Making Sense with Sam Harris - #88 — Must We Accept a Nuclear North Korea?

Episode Date: July 21, 2017

Sam Harris speaks with Mark Bowden about the problem of a nuclear-armed North Korea. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Thank you. of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming Today I'm speaking with Mark Bowden. Mark is the author of 13 books, including the number one New York Times bestseller, Blackhawk Down. He reported at the Philadelphia Inquirer for 20 years and now writes for the Atlantic and Vanity Fair, primarily. He's also a writer-in-residence at the University of Delaware. And his most recent book is Hue, 1968, a turning point for the American War in Vietnam.

And as you'll hear, Mark and I get very deep into the topic of North Korea. He wrote this wonderful article, though a fairly harrowing one, about just how difficult and dangerous and intractable our stalemate with North Korea is. This came out in The Atlantic a few weeks ago. It might still be in the current issue of the magazine. But in this podcast, we essentially walk through the logic of that article, and you will know more about why we haven't solved the North Korea crisis, though it's been a crisis for decades. And now I bring you Mark Bowden.

I am here with Mark Bowden. Mark, thanks for coming on the podcast. Well, thanks for inviting me, Sam. Well, I've been a fan of yours for a long time. I think I mostly see you in The Atlantic. Do you publish regularly somewhere else as a journalist? Mostly in The Atlantic. I do occasionally write for Vanity Fair and also for Sports Illustrated now and then.

Well, I have missed you in Sports Illustrated, I must say. That says more about me than about the rest of the world. I think many people will be familiar with your book Black Hawk Down, which became a film. But perhaps you can describe your career as a journalist and as a writer thus far. What have you tended to focus on? career as a journalist and as a writer thus far? What have you tended to focus on? Well, for about 20 years, I was a newspaper reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer. And there I covered just about everything imaginable from science to foreign assignments, to transportation in Philadelphia, to politics, to cops. But gradually, the overarching direction of my career was always to do longer stories and stories that took more time to report and investigate. So I kind of graduated from daily newspaper stories to Sunday stories to Sunday magazine stories to Sunday magazine serials and then to now to books and magazine articles. Were you involved with the film version of Black Hawk Down?

Did you write the screenplay? I wrote the original draft of that screenplay, which I think they very wisely threw away. And then they hired a wonderful screenwriter named Ken Nolan, who adapted it. Although I continued to work with Ken and I worked closely with Jerry Bruckheimer and Ridley Scott throughout that whole wonderful experience and very happy with the way the film turned out. Nice. And now you just released a book on the Vietnam War, right? Which I haven't seen, but I think I've just read a review of in the New York Times book review. Is that right? Correct. It's called Hue 1968, and it tells the story of the Battle of Hue in Vietnam during the

Tet Offensive. Ken Burns is releasing a big documentary on Vietnam in a couple of months, I think in September. He's going to be on the podcast. I might have to do my homework by reading your book. he's going to be on the podcast. I might have to do my homework by reading your book. I was at the screening of Ken Burns held a premiere in New York a few weeks ago, and I was lucky enough to get a ticket. So, and I've gotten to know the folks who worked on that project over the years that I was working on my Hue book.

That'd actually be a good event for you to do. You and Ken could be in dialogue somewhere and reawaken a public conversation about Vietnam. It seems like the moment has arrived. Well, we'll see. I think there might be some things like that in the works. in The Atlantic in 2003 on torture, titled The Dark Art of Interrogation, where you came to more or less the same position I did in my first book with respect to the ethics of it. And I hadn't read your piece until much later, and I've since recommended it to many people. Did you get much criticism for that article? Because I've encountered more or less nothing but pain for even touching the topic. What was your experience like? You know, I did get a good deal of criticism, but none of it very intelligent, actually. Most of the criticism, to my way of thinking, came from people who either hadn't read the essay or hadn't understood the argument that I was making.

I think probably the main sticking point was that I argue that whether or not to torture or coerce someone is a moral decision. And a lot of people seem to cling to the idea that it's simply a pragmatic decision because torture never works under any circumstances, which I don't believe is true. So I think just by virtue of the fact that I'm willing to say that I think torture is occasionally an effective way of getting information, that of course doesn't mean you ought to do it, but that was enough to trigger a lot of criticism. Yeah, yeah. And your position that it should be illegal, but that we should recognize that there are situations where even good people would be tempted, understandably, to break the law, and that if you can't imagine such situations, you're actually not trying hard enough. That's a very novel

argument, and it's one that I agree with, but I think I will spare us both a lot of pain by declining to talk about this topic anymore on this podcast. We can move on to far more cheerful topics like North Korea. And I also say that the ethical implication of everything you and I have said on this topic is also shared by the, and this is something I've said before, but that great handbook of evil, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. If you look up torture in that reference work, which really is one of the best reference works in philosophy, you find a very clear argument for the same position. So if you think we are Torquemada, just you can group us with Stanford as well.

Well, it's nice to be in good company like that. Yeah. So North Korea, you wrote this piece, I think it's still in the current issue of The Atlantic, and the title is How to Deal with North Korea. There are no good options, but some are worse than others. And this is as stifling a piece as you would expect, given how we're essentially standing in front of four doors and none of them lead anywhere we want to go. And I want us to walk through this pretty systematically because it stands a chance of being the most consequential foreign policy issue of the present and the indefinite future. First, how did you go about reporting on this?

Well, I thought it best to seek out people who have either worked on the North Korea issue in the military or in the White House or in the State Department and who have spent years wrestling with what to do about North Korea. And in some cases, you know, in the cases of some of the military commanders have had to actually prepare for the various options and pick their brains, ask them, you know, because we have a president who sort of plays to the lowest common denominator. And I thought there was a real fear with some of the things that he was saying that he would kind of build a level or groundswell of support for trying to attack North Korea or to pressure it, at least militarily. And I wanted to try to throw some cold water on the simplistic

thinking there and actually talk to people who had wrestled with this issue and lay out what, in fact, the options were. Well, remind people about how we got here. So how did North Korea become this blank space on the map? I mean, the images at night tell so much of the story of South Korea, which is just totally illuminated, like a 21st century society. And the North is just this sea of blackness outside of Pyongyang. So what is going on north of the DMZ? Well, you know, that country, North Korea, which was created after World War II, when Kim Il-sung was the, you know, Korean leader who helped with the was the Korean leader who helped with the Chinese to evict Japan, ended up in control in North Korea. And he established certainly one of the most bizarre regimes of modern times. It's really

kind of a throwback to a 17th century imperial state in Europe, where you have a hereditary dynasty with a whole mythology around Kim Il-sung and since then his son and now his grandson, who are purported to be, you know, sort of divine, divinely selected leaders of the Korean people. Their whole raison d'etre is to enable the Kim family to remain in power and to benefit from that position. building up its military and in the last 20 or 30 years to developing nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, biological weapons, and missile systems that we've now seen are capable of potentially reaching Alaska, and very soon will be capable of reaching the United States mainland. And I think that that effort has been so all-consuming and costly that it has drained North Korea of nearly every other option. And it's been through long periods of very near starvation where, you know, it's estimated that millions of people starved to death in the 1990s. Those conditions have eased somewhat out of necessity. I think the regime has allowed the black market to flourish a little bit, which, you know, people are eating anyway there.

But there's very little else going on outside of the capital city of Pyongyang, which is kind of their, the Kim family showcase. As you point out, this is almost a religious cult. As you point out, this is almost a religious cult. I mean, it's not otherworldly the way normal religious cults are, but it's clearly a personality cult that attributes magical powers to the dear leaders. I mean, these are almost the most confused people on Earth in terms of how they view their place in the world. As Christopher Hitchens used to say, this is a nation of racist dwarves. They're like three inches shorter than the South Koreans, and yet they think they're a master race. And I got to imagine that the spell has been breaking for some people somewhere in the society over the recent decades. But apparently, they have thought that the food aid they see coming from us is just like an awestruck offering to the genius of their dear leader by the West. And I think of them as kind of like a cargo cult

armed with nuclear weapons. Do we have any sense of what percentage of North Korean society believes the mythology? We don't have a good sense of that because there's not a lot of interaction between the Western world and North Korea. The journalists who go there are given Potemkin Village tours. sense of it is that most North Koreans are very cynical about the government the way people are about governments everywhere, but that they don't dare say what they think or speak out against it. I mean, the one thing we haven't mentioned is that North Korea is very much a gulag state in that they have millions of people imprisoned for the slightest of offenses. And, you know, we've even failing to clap loudly enough at a public appearance of the dear leader can get you executed or thrown in jail. So, you know, whatever North Koreans think, they're smart enough to keep it mostly to themselves. It seems to be the most successfully engineered Orwellian experiment the earth has ever seen. I mean, just in terms of

its isolation and the totality of the totalitarian control and the, just the level of informing against family members. And it's just, have you seen that the book, The Cleanest Race? Yes, I have. That's a Myers book, right? Yeah. Yeah. That's a, you know, which really does lay out the racist underpinnings of their, of their, you know, philosophy and the bizarre nature, as you described, of their quasi-religious worship of their dear leader. I realize the news has moved on a little bit since you published your article even just a couple of weeks ago because that was right before this seemingly successful ICBM test. How big a problem is North Korea at this point for the rest of the world? And how would you rank order it in terms of our concerns for our own well-being and the well-being of all the other implicated societies? Well, I think that it's far and away the largest national security concern of the United States. Everybody, I think largely because of media, you know, has this outsized fear of terrorist attack by Islamist fundamentalists, which is sort of a hangover from 9-11, which was 16 years ago.

I think that, you know, the threat of terror attacks will be with us always. But North Korea poses a threat on a completely different scale. They have weapons that could kill millions of people. Right now, they're, you know, the primary threat they pose is to South Korea and to Japan. But as their reach extends with ICBMs, the United States is also potentially a target. And while they don't have the kind of arsenal to pose an existential threat to the United States, I do think that the prospect of a nuclear weapon being exploded over Los Angeles or any other American city is a pretty terrifying prospect. And one that, frankly, as this article goes on to explain, there's very little we can

do to prevent short of deterrence. The implication of their recent missile test is that people agree that they can probably reach Alaska and Hawaii now, but not quite Los Angeles or the rest of the United States. But that should be coming in pretty short order. irresponsible the statements are of the regime, whatever you think their actual motivations are and whatever you think their level of suicidality could be. But we have a completely maniacal regime which in what's the outside estimate, a few years, five years, should be able to land a nuke on a city like Los Angeles or San Francisco? When I wrote the piece, which is just a few months ago, the estimate was three or four years. But this most recent ICBM launch, successful one, came much earlier than anticipated. So my guess is that we could probably even dial back the three and four years.

It might be even closer than that. So in your article, you talk about four possible responses to the problem, and they all suck. So let's move through these. First, just tell me briefly, what are the four, and then we can just run through them. Well, the first would be an all-out attack, what I call prevention, which would essentially crush the Kim regime, would destroy its military, wipe out its arsenals, and essentially reduce North Korea to a stateless humanitarian zone. The second I call turning up the screws. And that would be applying pressure through some form of military attack or embargo that would really hurt North Korea, but would be short of an all-out attack,

and that would seek to essentially prove to Kim Jong-un that we mean business and hopefully get him to recalculate his plans and back away. The third option is decapitation. And that would involve targeting Kim himself or maybe Kim and a few of the key people around him, probably to assassinate them or possibly, I guess, even less likely to arrest them and thereby sort of take off the head of that state and hope that something more reasonable would follow. And the last option, which may be the hardest to swallow, but which I think is probably inevitable, to swallow, but which I think is probably inevitable, is acceptance, which is recognizing that nuclear technology, missile technology is old stuff. It's been around for more than a half century. Lots of people know how to do it. And North Korea is eventually going to figure these things out and going to have these weapons. The paragraph in your article I want to read, which is kind of central to why

the first three options seem to be more or less unthinkable. And it's not necessarily what everyone would expect. It's not that the North Koreans already have nukes and then they can nuke South Korea or Japan or one of our allies. Even their conventional arms makes this situation seemingly totally intractable from a military point of view. And so this is your text. For years, North Korea has had extensive batteries of conventional artillery, an estimated 8,000 big guns just north of the demilitarized zone, the DMZ, which is less than 40 miles from Seoul, South Korea's capital, a metropolitan area of more than 25 million people. One high-ranking U.S. military officer who commanded forces in the Korean theater, now retired, told me he heard estimates that if a grid were laid across Seoul,

dividing it into three square foot blocks, these guns could, within hours, pepper every single one of them. This ability to rain ruin on the city is a potent existential threat to South Korea's largest population center, its government, and its economic anchor. Shells could also deliver chemical and biological weapons. That's the end of your text there. So the thing that makes any kind of military response, however much of a surprise attack we could muster, so impractical is that it's like within minutes,

the moment anything starts happening, they can just annihilate Seoul with their completely conventional artillery. And obviously, if you had evacuated millions of people from Sol, you'd be tipping your hand as to what's happening. Is this really the issue that there's just no way for us to knock out his capacity to harm Sol quickly enough so as to make any kind of prevention or decapitation or turning the screws approach practical? Yes.

Yeah, it's the main reason why the United States hasn't done something like this a long time ago. When Richard Nixon was president, the North Koreans shot down an American war plane and killed, I believe it was 31 American service members on board. airplane and killed, I believe it was 31 American service members on board. Nixon was not known to be a timid soul when it came to the use of military force. And he chose not to counterattack North Korea or to punish them militarily for doing that. And that was back in what, the early 1970s, when this capability was already in place to attack Seoul. So the capability of North Korea to punish or to inflict death and ruin on South Korea has gone up and up and up and up. And I think it's

even a little cynical and probably sadly correct that Kim and his regime calculate that this would possibly not be enough of a deterrent for the United States, because after all, those are just South Koreans living in Seoul for the most part. And so in order to have the level of security that he feels he needs, the ability to attack the United States mainland has been their great quest in the last 20 or 30 years. So the stakes have gone up so high at this point that I think for any sane person, the only policy priority ought to be to prevent conflict from breaking out. Let's take the prevention case first. This is the all-out attack that attempts to prevent anything, even a single shell emerging from North Korea headed toward the South. In your reporting on

this topic, did you encounter any serious person with a good reputation in the military or policy circles who thinks that we should just attack North Korea all out and roll the dice with a prevention strategy? No, I didn't. Although some of the people I spoke to said there are people who hold that opinion and who have voiced it at the Pentagon, but I don't believe that at the highest levels that it would be something seriously considered. And this is because to do anything like that is synonymous with, what, a minimum of some hundreds of thousands of deaths in Seoul or a minimum of a million? I mean, what are the estimates? Well, a minimum, I would say, yeah, would probably be hundreds of thousands.

And that's a very optimistic minimum. If North Korea felt it was under all-out attack, the chances of it doing nothing but launching conventional shells at Seoul and at American bases in South Korea is fairly small. I think that the far more likely totals would be millions. So this is one problem with the second and third options. Well, so let's take the second option first, turning the screws. Remind our listeners what that is and why it's problematic to consider. Okay. But first, if I could, Sam, I'd like to go back to the first option. Sure. If we assume, and I think it's everyone I've talked to agrees, who knows anything about

the actual weapons involved, that it's unrealistic, fantastical is a word I heard used, involved, that it's unrealistic, fantastical is a word I heard used, that we were completely successful. We were able to attack North Korea and destroy all of its capability without them getting off a single shot, without being able to kill a single American or South Korean. We would then be left with a totally stateless North Korea, which would create one of the greatest humanitarian crises in modern times, would flood China with millions of refugees, would flood South Korea with millions of refugees, and would leave the United States with the responsibility of essentially moving in and trying to govern a North Korea that would have, because it's a very rugged terrain, pockets of resistance likely throughout that country, also very likely

possessing nuclear material, chemical and biological weapons, a situation that would make our occupation of Iraq seem like taking your kids for a walk to the local playground by comparison. So there is no way either through, you know, an attack that would, you know, result in only a few chemical weapons exploding to an all-out success. No calculation of this works to our benefit. Yeah, I'm really glad you made that point because the best case scenario is so... including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now at samharris.org.