April 24, 2018—Temptations, Expectations and Needed Persistence!

Last Friday, immediately after North Korean leader Kim Jong Un announced North Korea would stop its ballistic missile tests and shut down its nuclear test site, President Trump tweeted: “This is very good news for North Korea and the World – big progress! Look forward to our Summit.”

Immediately, there was a flurry of very positive speculation about the possibilities of this move by North Korea, especially in the context of a planned meeting between President Trump and the “Great Leader” along with guesses about when and where it might occur.

Much has been made about CIA Director Mike Pompeo’s recent trip to Pyongyang to help set the stage for this historic meeting, especially in the context of his Senate confirmation to become Secretary of State — and the continuing political divide in Washington that is frustrating many initiatives sought by the Trump administration.

Speculation also continues along with the diplomatic rain dance associated with other preparatory stage-setting meetings, such as Kim Jong Un’s upcoming meeting with South Korea President Moon Jae-in in the Demilitarized Zone where the 1953 Armistice was negotiated. Hope abounds for a peaceful reunification of North and South Korea with longstanding benefits for both and for 25,000-30,000 U.S. troops still stationed there.

But “hope is not a strategy,” and these and other hopeful aspirations are very complicated. A positive outcome of the pending negotiations will be impeded by the legacy of a quarter century of failed attempts to block North Korea’s programs to produce a now demonstrated nuclear and ballistic missile capability. While positive outcomes may, and hopefully will, be possible, it seems to me that negotiations are unlikely to achieve anytime soon a demilitarized and denuclearized North Korean peninsula as many have hoped.

As part of his recent announcements, Kim Jong Un stated he now has the nuclear weapons and the missiles he needs to deliver them. In my view, his claim is valid — and our negotiators must take it into account as we pursue our objectives, which I believe should include improving our ballistic missile defense (BMD) capabilities in view of that reality.

Almost a year ago, our intelligence community acknowledged North Korea then could have 60 nuclear weapons — and it had recently tested ballistic missiles that could reach Guam (a U.S. territory), Hawaii, Alaska, and the entire continental United States.

Some take heart from the fact that many of North Korea’s underground tests have involved only low yield nuclear explosions — they assume these tests were failures because they think North Korea needs large yield nuclear weapons to threaten us.

But large yield nuclear weapons are not needed to produce the existential threat of an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) threat — and Russian Generals told the EMP Commissioners a decade ago that Russia had “accidentally” passed to North Korea how to build low-yield “super EMP” weapons.

Others, including senior officials who ought to know better, claim that North Korea still must prove it has the technology to reenter the Earth’s atmosphere with sufficient accuracy to hit an American city. But the existential threat from an EMP attack requires neither high accuracy nor to reenter the earth atmosphere. North Korea could detonate a nuclear weapon in space — e.g., almost anywhere over the eastern half of the United States, which would shut a major portion of the electric power grid upon which most Americans (and our military) depend.

Below is a chart from one of my briefings given repeatedly over the past year, illustrating possible ballistic missile trajectories from North Korea on the left — and on the right the trajectory of North Korea’s launch of its space satellites toward the south. (Two of these satellites, launched in 2012 and 2016, still orbit over the United States many times daily.)

Ballistic missiles in many of these trajectories on the left could be intercepted by our 44 ground-based interceptors in Alaska and California. But North Korea could overwhelm those defenses with a larger number of attacking ballistic missiles, which it may have. Satellites approaching the United States from the south are somewhat more troublesome because our BMD systems are oriented to defend against ballistic missiles approaching from the north.

In any case, we should take seriously North Korea’s explicit claim that achieving an EMP attack capability has been its “strategic goal,” especially when considering the threat of nuclear weapons launched southward, whether from North Korea’s mobile ballistic missiles launchers — or from its satellite launch site illustrated above. And we should supplement our existing BMD systems as soon as possible.

Fortunately, we have several opportunities for such supplements that should be considered in the planning for the upcoming negotiations.

Click here for my August 28, 2017 Newsmax article, which argued that we should quickly adapt U.S. aircraft to intercept ballistic missiles shortly after they are launched, while their rockets still burn and they are particularly vulnerable, to counter this then existing threat. To my knowledge we still need initiatives to obtain such “boost-phase intercept” capabilities, as I again argued last week.

Click here for my April 19, 2108 Newsmax article again emphasizing our continuing vulnerabilities, our urgent need to counter them — and that we could quickly employ “boost-phase interceptors” on existing aircraft to counter that threat. This article was before the flurry of activities following Kim Jong Un’s initiative.

Then click here to review my last Friday’s, April 20 Newsmax article noting that our negotiations with North Korea also could be quickly supported by enabling our (and Japan’s) Aegis BMD cruisers and destroyers near North Korea to provide such needed defenses. And as I observed:

“Such a capability would be most helpful to back up President Trump’s “Peace through Strength” approach to national security, especially as he plans his negotiation to denuclearize North Korea. Just as the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) gave enormous leverage to President Reagan’s negotiations with the Soviet Union, advancing our missile defense capabilities can advance our negotiations with North Korea.”

This comment turned out to be slightly prophetic. Within hours, we all became aware of pending negotiations with North Korea to see where Kim Jong Un’s initiatives lead. Click here for an early discussion of North Korea’s initiative, in which Kim Jong Un is quoted as saying North Korea’s achievement was a “great victory,” so “no nuclear test and intermediate-range and inter-continental ballistic rocket test-fire are necessary . . . now.”

As noted above, I believe this claim is most likely true.

These conditions remind me of the second half of the 1980s, when I was privileged to lead the Defense and Space Talks with the Soviet Union and protected President Reagan’s SDI program against Soviet efforts to scuttle it.

Our opposition came from not only the Soviets but also from many in the international community as well as in the United States. Happily, we prevailed and can today provide at least limited defenses against missile attacks, though the Clinton administration cancelled the most important SDI products as I have discussed before.

But the SDI program that was demonstrating President Reagan’s vision of building effective BMD systems, and his insistence that SDI was not negotiable, gave our overall negotiations considerable leverage. In conjunction with his Strategic Modernization Program that repaired the impact of many years of neglect of our strategic systems, his condition led to the first arms control treaties ever to reduce significantly the nuclear weapons.

Happily, President Trump — like President Reagan — has undertaken his own strategic modernization program to repair consequences of the neglect of properly maintaining our military over the last two decades. He should also initiate efforts to rapidly improve our existing BMD capability, as indicated above, and insist they continue whatever may be the nature of pending negotiations.

Such initiatives should be fashioned to fit with demands he is laying down as conditions for concluding any significant agreement with North Korea.

In particular, he has emphasized that if the proposed meeting does not look promising, he won’t go — and if it appears promising, he goes and it is not fruitful, he will “respectfully leave the meeting.”

These are very important conditions to which I hope he holds firmly — including initiatives to build truly effective BMD systems to protect the American people and to harden our critical civil infrastructure against potentially existential EMP threats already posed by North Korea.

Another Reykjavik on the way???

What can you do?

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