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                            THANK CARTER ANC CLINTON FOR NORTH KOREA’S NUKES

                                                                                     By

                                                                       Daniel John Sobieski

If there is anything positive about the crisis about North Korea, it is that we don’t have a President Hillary Clinton dealing with it.  The wannabe first female president, if you don’t count Obama aide Valerie Jarrett, who orchestrated the disaster in the Middle East, would no doubt have the advice of William Jefferson Clinton, the commander-in-chief who is the godfather of North Korea’s nuclear program and the winner of the Neville Chamberlain Lifetime Appeasement Award.

Between the two of them they have royally mucked up the word. Hillary was there when President Obama precipitously withdrew from Iraq, creating the vacuum ISIS filled,  and drew the red line in Syria with vanishing ink. She is the architect of the Libyan venture that turned Libya into a failed state and Benghazi a graveyard for four heroic Americans.

As for her husband,  Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter must be very proud. Their policy of appeasement of North Korea’s brutal dictatorship has now borne rotten fruit with the little fat boy, Kim Jong Un, now able to threaten the

world with horrors similar to those imposed on his own people.

When Clinton first learned of the North Korean nuclear program in 1994, a surgical strike against its Yoingbyomg reactor might have sufficed to send Pyongyang a message that a nuclear North Korea was unacceptable.

Instead Clinton allowed Jimmy Carter to engage in some private foreign policy and jet off to the last Stalinist regime on earth to broker a deal whereby North Korea would promise to forego a nuclear weapons program in exchange for a basket of goodies that included oil, fool, and, amazingly, nuclear technology.

Along the way, Carter praised North Korea’s mass-murdering dictator as a “vigorous and intelligent man.” And of North Korea itself, Carter said of this habitat for inhumanity,“I don’t see they are an outlaw nation.” Of course, the man who gave us the ayatollahs in Iran didn’t. That wouldn’t stop him from getting the Nobel Peace Prize. As Jonah Goldberg wrote in October, 2002:

Let's start with the Nobel Peace Prize Committee. On Oct. 11, the Nobel committee announced it would award its Peace Prize to Jimmy Carter. It was really an un-Peace Prize for George W. Bush, whom the Nobel crowd believes is a foolish warmongering meanie.

"In a situation currently marked by threats of the use of power," intoned the Nobel press release, "Carter has stood by the principles that conflicts must as far as possible be resolved through mediation and international cooperation based on international law, respect for human rights and economic development." Translation: Bush should be more like Carter….

… it was brother Jimmy who had the bright idea of lavishing the North Koreans with aid in exchange for their "cross-our-hearts-and-hope-to-die" promise that they would stop pursuing nuclear weapons technology. Of course, many argue it was Carter's mollycoddling of the North Koreans during his presidency that encouraged them to start their nuclear program to begin with. But hey, that's heavy water under the bridge….

The final agreement, which Clinton dubbed "a very good deal indeed," called for the United States to provide the North Koreans with $4 billion worth of light-water reactors and $100 million in oil in exchange for a promise to be good and an assurance that inspectors would be allowed to poke around at some indeterminate point down the road.

The rest, as they say, is history. Clinton, relieved perhaps that he would not have to use the military he once loathed, leapt on this deal as if it were a White House intern. In exchange for a promise to be good, Clinton accepted Carter’s deal and agreed to provide the nation that spends a quarter of its GNP on its military while its people starve in a gulag some $4 billion in economic assistance, including oil and light-water nuclear reactors.

Upon completing what became known as the “Agreed Framework” in 1994, Clinton praised it the same way Chamberlain praised the Munich deal with Nazi Germany:

At the time, Mr Clinton said: “This US-North Korean agreement will help to achieve a long-standing and vital American objective: an end to the threat of nuclear proliferation on the Korean peninsula.

“This agreement is good for the United States, good for our allies, and good for the safety of the entire world.

“It’s a crucial step toward drawing North Korea into the global community.”

Gee, where did we hear this before? Ah, yes, Neville Chamberlain, 1938, proclaiming peace in our time.

In 1998, a week after Clinton’s military chief of staff assured Congress that North Korea had no active ballistic missile program, Pyongyang launched a Taepodong ICBM over the Japanese home islands. Instead of blasting the launch sites, within two months Clinton sent North Korea another multi-million dollar aid package and reopened bilateral negotiations.

Robert Kaufmann, professor of public policy at Pepperdine University, said of the agreement Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton engineered:

"The North Korean deal of 1994 is the prototype for why open societies should not negotiate arms control agreements with rogue regimes. The North Koreans duped Jimmy Carter — an emissary of Clinton — and the Clinton administration to subsidize the North Korean nuclear program in exchange for the counterfeit promise that North Korea would limit itself to civilian nuclear power."

President Obama’ eight years of “strategic patience” sealed the deal. Unfortunately, his nuclear deal with Iran is the 1994 Framework deal with North Korea on steroids. Ironically, North Korea and Iran have worked hand-in-glove to develop the missile technology to deliver nukes. Now it has $150 billion and Obama’s blessing to test the missiles to deliver the nukes we may only have delayed the development of.

Once again we have negotiated an arms agreement with a rogue regime. Whatever transpires with North Lorea, Iran is coming up fast as a threat. And we all have Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton to thank for setting the precedent.

          Daniel John Sobieski is a free lance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.               

                                   HOW NORTH KOREA COULD DESTROY U.S. WTH SINGLE NUKE 

                                                                                     By     

                                                                       Daniel John Sobieski

As both Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has stated, the Clinton-Obama era of “strategic patience” with North Korea is over. The usual suspects in the mainstream media have been warning that Trump is provoking Pyongyang into war on the Korean peninsula. The counter is that the administration isn’t willing to wait till North Korea ha the operational capability to nuke an American city like Seattle or Honolulu.

What is not being discussed is a much bigger and more imminent threat which makes action imperative, an existential one for the United States. 

The nightmare scenario of an America sent back centuries in time before electricity, refrigeration, and smart phones has grown unnervingly closer with the presence of two North Korean satellites with orbits over a blissfully unaware American populace and an Obama administration indifferent that was to the apocalyptic threat of an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack.

On Feb. 7, 2016, North Korea launched a second satellite, the KMS-4, to join their KMS-3 satellite launched in December of 2012. In an article in the Washington Times on April 24, 2016, R. James Woolsey,  former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and Peter Vincent Fry, executive director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security as well as director of the Nuclear Strategy Forum, both congressional advisory boards, warned of the dangers of an apocalyptic EMP attack that these and similar satellites pose:

Both satellites now are in south polar orbits, evading many U.S. missile defense radars and flying over the United States from the south, where our defenses are limited. Both satellites — if nuclear armed — could make an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack that could blackout the U.S. electric grid for months or years, thereby killing millions.

Technologically, such an EMP attack is easy — since the weapon detonates at high-altitude, in space, no shock absorbers, heat shield, or vehicle for atmospheric re-entry is necessary. Since the radius of the EMP is enormous, thousands of kilometers, accuracy matters little. Almost any nuclear weapon will do.

Moreover, North Korea probably has nuclear weapons specially designed, not to make a big explosion, but to emit lots of gamma rays to generate high-frequency EMP. Senior Russian generals warned EMP Commissioners in 2004 that their EMP nuclear warhead design leaked “accidentally” to North Korea, and unemployed Russian scientists found work in North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.

Woolsey and Pry, along with former Reagan science adviser William R. Graham, chairman of the Congressional EMP Commission, Ambassador Henry Cooper, director of the Strategic Defense Initiative and chief negotiator at the Defense and Space Talks with the USSR; and Fritz Ermarth, chairman of the National Intelligence Council; warned of the North Korean EMP threat an article in the February 12, 2016, issue of National Review:

Naïve reliance on their transparent disavowals could end up costing millions of American lives.

North Korea launched its second satellite on Saturday, yet the national press continues to ignore this existential threat. The White House has not recognized that a nuclear-armed North Korea has demonstrated an ability to kill most Americans with an electromagnetic-pulse (EMP) attack. And White House spokesmen and the media have misled the public with unjustified assurances that North Korea has not yet miniaturized nuclear warheads for missile or satellite delivery.

We, who have spent our professional lifetimes analyzing and defending against nuclear-missile threats, warned years ago that North Korea’s Unha-3 space launch vehicle could carry a small nuclear warhead and detonate it a hundred or so miles over the United States to create an EMP, leading to a protracted nationwide blackout. The resulting societal chaos could kill millions.

The image of an America gone dark, an America suddenly transported from an era of IPads to an era of horse and buggy travel, recently depicted in the NBC series “Revolution” is not science fiction but a very real possibility.  As Investor’s Business Daily described the threat in an aptly titled April, 2013 editorial, “How North Korea Could Destroy The United States”:

The three-stage missile North Korea launched last December that also orbited a “package,” which experts say could be a test to orbit a nuclear weapon that then would be de-orbited on command anywhere over the U.S. and exploded at a high altitude, releasing an electromagnetic pulse (EMP). That would fry electronic circuitry and the nation’s power grid.

This concern recently has been reinforced by a little-publicized study released in May 2011, titled “In the Dark: Military Planning for a Catastrophic Critical Infrastructure Event,” by the U.S. Army War College that said a nuclear detonation at altitude above a U.S. city could wipe out the electrical grid for hundreds, possibly thousands, of miles around.

The satellite launched by Pyongyang coincided with a third round of nuclear tests described as a “nuclear test of a higher level,” most likely referring to a device made from highly enriched uranium, which is easier to miniaturize than the plutonium bombs North Korea tested in 2006 and 2009, said Cheong Seong-chang, an analyst at the private Sejong Institute in South Korea.

Such an EMP device would not have to be particularly high yield. It would not be designed to create a big explosion, but to convert its energy into gamma rays, that generate the EMP effect.

Any nuclear weapon detonated above an altitude of 30 kilometers will generate an electromagnetic pulse that will destroy electronics and could collapse the electric power grid and other critical infrastructures — communications, transportation, banking and finance, food and water — that sustain modern civilization and the lives of 300 million Americans.

As the Heritage Foundation reports, an EMP attack with a warhead detonated warhead 25 to 300 miles above the U.S. mainland “would fundamentally change the world. Airplanes would fall from the sky; most cars would be inoperable; electrical devices would fail. Water, sewer and electrical networks would fail simultaneously. Systems of banking, energy, transportation, food production and delivery, water, emergency services, and even cyberspace would collapse.”

Nobody is harmed or killed immediately by the blast. But life in the U.S., the world’s only superpower and the world’s largest economy, would come to a screeching halt as a country dependent on cutting-edge 21st century technology regresses in time almost a century instantaneously.

North Korean has also been working on a submarine launched ballistic missile,  which would put the continental U.S. with striking distance. While North Korean submarines are not yet that sophisticated as our ballistic missile submarine fleet, it would only take a sub modified to launch a single missile, or even one launched fromm a disguised container cargo ship off our West Coast to pose an apocalyptic threat.

As Woolsey and Pry note in the March 29 edition of The Hill, the threat of North Korean sending the U.S. back to the Stone Age is real and imminent:

The mainstream media, and some officials who should know better, continue to allege North Korea does not yet have capability to deliver on its repeated threats to strike the U.S. with nuclear weapons. False reassurance is given to the American people that North Korea has not “demonstrated” that it can miniaturize a nuclear warhead small enough for missile delivery, or build a reentry vehicle for an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) capable of penetrating the atmosphere to blast a U.S. city.

Yet any nation that has built nuclear weapons and long-range missiles, as North Korea has done, can easily overcome the relatively much simpler technological challenge of warhead miniaturization and reentry vehicle design….

…on October 7, 2015, (Admiral William) Gortney again warned the Atlantic Council: "I agree with the intelligence community that we assess that they [North Koreans] have the ability, they have the weapons, and they have the ability to miniaturize those weapons, and they have the ability to put them on a rocket that can range the [U.S.] homeland."

 In February and March of 2015, former senior national security officials of the Reagan and Clinton administrations warned that North Korea should be regarded as capable of delivering by satellite a small nuclear warhead, specially designed to make a high-altitude electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack against the United States. According to the Congressional EMP Commission, a single warhead delivered by North Korean satellite could blackout the national electric grid and other life-sustaining critical infrastructures for over a year—killing 9 of 10 Americans by starvation and societal collapse.

Deploying THJAAD missile defense systems in South Korea and Alaska, developed under Republican administrations, is a start, but more force or other moves might be necessary.  Fortunately, unlike President Obama,

President Trump is unwilling to keep  whistling past our own graveyard.

          Daniel John Sobieski is a free lance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.               

Dennis Rodman and Kim Jong Un, North Korean Leader, – photo credit – News Max

Former NBA basketball champion Dennis Rodman has launched a new basketball diplomacy effort by picking former NBA basketball players for a North Korean basketball exhibition game.  The American players will play against North Korea’s top basketball stars in the upcoming game.

Rodman, who is not shy about calling North Korean dictator and leader Kim Jong Un his “friend for life” is going to Pyongyang in celebration of Jong Un’s January 8^th birthday, according to Fox News.

Should anyone in America really care about this move by Rodman to use a basketball game as a diplomatic way to ease tensions between the United States and North Korea?  In a word: NO!

It seems clear that for the past two decades Rodman has been a man and basketball player in pursuit of his own mind-bending absurdities and by establishing a friendship with the 30-year-old leader Rodman is simply now over his head.  The former basketball star has been questioned on several occasions about using his friendship with the North Korean leader to ease some that nation’s horrendous human rights problems like the “indiscriminate killings, torture and rapes,” reports Fox News.

Yet, this basketball player seems to be either oblivious or simply operating in another physical universe. He recently commented that even with the recent horrendous murder of Kim’s uncle by way of feeding him to a pack of hungry dogs was not his concern.

So in truth, what is Rodman’s concern and what does he hope to accomplish with his so-called “Basketball Diplomacy?”

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