You can read the full text on the web here.

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Section 9 Entry 0003. Date: 2003 January 08 Wednesday.   (diary)    (previous)   (top)   (bottom)   (next)  (topics)  (contents)

In Japan, at New Year, it's auspicious to dream of ... what? I forget. Some kind of bird, I think. (Maybe a hawk.) And Mount Fuji, definitely. However, over the New Year period I didn't dream of anything in particular.

Last night, however, I dreamt that I went to Egypt with my parents, and someone was murdered by Islamic militants. Although I'm dismayed at the notion of resurrecting the ancient war between Islam and the West, and see the wilful acts of resurrection currently in train as being totally wrongheaded, I'm nevertheless being contaminated by the zeitgeist.

We are all children of whatever age we happen to find ourselves living in.

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Section 9 Entry 0004. Date: 2003 January 09 Thursday.
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At this stage, I'm reasonably happy with the basic organization of the website, and I'm ready to start posting new stories on a reasonably regular basis. I'm planning to post at least twelve new stories this year, and today I posted the first of these, a science fiction story called Bad Sex. The elements include media feeding frenzy, clones, cloning, John Milton, Paradise Lost, attitudes toward sex.

This story has been quite some time in the making, and on 2002 November 08 I wrote about how I came to write it.

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Section 9 Entry 0005. Date: 2003 January 10 Friday.   (diary)   (previous)   (top)   (bottom)   (next)  (topics)  (contents)

In my previous entry I wrote "At this stage, I'm reasonably happy with the basic organization of the website." However, that's a lie. The truth is that I could happily spend a large chunk of the rest of eternity absorbed in the never-ending task of tweaking the interface.

One thing I've discovered over the last couple of years is that computers are seriously addictive. It was bad enough back in the days of DOS, back in the 1980s, when an unpardonable number of hours got chewed up experimenting with minute adjustments to the config.sys file and the autoexec.bat file - experiments made all the more interesting because I never really properly understood what I was doing, so there was always a suspenseful element of uncertainty to the proceedings.

Once, in the course of my experimenting, I did something - I have no idea what - and accidentally converted every single piece of data on my system to an incomprehensible set of numbers. Another time I succeeded in shrinking my entire display into a colorful matchbox-sized blob of incomprehensibility, rendering the system totally unworkable. I got to be quite good at reinstalling my system from scratch, and the unintended consequences of my own curiosity taught me to be a thoroughgoing backup demon.

Now, however, I've graduated from DOS to Linux and Windows, and the Internet gives me access to a pretty well unlimited stash of free software.

(To be continued. Right now I have some work to do ....)

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Section 9 Entry 0006. Date: 2003 January 10 Friday.   (diary)   (previous)   (top)   (bottom)   (next)  (topics)  (contents)

Yesterday, I read in the newspaper of a secret United Nations report saying there will be 500,000 casualties if there is a conventional war in Iraq. The report was released by "a Cambridge peace group" on their website, URL ungiven.

This morning I went on the Internet and found the same reports in a number of places. But what is the "Cambridge peace group"? The BBC wasn't saying, but had a link to the United Nations document on the peace group's site.

The peace group turns out to be the Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq and their URL is http://www.casi.org.uk.

The BBC's link to the PDF document led (early on January 10) to a small PDF document which simply gave a different download link, which I tried, but my copy of Adobe Acrobat refused to open whatever it was I downloaded. I then went to the CASI site itself and found a new and workable link to the PDF document.

At about 0830 on 2003 January 10, the link to the CASI copy of the United Nations report (in PDF format) was:-

http://www.casi.org.uk/info/undocs/war021210.pdf

The context is explained on an ordinary webpage which is at:-

http://www.casi.org.uk/info/undocs/war021210notes.html

The above links to the CASI site, to the CASI copy of the UN document on predicted war casualties and to the CASI webpage giving the context were functional at 0840 Japan time on 2003 January 10.

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| war links | new stories (Hugh's fiction)

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Section 9 Entry 0007. Date: 2003 January 10 Friday.   (diary)   (previous)   (top)   (bottom)   (next)  (topics)  (contents)

Exploring the Internet, had another download adventure today, this time a novel.

Cory Doctorow, a guy I hadn't heard of before, has a blog at http://boingboing.net. He seems to blog on a fairly regular basis. He also has a novel available for download in various formats (plain text, HTML, PDF etc) on his www.craphound.com site. The link is here. This site is interesting to me personally because I'm interesting in using the Internet as a medium to promote my work. Cory Doctorow blogs (2003 Jan 09) "Over 20,000 downloads of Down and Out [Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom] in one day 24 hours after launching the site from which you can download my novel for free, the book has been downloaded over 20,000 times. It's been Slashdotted, blogged to hell and back, and I've done a number of press interviews about it. What's more, the title is currently sitting at #304 in the Amazon Sales Rank. Let's call this one a success. I could not be more stoked. Damn." I haven't read the book yet but I've just downloaded it.

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Section 9 Entry 0008. Date: 2003 January 11 Saturday.   (diary)   (previous)   (top)   (bottom)   (next)  (topics)  (contents)

It's the first day of a three-day weekend here in Japan (Monday 13 is Coming-of-Age day) and I'd planned to have a quiet time doing housework and working on my fiction. I certainly didn't want to kick off the weekend by thinking about nuclear war. However, when I woke up and turned on the television, NHK (the commercial-free state-sponsored Japanese television service) was rebroadcasting a furious denunciation of the United States and the IAEA (the International Atomic Energy Agency).

The North Korean denunciation was being broadcast in the Korean language with Japanese subtitles. It was obvious that the North Koreans were thoroughly steamed about something, but my knowledge of the Korean language is close to zero ("kimuchi" is the only Korean word I can bring to mind) and my reading knowledge of Japanese is still poor (by the time I've read fifty percent of a TV subtitle, it's gone - speed counts.)

So later I went on the Internet to find out exactly what was going on, and found this on the BBC, eleven hours old by the time I got to it:-

"North Korea's announcement that it is immediately withdrawing from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) has caused panic and alarm throughout Asia."

Yeah, color me alarmed.

I'm also starting to feel a little bit overloaded. One crisis at a time, please! The work year is getting into gear and my schedule is rapidly becoming busier and busier, and it's getting difficult to fit this global worrying into my schedule ... on the other hand, since North Korea is really just in the backyard, I don't think I can simply ignore that part of the global equation.

And now ... to crash bathetically from the global level to the intensely local ... my firewall has twice thrown up a message in the last half hour saying "The firewall has blocked an Internet broadcast to your computer [DHCP] from 0.0.0.0 [UDP Port 68]."

The odd thing about this is that although the WiFi card is plugged into my laptop computer, the WiFi router, which is a separate piece of equipment, is unplugged, meaning that there is no way for my computer to talk to the Internet. So I'm theorizing that:-

(a) Some kind of hardware failure is generating this message, which is possible, as my laptop computer has come in for a certain amount of rough treatment as it has been lugged all over the city (and further beyond), or

(b) Someone locally is (maybe) trying to hack into my WiFi system ("locally" meaning within one or two hundred meters of where I'm sitting), or

(c) Someone is using some kind of radio-frequency generating equipment which is accidentally sending out radio signals which the WiFi card is picking up and which the firewall is interpreting as a signal from the Internet.

In many ways, computers are great, but at other times the attraction of dealing with the never-ending string of hassles which computers generate starts to pall ... and this is one of those times. Damn! The same firewall message just popped up again!

The WiFi system is protected, to an extent, by a WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) setup which scrambles the signal which is traveling between the router (which is currently off) and the WiFi card which is plugged into the laptop's PC card slot. Even so, the thought that someone might possibly be trying to hack into my system from the local neighborhood is one more (little) thing to worry about.

.... I think the correct solution to all this is to go to the refrigerator, get out the icecream, put some icecream in a bowl, add a sliced banana, and call it lunch.

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"Kimuchi" is spicy cabbage. It's a traditional Korean dish which is moderately popular with Japanese people, and I sometimes find myself eating, for example, kumuchi-flavored tofu.

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Section 9 Entry 0009. Date: 2003 January 11 Saturday.   (diary)   (previous)   (top)   (bottom)   (next)  (topics)  (contents)

B52s on alert - 2003 Feb 05 Wednesday

1989 report from the National Defense University

I tried to let the North Korean issue slide, but it continued to nag at me. Then in today's International Herald Tribune I read a reassuring article by Bill Keller headlined "Actually, there is a plan for North Korea".

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Link, valid 2003 January 11 at 2200 Japan time, to Bill Keller "more for more" article "Actually, there is a plan for North Korea" in the International Herald Tribune.

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In summary, the article says that back in 1999 the National Defense University put together a team headed by Richard Armitage, now Deputy Secretary of State. The 1999 plan proposed an approach which came to be known as "more for more", and Keller summarizes the plan as being to "expect much more from the North Koreans, but offer much more in return; financial aid including completion of the two promised light-water reactors; the nonaggression pact that North Korea is demanding; eventually, normal diplomatic relations."

I thought that sounded so level-headed and reassuring that I wanted to see the original document for myself, so I went on the Internet and found it, and what I found filled me with disquiet.

I found the report on a Korean site, www.kimsoft.com, which gives a Korean perspective on the problem. The actual report is on that Korean site here. The report is headed "gov/us/fed/congress/record/1999/mar/04/1999CRE341B", but the Korean site supplies a headline which gives a Korean spin on the report: "The Armitage Report on North Korea: Naval Blockades and Preemptive Strikes by Japanese Forces?"

I wanted to authenticate this report: it never hurts to check things.

A search for "1999CRE341B" on the web with Google drew a near-blank (one more Korean site) but a search with Google groups was more productive, turning up a posting of "5 Mar 1999" by "roboposter@us.govnews.org".

The details of the provenance of this electronic document are given as follows:-

Archive-Name: gov/us/fed/congress/record/1999/mar/04/1999CRE341B
[Congressional Record: March 4, 1999 (Extensions)]
[Page E341-E343]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access
[wais.access.gpo.gov]
[DOCID:cr04mr99-29]

The bottom line is that what Google has in its stash of "Groups" material seems to be the same as what is on the Korean site.

I took the liberty of making my own copy of the roboposter posting and putting it on my own site here.

Reading through this 1999 document, I was seriously troubled by a number of points. The context of my worry, of course, is that the man whom Bill Keller refers to as "the guy in charge of that report" is, as mentioned above, the American Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, one of the gentlemen who have the opportunity to help shape or reshape George Bush's worldview.

The report says (and I agree) that North Korea is not going to fall apart anytime soon just because most of its citizens are starving.

Then it says - now here is the point where my alarm bells start ringing - that "only by fairly testing Pyongyang's intentions through diplomacy can we validate policy assumptions. If a diplomatic solution is not possible, it is to our advantage to discover this sooner rather than later in order to best protect our security interests. If North Korea leaves no choice but confrontation, it should be on our terms, not its own."

Now, if I was Kim Jong Il, the boss man of North Korea, and if I was sitting at home in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, my translation of this would be "if you guys don't do what we say then we're going to choose the time, the place and the weapons." Of course, the document doesn't force that interpretation, but that's one possible reading of it.

The particularly alarming thing is the very American strain of impatience which is evident in the document - the report wants a fast solution, not a slow one.

As I wrote earlier in this diary, at one time the Soviet Union was ruled by the monster Stalin, but that in time Stalin died, an evolutionary regime change took place, and eventually someone conceded that "mistakes have been made".

And to my way of thinking, massaging the North Korean problem until it eventually resolves itself is the best move under the present circumstances.

Now, the report goes on to say that:-

"One cannot expect North Korea to take U.S. diplomacy seriously unless we demonstrate unambiguously that the United States is prepared to bolster its deterrent military posture. This can be done without appearing to threaten Pyongyang."

At this point, I really think the report disconnects from the logical world. The report essentially says this:-

"To make the North Koreans talk, we have to increase the military threat which America poses to North Korea. However, although we have to threaten these guys to make them come to the negotiating table, they're not going to interpret our threat as being a threat."

That's obviously a logical nonsense, and the people responsible for producing this report are smart enough to know that it's a logical nonsense, which suggests that they're operating from ... well, the words that come to mind are "from inside the imperialist box".

Later (as discussed below) the report goes on to mention the option of preemption, and if you have preemption in mind as one of your options, then obviously your military forces constitute a threat to those whom you are thinking of preempting.

Actually, on reflection, the words "This can be done without appearing to threaten Pyongyang" are ambiguous. Without appearing to whom? Are we talking about North Korean perceptions or about the perceptions of the wider world outside North Korea? The passage could be taken as meaning "We can threaten North Korea without the rest of the world noticing that we are threatening North Korea."

Now let's read on ....

The report goes on to say that:-

"We would propose a new comprehensive approach for management of the problems posed by North Korea. The package should combine the elements of deterrence and diplomacy cited below. This package is not offered with any unwarranted optimism regarding what is possible vis-a-vis North Korea. Thus, the strengthening of deterrence is central to this package."

Translation: "We're going to try diplomacy, but it's not going to work, so we should get ready for war."

The report goes on to say that "Red Lines" should be drawn and that:-

"The United States, together with the Republic of Korea and Japan, should clarify what is unacceptable behavior and underscore that provocative military action by North Korea will not be tolerated and will provoke a response."

A little later, the report outlines a carrot-and-stick deal, the "more for more" deal which Bill Keller talks about in the article mentioned above:-

"Washington should table an offer that meets Pyongyang's legitimate economic, security, and political concerns. This would allow the United States to seize the diplomatic initiative as well as the moral and political high ground. It would also strengthen the ability to build and sustain a coalition if North Korea does not cooperate. Most importantly, the failure of enhanced diplomacy should be demonstrably attributable to Pyongyang."

Why does this statement trouble me? Well, because of the part starting "Most importantly".

The context, of course, is that right now the United States is going through the motions of diplomacy while preparing for a war with Iraq, and President Bush's recent speeches have made it clear that, as far as he is concerned, Saddam Hussein has a choice, and any failure of diplomacy is demonstrably attributable to Saddam.

Now comes the reassuring part, the part that at least sounded reassuring when Bill Keller summarized it in his article "Actually, there is a plan for North Korea":-

"The objective of negotiations should be to offer Pyongyang clear choices in regard to its future: on the one hand, economic benefits, security assurances, political legitimization, on the other, the certainty of enhanced military deterrence. For the United States and its allies, the package as a whole means that we are prepared - if Pyongyang meets our concerns - to accept North Korea as a legitimate actor, up to and including full normalization of relations."

However, the context, supplied by the report itself, is that we cannot have "any unwarranted optimism regarding what is possible vis-a-vis North Korea" - diplomacy can be expected to fail.

Reading on through the report we come to this:-

"Should diplomacy fail, the United States would have to consider two alternative courses, neither of which is attractive. One is to live with and deter a nuclear North Korea armed with delivery systems, with all its implications for the region. The other is preemption, with the attendant uncertainties."

However, at this stage it's already been more or less agreed that diplomacy is going to fail. So, in analysis, the "more for more" suggestion amounts to this:-

"Here's a nice package which would be acceptable to any sane and reasonable person. But we know that the North Koreans are not reasonable, even if they're technically sane, and so this offer is pretty much guaranteed to fail. But, when it fails, having tried it will make us look good when we take the next step."

The report concludes like this:-

"Strengthened deterrence and containment. This would involve a more ready and robust posture, including a willingness to interdict North Korean missile exports on the high seas. Our posture in the wake of a failure of diplomacy would position the United States and its allies to enforce ``red lines.''

"Preemption. We recognize the dangers and difficulties associated with this option. To be considered, any such initiative must be based on precise knowledge of facilities, assessment of probable success, and clear understanding with our allies of the risks.

"We are under no illusions about the prospects for success of the comprehensive package outlined above. The issues are serious and the implications of a failure of diplomacy are profound."

In summary, my analysis of this report is that it says:-

(i) Diplomacy is unlikely to work, but a diplomatic effort would make us look good for the next step, and

(ii) The next step is grabbing North Korean missiles on the high seas or preemption.

End of summary.

Continuing to just muddle on (which is what the world has been doing up until now) does not seem to be an option.

As mentioned above, the report dates from 1999. What has happened in practice is that the Bush administration has skipped the diplomatic step and has proceeded to the missile-grabbing step. Back in December, the United States got the Spanish navy to grab a North Korean ship carrying scud missiles to Yemen ... but the US then released the ship after Yemen protested, the twist here being that Yemen is (more or less) a US ally in the "war against terror". (I did say "more or less". Like everything else, the details are possibly a bit more complicated than that.)

The Armitage report says "Try diplomacy, and if that doesn't work then we should grab missiles."

Instead, the Bush administration didn't try diplomacy, used its Spanish proxies to grab missiles instead, then gave the missiles back, and consequently sent a very unclear signal to North Korea. The new element which has been added to the mix (one the Spanish navy probably won't forget in a hurry) is American unpredictability.

Now, I'm sure that the Armitage report has been read by North Korea. The report said, back in 1999, that America should think about grabbing North Korean missiles on the high seas, and then in 2002 the United States went and did just that. The report also says that the one other option available to America (if diplomatic success is unavailable) is preemption.

Back in 1999, the report was talking about preemption as being one of the options available. This was read into the American Congressional Record on the 4th of March back in 1999, and was probably read by someone in North Korea very shortly afterwards ... meantime, George Bush is now poised to launch an unnecessary preemptive war against Iraq.

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Date of this entry: 2003 January 11 Saturday.
start of entry for 2003 January 11 Saturday

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North Korea: U.S.A. puts B52s on alert - 2003 February 05 Wednesday

To my way of thinking, it is George Bush's preemptive war against Iraq which is precisely what is stirring up trouble on the Korean peninsular. The North Koreans probably think that they are next on the menu. First Afghanistan, then Iraq, then North Korea, which George Bush has explicitly named as a member of the "axis of evil."

Earlier this year, I wrote "It has occurred to me that maybe George Bush will precipitate war on the Korean peninsular by bombing North Korean nuclear processing facilities, but I'm assigning a fairly low probability to this, something on the order of five percent" - that is, five percent in the coming year.

However, after carefully considering the latest developments, I am now assigning a thirty per cent probability to war on the Korean peninsular in 2003.

But there is a solution! This is the good news. After thinking about this problem for most of the day, I have finally come up with a practical three-step plan for resolving the problem of increasing tensions on the Korean peninsular. The plan is as follows:-

Step One: George Bush backs away from his planned war with Iraq. This will reassure the guys in the North Korean leadership that they are not going to get eaten alive by the hegemonistic Americans.

Step Two: George Bush persuades Japan to buy North Korea's nuclear material. (Japan is already awash with nuclear material, and a few more tons won't make any significant difference.) This will address regional security concerns, will satisfy North Korea's urgent need to make a buck, and will nullify the possibility of nuclear proliferation.

Step Three: Colin Powell replaces Dick Cheney as Vice President, and then George Bush resigns in favor of Colin Powell, leaving American power in the hands of a man whom the world trusts not to go beserk with it.

North Korea update: U.S.A. puts B52s on alert - 2003 Feb 05 Wednesday

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