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The Nuclear War That Almost Was and the Man Who Prevented It – Article by Brittany Hunter

The Nuclear War That Almost Was and the Man Who Prevented It – Article by Brittany Hunter

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Brittany Hunter
October 1, 2017
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Will we be so lucky the next time this happens?

On September 19, 2017,

Trump spoke in front of the United Nations and declared that, if necessary, the United States would do “what it needed to do” to protect itself against North Korean threats.

Standing on the floor of the U.N. General Assembly, Trump stated:

“The United States has great strength and patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea. Rocket Man is on a suicide mission for himself.”

This isn’t the first time Trump has threatened North Korea with the prospect of nuclear war. Just last month, he promised to “unleash fire and fury” against the country, which had just launched its own ballistic missile over neighboring Japan. Since then, tensions have been mounting.

But as the two countries move closer to the brink of nuclear war, the world is about to celebrate the 34th anniversary of the nuclear war that almost was.

Apocalypse Almost

Stanislav Petrov was working the overnight shift on September 26, 1983 when he inadvertently saved the world from nuclear war.

As a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Union’s Air Defense Forces, Petrov was tasked with monitoring the country’s satellites, looking for possible nuclear weapons launched by the United States. There was nothing particularly unusual about this shift until the alarms began to sound at dawn.

The alarm had indicated a warning that America had launched five nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles. And it was Petrov’s job to sound the alarm that would initiate a retaliation before it was too late.

“The siren howled, but I just sat there for a few seconds, staring at the big, back-lit, red screen with the word ‘launch’ on it,” Petrov remembered.

Earlier that same month, the Cold War had further escalated after the USSR had shot down a Korean commercial airliner that had flown into its airspace. The incident resulted in the deaths of 269 people including a United States Congressman from Georgia, Larry McDonald.

The heightened tensions between the two global superpowers made the decision forced on Petrov even more grave.

Petrov recalled:

“There was no rule about how long we were allowed to think before we reported a strike. But we knew that every second of procrastination took away valuable time, that the Soviet Union’s military and political leadership needed to be informed without delay. All I had to do was to reach for the phone; to raise the direct line to our top commanders — but I couldn’t move. I felt like I was sitting on a hot frying pan.”

Countless Lives Saved

Petrov hesitated because he had a gut instinct that something was off. This technology was still fairly new, and he was sure it had some kinks to be worked out. In his training, he was taught that any strike from the U.S. would most likely come as a full-fledged attack. Yet, the satellite system was only showing a handful of missiles. This hardly constituted all-out warfare. What if the satellite was incorrect? Was he willing to call in his superiors and start a nuclear war over a system error?

On the other hand, if the monitors were correct, Petrov only had 20 minutes to act before the missiles struck. After a torturous internal debate, Petrov decided not to act in haste. He quickly checked to see if the satellite had malfunctioned, causing it to report a false launch.

He soon discovered that there had in fact been an error and no missiles had been launched at all.

If Petrov had simply sounded the alarm for his superiors, as he was trained and ordered to do, there is a good chance counterstrikes would have been launched on behalf of the USSR and the world may not be as it is today.

Commenting on this historic event that almost was, arms control expert Jeffrey Lewis told NPR:

“[Petrov] just had this feeling in his gut that it wasn’t right. It was five missiles. It didn’t seem like enough. So even though by all of the protocols he had been trained to follow, he should absolutely have reported that up the chain of command and, you know, we should be talking about the great nuclear war of 1983 if any of us survived.”

The New Cold War

Petrov passed away in May of this year, avoiding having to witness America’s current flirtation with nuclear war.

Aside from the Cuban Missile Crisis, the September 26th incident was the closest the United States had ever been to a nuclear war — until now.

The escalation between the United States and North Korea builds by the day. As each president continues to taunt the other, either by showing off military might or dishing out childish insults, the world gets closer to the possibility of nuclear war: one that could also involve the nuclear arsenals of China, even Russia. Unlike Petrov, neither world leader has taken a moment to fully think this through. A nuclear war is in absolutely no one’s interest.

The US government has been ratcheting up tensions with nuclear Russia over Ukraine and the Middle East and with nuclear China over North Korea and disputed islands in the South China Sea. As relations between nuclear powers deteriorate, incidents like what happened on September 26, 1983 become more likely. We’re all alive today because a man like Stanislav Petrov was the one on duty that day. Will we be so fortunate the next time? What if a more obedient and “by the book” officer is at the helm the next time a system malfunctions or a message is miscommunicated when nuclear stakes are on the line? As a BBC article reported:

He says he was the only officer in his team who had received a civilian education. “My colleagues were all professional soldiers, they were taught to give and obey orders,” he told us.

So, he believes, if somebody else had been on shift, the alarm would have been raised.

Petrov was ominously right when he said, “…they were lucky it was me on shift that night.”

Brittany Hunter is an associate editor at the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE). Brittany studied political science at Utah Valley University with a minor in Constitutional studies.

This article was published by The Foundation for Economic Education and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which requires that credit be given to the author. Read the original article.

How to End the Korea Crisis – Article by Ron Paul

How to End the Korea Crisis – Article by Ron Paul

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Ron Paul
October 1, 2017
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The descent of US/North Korea “crisis” to the level of schoolyard taunts should be remembered as one of the most bizarre, dangerous, and disgraceful chapters in US foreign policy history.

President Trump, who holds the lives of millions of Koreans and Americans in his hands, has taken to calling the North Korean dictator “rocket man on a suicide mission.” Why? To goad him into launching some sort of action to provoke an American response? Maybe the US president is not even going to wait for that. We remember from the Tonkin Gulf false flag that the provocation doesn’t even need to be real. We are in extremely dangerous territory and Congress for the most part either remains asleep or is cheering on the sabre-rattling.

Now we have North Korean threats to detonate hydrogen bombs over the Pacific Ocean and US threats to “totally destroy” the country.

We are told that North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un is a “madman.” That’s just what they said about Saddam, Gaddafi, Assad, and everyone else the neocons target for US military action. We don’t need to be fans of North Korea to be skeptical of the war propaganda delivered by the mainstream media to the benefit of the neocons and the military industrial complex.

Where are the cooler heads in Washington to tone down this war footing?

Making matters worse, there is very little understanding of the history of the conflict. The US spends more on its military than the next ten or so countries combined, with thousands of nuclear weapons that can destroy the world many times over. Nearly 70 years ago a US-led attack on Korea led to mass destruction and the death of nearly 30 percent of the North Korean population. That war has not yet ended.

Why hasn’t a peace treaty been signed? Newly-elected South Korean president Moon Jae-in has proposed direct negotiations with North Korea leading to a peace treaty. The US does not favor such a bilateral process. In fact, the US laughed off a perfectly sensible offer made by the Russians and Chinese, with the agreement of the North Koreans, for a “double freeze” – the North Koreans would suspend missile launches if the US and South Korea suspend military exercises aimed at the overthrow of the North Korean government.

So where are there cooler heads? Encouragingly, they are to be found in South Korea, which would surely suffer massively should a war break out. While US Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, was bragging that the new UN sanctions against North Korea would result in a near-complete blockade of the country (an act of war), the South Korean government did something last week that shocked the world: it announced an eight million dollar humanitarian aid package for pregnant mothers and infant children in North Korea. The US and its allies are furious over the move, but how could anyone claim the mantle of “humanitarianism” while imposing sanctions that aim at starving civilians until they attempt an overthrow of their government?

Here’s how to solve the seven-decade-old crisis: pull all US troops out of the Korean peninsula; end all military exercises on the North Korean border; encourage direct talks between the North and South and offer to host or observe them with an international delegation including the Russians and Chinese, which are after all Korea’s neighbors.

The schoolyard insults back and forth between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-Un are not funny. They are in fact an insult to all of the rest of us!

Ron Paul, MD, is a former three-time Republican candidate for U. S. President and Congressman from Texas.
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This article is reprinted with permission from the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.
North Korea or Iran… Where Will President Trump Attack First? – Article by Ron Paul

North Korea or Iran… Where Will President Trump Attack First? – Article by Ron Paul

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Ron Paul
August 2, 2017
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President Trump seems to be impatiently racing toward at least one disastrous war. Maybe two. The big question is who will be first? North Korea or Iran?

Over the past several days President Trump has sent two nuclear-capable B-1 bombers over the Korean peninsula to send a clear message that he is ready to attack North Korea. On Saturday he blamed China for North Korea’s refusal to cease its missile tests. He Tweeted: “I am very disappointed in China… they do nothing for us with North Korea, just talk. We will no longer allow this to continue.”

One press report from an unnamed Pentagon source claimed that President Trump “is to order a military strike against North Korea within a year,” after this weekend’s North Korean test of a longer-range missile.

Iran, which along with North Korea and Russia will face new sanctions imposed by Congress and expected to be signed into law by Trump, is also in President Trump’s crosshairs. He was reportedly furious over his Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s certifying that Iran was in compliance with the nuclear deal – even though Iran was in compliance – and he seems determined to push a confrontation.

Twice in the past week the US military has fired at Iranian ships in the Persian Gulf. On Tuesday an Iranian military ship in the Persian Gulf was warned off by machine gun blasts from a US Naval vessel. Then on Friday the US Navy fired warning flares toward another Iranian ship operating in the Persian Gulf.

Imagine if the US Navy had encountered Iranian warships in the Gulf of Mexico firing machine guns at them when they approached the Iranians.

Facing new sanctions, the Iranian government announced that it will not end ballistic missile testing even under US pressure. The missile program is not a violation of the P5+1 Iran deal unless it is specifically designed to carry nuclear weapons.

So whom will Trump attack first? Let’s hope nobody, but with continuing pressure from both Democrats and Republicans over the unproven “Russiagate” allegations, it increasingly looks like he will seek relief by starting a “nice little war.” If he does so, however, his presidency will likely be over and he may end up blundering into a much bigger war in the process.

Although Trump’s bombastic rhetoric on Iran and North Korea has been pretty consistent, the American people voted Trump because he was seen as the less likely of the two candidates to get the US into a major war.

A recent study by the Boston University and the University of Minnesota concluded that Trump won the most votes in parts of the country with the highest military casualties. Those most directly suffering the costs of war were attracted to the candidate they saw as less likely to take the US into another major war. These are the Americans living in the swing states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan that surprised the pundits by voting for Trump over Hillary.

Will Trump’s legacy be blustering us into one or two wars that will make Iraq and Afghanistan look like cakewalks by comparison? Millions dead? It’s time to make our voices known before it’s too late!

Ron Paul, MD, is a former three-time Republican candidate for U. S. President and Congressman from Texas.

This article is reprinted with permission from the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.

Trump Should Veto Congress’s Foolish New Sanctions Bill – Article by Ron Paul

Trump Should Veto Congress’s Foolish New Sanctions Bill – Article by Ron Paul

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Ron Paul
July 27, 2017
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This week’s expected House vote to add more sanctions on Russia, Iran, and North Korea is a prime example of how little thought goes into US foreign policy. Sanctions have become kind of an automatic action the US government takes when it simply doesn’t know what else to do.

No matter what the problem, no matter where on earth it occurs, the answer from Washington is always sanctions. Sanctions are supposed to force governments to change policies and do what Washington tells them or face the wrath of their people. So the goal of sanctions is to make life as miserable as possible for civilians so they will try to overthrow their governments. Foreign leaders and the elites do not suffer under sanctions. This policy would be immoral even if it did work, but it does not.

Why is Congress so eager for more sanctions on Russia? The neocons and the media have designated Russia as the official enemy, and the military-industrial complex and other special interests want to continue getting rich terrifying Americans into believing the propaganda.

Why, just weeks after the White House affirmed that Iran is abiding by its obligations under the nuclear treaty, does Congress pass additional sanctions anyway? Washington blames Iran for “destabilizing” Syria and Iraq by helping them fight ISIS and al-Qaeda. Does this make any sense at all?

When is the last time Iran committed a terrorist act on our soil? It hasn’t. Yet we learned from the declassified 28 pages of the Congressional 9/11 report that Saudi Arabia was deeply involved in the 2001 attacks against Washington and New York. Who has funded al-Qaeda and ISIS in Syria for years? Saudi Arabia. Yet no one is talking about sanctions against that country. This is because sanctions are not about our security. They are about politics and special interests.

Why is Congress poised to add yet more sanctions on North Korea? Do they want the North Korean people to suffer more than they are already suffering? North Korea’s GDP is half that of Vermont – the US state with the lowest GDP! Does anyone believe they are about to invade us? There is much talk about North Korea’s ballistic missile program, but little talk about 30,000 US troops and weapons on North Korea’s border. For Washington, it’s never a threat if we do it to the other guy.

Here’s an alternative to doing the same thing over and over: Let’s take US troops out of North Korea after 70 years. The new South Korean president has proposed military talks with North Korea to try and reduce tensions. We should get out of the way and let them solve their own problems. If Iran and Russia want to fight ISIS and al-Qaeda at the invitation of their ally, Syria, why stand in the way? We can’t run the world. We are out of money.

President Trump was elected to pursue a new kind of foreign policy. If he means what he said on the campaign trail, he will veto this foolish sanctions bill and begin dismantling neocon control of his Administration.

Ron Paul, MD, is a former three-time Republican candidate for U. S. President and Congressman from Texas.

This article is reprinted with permission from the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.

North Korea: From Hermit Kingdom to Merchant Kingdom? – Article by J. Wiltz

North Korea: From Hermit Kingdom to Merchant Kingdom? – Article by J. Wiltz

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J. Wiltz
December 7, 2014
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Toward the end of her remarkable speech at this year’s One Young World Summit in Dublin, North Korean defector and human rights activist Yeon-mi Park listed three ways in which ordinary people can help freedom-seekers in North Korea:

One, educate yourself so you can raise awareness about the human crisis in North Korea. Two, help and support North Korean refugees who are trying to escape to freedom. Three, petition China to stop repatriation.

To this list, Swiss-born businessman Felix Abt might add a fourth suggestion: do business with them. This suggestion forms the heart of Abt’s new book, A Capitalist in North Korea: My Seven Years in the Hermit Kingdom (Tuttle Publishing 2014).

From Hermit Kingdom to Merchant Kingdom

 

Those familiar with the situation in North Korea (officially known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea or DPRK) will not find Abt’s title as shocking as it’s probably intended to be. Indeed, as early as 2009, and undoubtedly even before that, Western media outlets were reporting on “the secret capitalist economy of North Korea” (i.e., the black market) which sprung up in response to the famine of the mid-1990s. Writing for the Washington Post in May 2014, Yeon-mi Park herself even referred to the young people currently living in North Korea as the “Jangmadang, or ‘Black Market Generation’.”  These young people, she says, are far more individualistic than their predecessors, far less loyal to the ruling Kim regime, and infinitely more likely to be exposed to outside media and information.

Abt’s book echoes and elaborates on all of these points. Drawing on his personal experience as the foreign head of a North Korean pharmaceutical company, as well as a co-founder of the Pyongyang Business School, he details the DPRK’s early forays into franchising, customer service, online forums(!), bicycle merchants, performance incentives, and even that most un-socialist of all market activities, advertising.

These ideas and practices are still very new to the world’s most notorious “bastion of communism” (Abt’s words), but already the government is being forced to make gradual changes to its market policies. Two quick examples: “More flexible opening hours are allowed for markets, and more companies are permitted to interact with businesses abroad.”

In spite of these positive developments, however, Abt laments, “There appears to be no end in sight for the severe economic problems of the world’s most centrally planned economy.” He divides the blame for these problems among several perpetrators: (1) North Korean military policy; (2) over-dependence on foreign humanitarian aid; and (3) foreign sanctions and embargoes.

“North Korea,” says Abt, “is the most heavily sanctioned nation in the world, and no other people have had to deal with the massive quarantines that Western and Asian powers have enclosed around its economy.”

Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

 

To be sure, arguments against North Korean sanctions are a tough sell, given the country’s well-documented human rights abuses and annual nuclear threats against the United States and South Korea. Several Amazon reviewers have accused Abt of simply parroting North Korean propaganda, calling him “Pyongyang Pete” and “the Kim Dynasty’s useful idiot.”  Even many libertarians, long opposed to the Cuban embargo, can probably agree that many of North Korea’s domestic and international woes are self-inflicted.

For example, in 2006, the former president of South Korea’s largest dairy company came up with the strategy to provide every child in North Korea a daily glass of milk. “Charities and wealthy individuals committed to the project,” Abt writes, “but after Kim Jong Il’s first nuclear test, the prospect quickly vanished.”

Abt also notes that in 2007, the website DailyNK reported that North Korea spends up to 40 percent of its annual budget on monuments and celebrations dedicated to the Kim regime. Abt recounts how he “gasped” at the sheer size of these monuments, as well as other buildings like the Koryo Hotel where “up to 1000 guests can stay in 504 rooms on 45 floors.”

But read to the end of A Capitalist in North Korea and you’ll find that “fewer than a third of all hotel rooms are occupied during most weeks.” Pyongyang tourist videos on YouTube corroborate this point. On almost every day of any given year, the 504 rooms of the Koryo Hotel sit empty (a predictable side effect of the DPRK’s notoriously tight travel restrictions). This is not what an efficient allocation of resources looks like.

Moreover, the North Korean government sometimes reacts to the market activities of its foreign investors with repression and cronyism. In 2006, a Chinese-run pharmacy was closed because it posed a threat to the socialist public health system. Several years later, a German internet provider was able to lobby the government, making it impossible for other foreign-invested businesses to install their own satellite dishes.

“So how will reform come about?”

 

And yet, not one of these things — not the nuclear tests, the empty hotels, or the shady business dealings — could in any way be prevented by sanctions that target foreign banks, farm equipment, fertilizer, mobile phones, alcoholic drinks, French cheese, or luxury items. “The current sanctions have not only failed to curtail the nuclear ambitions and human rights abuses of the ambitious North Korean leader,” says Emma Campbell in a May 2013 article for East Asia Forum, “they are also constraining the actions of humanitarian NGOs trying to carry out life-saving activities inside the DPRK.”

Among these life-saving activities is the development of a market-minded merchant class that is less dependent on the regime and better able to conduct business with the outside world in a peaceful, profitable manner. While Abt is clear that doing business in North Korea is by no means a guaranteed success, he rightly sees it as one of the best methods for improving the lives of millions of North Koreans caught between domestic and foreign repression. “Business,” he writes, “is the way forward for Kim’s country … a promising way to open and change the hitherto isolated country and the course of things for the better.”

The decades-long task of opening North Korea to the outside world may very well be accomplished by first opening the outside world to North Korea.

J. Wiltz writes from Anyang, South Korea, where he teaches English and blogs at A Day with J.

This article was published on Mises.org and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution United States License, which requires that credit be given to the author.

Economies are Not Destroyed in a Day – Article by Nicolás Cachanosky

Economies are Not Destroyed in a Day – Article by Nicolás Cachanosky

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Nicolás Cachanosky
October 26, 2013
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Earlier this month, Argentina’s leading conservative paper, La Nación published an unsigned editorial comparing the economies of Argentina and Venezuela. The editorial concluded that as economic freedom declines in Argentina, and as Argentina adopts more of what Chavez called “twenty-first century socialism,” it is becoming increasingly similar to Venezuela. Is this true? Will Argentina suffer the same fate as Venezuela where poverty is increasing and toilet paper can be a luxury?

The similarities of regulations and economic problems facing both countries are indeed striking in spite of obvious differences in the two countries. Yet, when people are confronted with the similarities, it is common to hear replies like “but Argentina is not Venezuela, we have more infrastructure and resources.”

Institutional changes, however, define the long-run destiny of a country, not its short-run prosperity.

Imagine that Cuba and North Korea became, overnight, the two most free-market, limited-government countries in the world. The two countries would have immediately gained civil liberties and economic freedom, but they would still have to accumulate wealth and to develop their economies. The institutional change affects the political situation immediately, but a new economy requires time to take shape. For example, as China opened parts of its economy to international markets, the country started to grow, and we are now seeing the effects of decades of relative economic liberalization. It is true that many areas in China continue to lack significant freedoms, but it would be a much different China today had it refused to change its institutions decades ago.

The same occurs if one of the wealthiest and developed countries in the world were to adopt Cuban or North Korean institutions overnight. The wealth and capital does not vanish in 24 hours. The country would shift from capital accumulation to capital consumption and it might take years or even decades to drain the coffers of previous accumulated wealth. In the meantime, the government has the resources to play the game of Bolivarian (i.e., Venezuelan) populist socialism and enjoy the wealth, highways, electrical infrastructure, and communication networks that were the result of the more free-market institutional realities of the past.

Eventually, though, highways start to deteriorate from the lack of maintenance (or trains crash in the station killing dozens of passengers), the energy sector starts to waver, energy imports become unavoidable, and the communication network becomes obsolete. In other words, economic populism is financed with resources accumulated by non-populist institutions.

According to the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World project, Argentina ranked 34th-best in the year 2000. By 2011, however, Argentina fell to 137, next to countries like Ecuador, Mali, China, Nepal, Gabon, and Mozambique. There is no doubt that Argentina enjoys a higher rate of development and wealth than those other countries. But, can we still be sure that this will be the situation 20 or 30 years from now? The Argentinean president is known for having said that she would like Argentina to be a country like Germany, but the path to becoming like Switzerland or Germany involves adopting Swiss and German-type institutions, which Argentina is not doing.

The adoption of Venezuelan institutions in Argentina, came along with high growth rates. These growth rates, however, are misleading:

First, economic growth, properly speaking, is not an increase in “production,” but an increase in “production capacity.” The growth in observed GDP after a big crisis is economic recovery, not economic growth properly understood.

Second, you can increase your production capacity by investing in the wrong economic activities. Heavy price regulation, as takes place in Argentina (now accompanied by high rates of inflation), misdirects resource allocation by affecting relative prices. We might be able to see and even touch the new investment, but such capital is the result of a monetary illusion. The economic concept of capital does not depend on the tangibility or size of the investment (i.e, on its physical properties), but on its economic value. When the time comes for relative prices to adjust to reflect real consumer preferences, and the market value of capital goods drops, capital is consumed or destroyed in economic terms even if the physical qualities of capital goods remains unchanged.

Third, production can increase not because investment increases, but because people are consuming invested capital, as is the case when there is an increase in the rate that machinery and infrastructure wear out.

I’m not saying that there is no genuine growth in Argentina, but it remains a fact that a nontrivial share of the Argentinean GDP growth can be explained by: (1) recovery, (2) misdirection of investment, and (3) capital consumption. If that weren’t the case, employment creation wouldn’t have stagnated and the country’s infrastructure should be shining rather than falling into pieces.

Most economists and policy analysts seem to have a superficial reading of economic variables. If an economy is healthy, then economic variables look good, GDP grows, and inflation is low. But the fact that we observe good economic indicators does not imply that the economy is healthy. There’s a reason why a doctor asks for tests from a patient that appears well. Feeling well doesn’t mean there might not be a disease that shows no obvious symptoms at the moment. The economist who refuses to have a closer look and see why GDP grows is like a doctor who refuses to have a closer look at his patient. The Argentinian patient has caught the Bolivarian disease, but the most painful symptoms have yet to surface.

NOTE: This is a translated and expanded version of an original piece published in Economía Para Todos (Economics for Everyone).

Nicolás Cachanosky is Assistant Professor of Economics at Metropolitan State University of Denver. See Nicolás Cachanosky’s article archives.

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This article was published on Mises.org and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution United States License, which requires that credit be given to the author.