave well enough alone. What will it take for our gov’t to finally learn the cost of its meddling, I wonder.
I hate to agree with conservative think-tanks, but I’m not at all impressed by arguments about the sovereignty of dictatorships. Not to say that means we should just invade anybody we want, because there are terrible consequences.
North Korea having nuclear weapons makes the world a more dangerous place. First of all - and this cannot be underestimated - Kim Jong Il is batshit insane. Nobody on Earth benefits if he has nukes, and many people could be potentially hurt. Second, it creates more bad precedent. America withdrawing from agreements and potentially moving forward with Star Wars was not a good thing, and this would be another step down a bad road. To be simplistic, proliferation is bad.
Rex, you may or may not have a point. But to put Democratic governments on par with dictatorships because of a “matter of degree” is absurd on its face. Let’s not ignore the basic truth, which is that this country is a representative Democracy and North Korea is run by a murderous, crazy despot.
This country is ruled by a tyranny of the majority, a natural outcome of the democratic process and the expanded franchise when the constitutional safeguards are ignored.
We’re less butcherous than Pol Pot, sure. But we still have the death penalty in this country, approved by a majority of the citizens. So IMHO, we’re ruled by a muderous tyranny of the majority.
Anyway, if I punch you on the forearm unprovoked and leave a bruise, that’s a violation of your rights. That somebody else might violate them worse, say by anally raping you, doesn’t excuse my behaviour. As an American, I will worry about the individual rights violations that my government commits, both here and abroad, and I won’t just pass them by because some other gov’t is worse. Rights violations are not excused just because they’re comparatively less severe in magnitude than other ongoing violations. They are the same thing, different degree.
you must have caught him on a bad day, when I met him he didn’t seem that batshit insane.
Maybe you had lunch with him, he gets low blood sugar in the afternoons.
You can’t base an arguemnt on ‘he’s mad, they shouldn’t have nukes’ any more than you can base an arguement on ‘Bush is a dumbass cowboy, he shouldn’t have nukes’.
I’m very opposed to the death penalty, but even with it we’re less murderous than Pol Pot by millions.
Which is a more serious offense: rape, or arm-punching? Which one should we make more of an effort to stop and prevent from worsening? Both should be prevented, but I think it’s disingenous to put the two crimes on par because they both fall under the vague category of violating my rights.
Because the argument you’re making is something along the lines of ‘we can have nukes, because we will use them responsibly to defend ourselves. He can’t have nukes because he’s mad and will blow stuff up.’
You don’t know he’s mad. Likelihood is he isn’t mad. And for all the dictators you label mad, none of them have ever actually deployed these weapons, which we have. Prove he’s mad, and then you’ve got a case. Labelling the leaders of other countries batshit insane isn’t getting us anywhere.
What if he wants to defend his country from America, which has labelled his country ‘evil’ and whose leader said on that meet the press deal that he could invade North Korea.
How do you think it looks to North Korea that the U.S. reserves the right to first strike, and reserves the right to depose the governments of other countries. I would have thought it looks like they need the nukes to defend themselves from us more than we need them to defend ourselves from them.
You’ll have to show me where I said that, because all I said is that Kim should not have nuclear weapons. I didn’t say America should.
Do you have any familiarity with the guy we’re talking about here? From his BBC profile
By “penchant for foreign liquor,” I think they are referring to the story I’ve seen printed elsewhere that he is the world’s largest individual purchaser of Hennessy Cognac. He’s also reputed to have a tremendous collection of porn films. This in a country where people are starving. It’s said North Korea goes dark at night because they can’t provide the power. He frequently has people kidnapped (not just women, there was one prominent South Korean filmmaker he did that to as well; he had the guy make a movie for him). The kidnapping women thing reminds me of Saddam’s kids, actually.
I’m not saying calling him crazy will get us anywhere diplomatically (which doesn’t mean he’s sane). I think Bush is a moron for not engaging the country sooner.
He probably does. I’m not saying he’s insane because he wants to defend himself. I’m saying he’s insane because he appears to be completely bonkers.
It looks awful, and I think you’re right. None of which means that the world wouldn’t be a more dangerous place if NK becomes a nuclear power. Some have speculated that one reason he wants nuclear technology is that he could then sell it on the black market for a lot of money, which the country needs.
When India was denied the supercomputers, we just went ahead and built our own.