But, first, I want to put up three "What I spotted" snippets.
The first is this guy's in-your-face T-shirt, spotted in West Mall today. It said, "I am your father". He was not a big fella, and maybe some big guy will whack him up. This expression, translated into Hokkien, is THE ultimate insult.
Secondly, I will want to highlight in a future posting some advertisements which either cleverly (and successfully) pun on the English language or abuse it. I have an example today of the latter. This big half-page ad by the developer of the new Junction 10 mall-cum-residential complex has this tag line: "380,000 Captive Residents and 380 SOHO apartments". The copywriter, trying to be clever, thought if one can talk about, say, a charismatic speaker's "captive audience", "captive residents" can work too (suggesting that the mall has a target reach of 380,000 residents of the area). Nope, such a phrase can have only its literal meaning, which makes this a silly ad.
Thirdly, in a sports item in today's ST (page B11), there is this sentence: "There were worries that the [Malaysia-Indonesia match, played in Jakarta] would be marred by fan violence, but it went off incident-free as the Malaysian fans held their nerves in front of some 85,000 fanatical home supporters, including Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono."
I am quite sure Mr Yudhoyono, aware that press cameras were near him, watched the match with suitable decorum! Writers should always watch out for such slip-ups. ST's own goal.
Okay, my take on the current North Korean crisis? My commentary below (using my own original headline) was published in The Straits Times earlier this year but I would say it is still valid:
If North Korea rocks, should we miss a nuclear beat?
Location, location, location is the mantra of real estate agents, and of astute analysts who understand the role of geopolitics in so-called regional crises like the one occurring now in the Korean peninsula.
Nixon-era American Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, in a commentary which drew on geopolitics and domestic politics, has argued that the Unites States and the other major powers cannot have their cake and eat it.
There is a price to pay in terms of proliferation if North Korea is accepted as a “de facto” nuclear power. On the other hand, defanging Pyongyang by diplomatic means is still a mission impossible, if only because key players like the US and China continue to have their own agendas.
I would like to add another element: rocket science, and how it impinges on the paradox of nuclear power for warfighting purposes.
Let me put it this way. Imagine that the discovery of nuclear energy ushers in its peaceful use. Many energy-related problems will have been solved, or mitigated. But mankind has no peaceful track record, you will say. Post-Hiroshima and Nagasaki, an attempt was indeed made to claw back the militarization of nuclear power and to set up an agency to oversee its peaceful use.
But, alas, the nuclear genie will not go back into the bottle.
The Cold War superpowers, albeit after some false starts, understood how nuclear deterrence at their strategic level worked, and came to realize that nuclear war across the spectrum – from its limited battlefield use to its escalation to “nuking” each other’s major cities – was unwinnable.
The US tolerated allies’ Britain and France’s nuclear emergence because they were allies! Britain wedded its nuclear doctrine to America’s, and France… well, the French people felt immensely proud that they were an independent nuclear power, even if in their hearts they knew its first use by Paris would mean the end of history for France.
What I loosely call “rocket science” has driven nuclear proliferation since. Simply put, the technical knowhow to weaponise nuclear power and to fashion the means to deliver it is unstoppable, short of political intervention.
China, Israel, India and Pakistan all became nuclear powers by means fair and foul.
For them, geopolitics and domestic politics were driving factors. And, as Dr Kissinger recently noted, so is the case with North Korea (and Iran, for that matter). So will be the case with regard to future “proliferants”.
What makes the North Korean bid to become a nuclear power state a subject of such intense pressure are the several ramifications.
First, if it goes nuclear whether de facto (implicitly accepted by the US and other major powers) or de jure (openly accepted), the other non-nuclear regional states – South Korea and Japan – will likely go nuclear too. Rocket science will enable that.
Secondly, as Dr Kissinger correctly noted, China will be surrounded by nuclear weapon states (Russia too of course), in a region which I shall refer to as a neighbourhood in which “my friend today may be my enemy, and my friend’s enemy can become my friend".
All this will make Northeast Asia an unstable real estate.
Thirdly, it seems improbable right now but a time may come when the US will simply say “a plague on all your houses” and simply walk away from this sizzling nuke-infested region.
Dr Kissinger suggests a concert of powers come about to stop Pyongyang from going nuclear, yet does not suggest that military action may be necessary.
But a concert of powers does not have a good record in history, and it will not work now, when rocket science is no longer an exclusive club’s preserve.
Having said all that, there is a glimmer of hope, not one to feel smug about though. It rests on that ancient Chinese saying: Be careful what you wish for.
A Northeast Asia, in which each regional state is armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons from dumb bombs to smart warheads, and deliverable by aircraft, missiles and submarines, will find them unusable for war purposes.
Nuclear war is unwinnable. That’s the paradox, and hopefully the world’s only mantra as it awaits North Korea’s next missile test or nuclear explosion.
No comments:
Post a Comment