by WorldTribune Staff, September 18, 2017
The United States has a window of opportunity to cast aside its “denial behavior” on North Korea, an analyst said.
“Is the naivete and willful blindness that helped begin World War II on September 1, 1939, being repeated in the response of the U.S. and its allies to North Korea’s nuclear missile program, that apparently tested a thermonuclear H-Bomb warhead on September 2, 2017?” asked Dr. Peter Vincent Pry in a Sept. 13 analysis for Family Security Matters.
History does not have to repeat itself, however, wrote Pry, who is Executive Director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security and Director of the U.S. Nuclear Strategy Forum, both Congressional Advisory Boards.
“Right now, North Korea has two satellites and fewer than a dozen ICBMs that could threaten the U.S. homeland,” Pry wrote. “These the U.S. could assuredly destroy in a very limited surgical strike using conventional weapons.”
Should the U.S. take that action, Kim Jong-Un “would not likely retaliate massively as his regime would remain in power and retain nearly 1,000 short and medium-range missiles armed with conventional, chemical, biological, and nuclear warheads,” Pry wrote. “Nonetheless, the U.S. should be prepared to promptly launch a large-scale disarming strike against North Korea using all means necessary-including nuclear weapons.”
Pry continued: “If Kim is so aggressive that he would bring on himself a nuclear holocaust over the loss of a dozen missiles and two satellites, we had better deal with him now, before he has 100 ICBMs.”
U.S. elites “cling to the fantasy that China and economic sanctions can save us, that North Korean denuclearization can be achieved peacefully. But the evidence is now overwhelming that China and Russia have helped build the North Korean nuclear threat as part of their New Cold War to force the United States out of the Pacific and out of its role as the world policeman.”
North Korea’s successful test on Sept. 2 of what it says was a hydrogen bomb had been “preceded by many years of denial behavior by U.S. statesmen, intelligence experts, academics and the press about the sophistication of Pyongyang’s nuclear missile program,” Pry noted.
“Just six months ago, most experts thought North Korea’s nuclear arsenal was primitive and tiny, perhaps as few as 6 A-Bombs. Now the intelligence community estimates North Korea has 60 nuclear weapons.
“Just six months ago, many experts thought North Korea’s ICBMs were fake missiles, only for show, and most experts thought, if they were real, they could not strike the U.S. mainland. Now the intelligence community estimates North Korea’s ICBMs can strike at least as far as Chicago, and probably hit anywhere in the United States.”
Pry continued: “Perhaps the most extreme denial behavior is over North Korea’s capability to make a nuclear electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack-that could destroy the United States with a single weapon. The blue ribbon Congressional EMP Commission [which Pry served on] has warned for years that North Korea probably has Super-EMP weapons.”
Pry noted that “Those like Susan Rice, former national security adviser to President Obama, who are willing to make the world, in President Kennedy’s famous words about protecting freedom, ‘pay any price, bear any burden’ to stop global warming, are all too eager to surrender our children to a future of Mutual Assured Destruction with Kim Jong-Un.
“The new rationalization for doing nothing militarily is it is too late, would cost too many lives, and we can learn to live with nuclear North Korea as we did with the USSR during the Cold War. But North Korea is not the USSR, and the nuclear-armed Caligula in Pyongyang is not Moscow’s Politburo, dangerous as it was. And the Cold War is no good paradigm for survival. The world barely escaped a thermonuclear holocaust at least a dozen times.
“The U.S. and allied elites have so educated themselves about the horrors of nuclear war that we are self-deterred, and will not act militarily to save ourselves.”
Read Dr. Pry’s full analysis here
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