NOAM CHOMSKY: North Korea is one of the most horrible countries in the world, nothing good to say about it.
But the question is : "what do you do about it ?" You try to make it worse or try to move towards reconciliation and improve matters. The Bush administration is making it worse. This hysterical rhetoric is going - predictably - going to increase North Korean efforts to develop a nuclear deterrent. And as the South Korean president pointed out, you don't want them to do it, but it is understandable why they would. You threaten a country with destruction and they're not going to say. "Thank you, here is my throat, cut it." They are going to try to find some way to react. There are only two ways to react. Nobody is going to fight the U.S. military. The U.S. depends about as much on the military as the rest of the world combined. It's technologically far more advanced - such an enormous destructive capacity - that nobody is going to fight a war with it, which leaves two possibilities for a deterrent. One is nuclear weapons and the other is terror. And so by carrying out meaningful threats against other countries, you're simply inspiring terror and nuclear proliferation...
..."You'd better develop a deterrent." And the only deterrent they have is nuclear weapons, rather - weapons of mass destruction - or terror.
What other option do they have? It's the same with Iran. One of the leading Israeli military historians, Martin von Creveld, this is his name, recently had an article. I think it was in the International Herald Tribune in which he said, approximately, "Obviously we don't want Iran to have nuclear weapons. But if they don't develop them they are crazy." If you put them under serious threat of attack, they are surrounded on all sides by very hostile and aggressive forces - U.S. armies on both sides and other nuclear state, Israel is a powerful nuclear state which is threatening them. I mean, you threaten them with attack, they are not going to say, "Thank you." They are going to react. And how can they react? In several ways. One of them is by increasing its support for terror and the other is developing a nuclear deterrent.
SUN WOO LEE: What opinion do you have about the issues related to the human rights of the North Korean people? Do you have any solution?
NOAM CHOMSKY: The solution is step-by-step reconciliation. It's not going to solve the problem tomorrow. But in the longer term, it can solve the problem. I mean you know much better than I - the Koreans have always wanted to be reunited. That goes back to 1945. I'm sure that that's just as true in the North as in the South. People have families, [it's the] same country after all. So, a move towards reconciliation will reduce the human rights violations. Not easily. There will still be people starving, there will still be severe controls over the population. But the way to reduce them is to move towards the sunshine policy, move towards reconciliation. Every step that is made for reconciliation improves human rights. So every threat makes human rights violations worse. That's almost true everywhere. Syria and Iran. Take Iran. You know Iranian democrats and reformers have bitterly condemned the sanctions and they say that all it does is make the leadership harsher, and give them popular support. So it undermines democracy, and it undermines human rights.
SUN WOO LEE: How do you think we should solve the North Korean nuclear weapons problem?
NOAM CHOMSKY: There's a way to do it. There's a very simple way to solve it. In fact, it came pretty close to working. In 1994, there was a framework agreement, which, as far as we know, stops nuclear weapons development in North Korea. In return, the West, primarily the United States, pledged to provide them with the capacity for nuclear energy development, which they need. They don't have internal resources. The West didn't live up to that bargain. And then when the Bush Administration came in, waving its weapons of mass destruction, saying, "We are going to attack you!" Well, OK, it's the end of the framework agreement. They then began to carry out the uranium enrichment for nuclear weapons. How far it's gone, we don't know. But the way to reduce - you know, you can't eliminate completely the possibility that someone will be able to develop nuclear weapons. But you can reduce the probability. There are many ways to do it. One is to work within the general structure of the framework agreement. If you make nuclear energy available that reduces the incentive to develop nuclear weapons. The other is to reduce threats.
And then there're things that go far beyond that. I mean the big problem that's been pointed out over and over by Mohamed Al Baradei--who just won a Nobel Prize--is the production of high-grade, weapons-grade enriched uranium--fissile material--that really can be used for nuclear weapons. As long as that's produced, there will be nuclear weapons produced. Again, I can't predict the details, but it's available.
So, the way to terminate the threat of nuclear weapons is to take two steps. One of them is to control, to have an international control over the development of any fissile materials and have a bank somewhere under international control with all fissile materials produced or stored. And if any country wants them for legitimate purposes - nuclear energy, then release them. That proposal has been at the U.N. for years, I think it was 1993, [that] it was proposed. But the U.S. has blocked it.
It finally came to a vote in November 2004. That's probably the most important vote that the U.N. ever took. The vote came out 174 to 1. The U.S. voted against it. Two countries abstained: Israel and Britain.
SUN WOO LEE: Britain, too?
NOAM CHOMSKY: Israelis reflexively have to do what the U.S. tells them. So they abstained. Britain was much more interesting. The British ambassador explained in the U.N. session why Britain was voting against it. He said Britain is in favor of the treaty, but the way this one is written is too divisive. It divides the world 174 to 1. And so therefore Britain will go along with the U.S. That just tells you what Tony Blair's priorities are. Human survival is of much lower priority for Tony Blair than making sure that he gets invited to George Bush's ranch. And this was not reported. I don't know if it was reported in South Korea, but in the U.S. it was not reported. It was not reported, you know. That's one step towards eliminating nuclear weapons.
And there is a second step which Elbaradei has insisted on: the non-proliferation treaty was a compact, it was a bargain. The non-nuclear states agreed not to develop nuclear weapons and the nuclear states agreed that they would eliminate nuclear weapons. Have they done it? None of them have done it. And the U.S. isn't believed. The U.S. simply says the provisions of the treaty don't apply to us. Well, O.K. if the nuclear states are not going to live up to their side of the bargain, then the non-nuclear states are not going to do it, either. You may not be able to eliminate environmental catastrophe, but the threat of nuclear weapons can be eliminated by simple ways. The nuclear states, primarily the U.S., should undertake their obligation, by treaty, even underscored by a World Court judgment, to move towards elimination of nuclear weapons. We're doing the opposite. And there should be international control over production of the fissile materials. That would come very close to terminating the nuclear threat. The other thing to do is to recover the nuclear weapons that are around. There had been progress on that, up until the Bush administration. They just dropped the efforts. These are solvable problems and the fate of the species depends on it. Environmental catastrophe is longer term. And we don't know if it's a solvable problem but certainly there are things that should be done about it.
North Korea: What Next?
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Originally Posted by shootemindehead
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