Mark Bowden is the author of 13 books, including the No. 1 New York Times bestseller, Black Hawk 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, a topic that came out in the Atlantic a few weeks ago, but in this podcast, we essentially walk through the logic of that article, and you ll 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, who is here with me to talk about it. Sam Harris Founder and Editor-In-Chief of Making Sense: The Making Sense Podcast Director and Producer of the Ken Burns Documentary Executive Director of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts Producer and Editor of The Dark Art of Interrogation Author of the White House Correspondent s Notebook, and a host of other writing projects, including a book, a podcast and a podcast, and is a frequent guest on the radio show, . He is also a regular contributor to The New York Magazine and the Los Angeles Evening Standard, and a frequent contributor to the Hollywood Reporter, and the Hollywood A.V. Club, and he is a host on the podcast, , and he also hosts a show on the show, The Good Fight, The Badger, and The Good Hustle, and The Badging, and Other Things, and among other things. , and he s a good friend of the Good Hustling, and so much more! Join us at Making Sense on social media Subscribe to Making Sense? Learn more about him on Insta: in the Badger and Good Hustler, The Good Thing, Good Things, Badie, and So Much Good, Good, and Good, Bad, and He s Good at That's Good by Good by So Much More, and You Can Say That, Too Much Good by That's Not That at That, Good And So Much So, Too Good by He s Great, Good At That, That s Good And He s Gotta Have It Like That by Good And That s Not That, And He Says It's Good And They Say That And That's That, He s Not Gotta Say That by That And He Can Say It, Too Gotta Be That, So Much Like That, and That s Also That's Gotta Hear That, Not That That, or That s That, Really Like That That's Also That, This Is That, And That Says That s So Good, Too It's That's Right, Too He s Just That, Right, That's It, That Sells It, And That Really Does That, Like That's Really, That Really, Really, Too, And They Don t Have It, He Sells That, But That s Really That, Or That's Just That s Truly That, No Squeep Like That And They Do That, Geeeeeeeeee He s So Squeeee, Too Like That?
00:05:30.300You know, I did get a good deal of criticism, but none of it very intelligent, actually.
00:05:35.460Most 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.
00:05:46.980I think probably the main sticking point was that I argue that whether or not to torture or coerce someone is a moral decision.
00:05:58.240And 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.
00:06:11.540So 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.
00:06:22.880But that was enough to trigger a lot of criticism.
00:06:28.160And 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.
00:06:39.320And that if you can't imagine such situations, you're actually not trying hard enough.
00:06:46.480That's a very novel argument, and it's one that I agree with.
00:06:49.600But I think I will spare us both a lot of pain by declining to talk about this topic anymore on this podcast.
00:07:00.840And 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.
00:07:16.400If 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.
00:07:28.780So if you think we are Torquemada, just, you can group us with Stanford as well.
00:07:35.500Well, it's nice to be in good company like that.
00:07:38.940So 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.
00:07:48.360There 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.
00:08:05.660And 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.
00:08:15.900First, how did you go about reporting on this?
00:08:18.780Well, 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.
00:08:36.780And in some cases, you know, in the cases of some of the military commanders, have had to actually prepare for the various options.
00:08:44.820And pick their brains, ask them, you know, because we have a president who sort of plays to the lowest common denominator.
00:08:53.560And 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 a groundswell of support for trying to attack North Korea or to pressure it, at least militarily.
00:09:11.760And 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.
00:09:25.440Well, remind people about how we got here.
00:09:27.460So how did North Korea become this blank space on the map?
00:09:32.280I mean, the images at night tell so much of the story of South Korea, which is just totally illuminated, like a 21st century society.
00:09:40.980And the North is just this sea of blackness outside of Pyongyang.
00:09:48.760Well, you know, that country, North Korea, which was created after World War II, when Kim Il-sung was the Korean leader who helped with the Chinese to evict Japan, ended up in control in North Korea.
00:10:09.720And he established certainly one of the most bizarre regimes of modern times.
00:10:15.160It's really kind of a throwback to 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,
00:10:32.600who 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.
00:10:51.680And so they've, you know, built a very draconian, totalitarian state that focuses most of its resources on building up its military and in the last 20 or 30 years to developing nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, biological weapons, and missile systems that, you know, that we've now seen are capable of potentially reaching Alaska and very soon will be capable of reaching the United States mainland.
00:11:19.960And I think that that effort has been so all-consuming and costly that it has drained North Korea of nearly every other option.
00:11:30.360And 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.
00:11:40.040Those conditions have eased somewhat out of necessity.
00:11:42.360I think the regime has allowed the black market to flourish a little bit, which, you know, people are eating anyway there.
00:11:51.120But there's very little else going on outside of the capital city of Pyongyang, which is kind of their, the Kim family showcase.
00:11:59.100As you point out, this is almost a religious cult.
00:12:03.540I 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.
00:12:13.960I mean, these are almost the most confused people on earth in terms of how they view their place in the world.
00:12:19.380As Christopher Hitchens used to say, this is a nation of racist dwarves.
00:12:23.840They're like three inches shorter than the South Koreans, and yet they think they're a master race.
00:12:29.600And I got to imagine that the spell has been breaking for some people somewhere in the society over, you know, over the recent decades.
00:12:37.620But apparently they have thought that our, the food aid they see coming from us is just like an awestruck offering to the genius of their dear leader by the West.
00:12:48.580And I think of them as kind of like a cargo cult armed with nuclear weapons.
00:12:53.840Do we have any sense of what percentage of North Korean society believes the mythology?
00:13:01.220We don't have a good sense of that because there's not a lot of interaction between the Western world and North Korea.
00:13:09.680The journalists who go there, you know, are given Potemkin village tours.
00:13:13.940I have spoken to a few who have done a longer term, a little wider reporting, and their 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.
00:13:32.740I 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 in prison for the slightest of offenses.
00:13:42.120And, 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.
00:13:50.960So, you know, whatever North Koreans think, they're smart enough to keep it mostly to themselves.
00:13:58.460It seems to be the most successfully engineered Orwellian experiment the Earth has ever seen.
00:14:06.060I mean, just in terms of its isolation and the totality of the totalitarian control and just the level of informing against family members.
00:14:16.180And it's just have you seen that the book, The Cleanest Race?
00:14:20.380Yes, I have. That's a Myers book, right?
00:14:23.140Yeah. Yeah. That's, 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.
00:14:39.060I 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.
00:14:50.680How big a problem is North Korea at this point for the rest of the world?
00:14:54.880And 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?
00:15:03.300Well, I think that it's far and away the largest national security concern of the United States.
00:15:10.360Everybody, 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.
00:15:24.080So I think that, you know, the threat of terror attacks will be with us always.
00:15:28.720But North Korea poses a threat on a completely different scale.
00:15:33.480They have weapons that could kill millions of people.
00:15:36.940Right now, they're, you know, the primary threat they pose is to South Korea and to Japan.
00:15:42.260But as their reach extends with ICBMs, they, the United States is also potentially a target.
00:15:50.420And 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.
00:16:09.220And one that, frankly, as this article goes on to explain, there's very little we can do to prevent shortage of deterrence.
00:16:19.820The 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.
00:16:31.480But that should be coming in pretty short order.
00:16:34.920And then you are talking about there really is no word to describe how crazy and irresponsible the statements are of the regime, whatever you think their actual motivations are and whatever you think their level of suicidality could be.
00:16:50.080But 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?
00:17:04.040When I wrote the piece, which is just a few months ago, the estimate was three or four years.
00:17:08.500But this most recent ICBM launch, successful one, came much earlier than anticipated.
00:17:14.900So my guess is that we could probably even dial back the three and four years.
00:17:33.180First, just tell me briefly, what are the four?
00:17:36.440And then we can just run through them.
00:17:39.360Well, 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, you know, reduce North Korea to a stateless humanitarian zone.
00:17:59.120The 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.
00:18:14.020And 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.
00:18:28.280The 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.
00:18:45.380And thereby sort of take off the head of that state and hope that something more reasonable would follow.
00:18:56.040And the last option, which may be the hardest to swallow, but which I think is probably inevitable, is acceptance, which is recognizing that nuclear technology, missile technology, is old stuff.
00:19:11.460It's been around for more than a half century.
00:19:16.240And North Korea is eventually going to figure these things out and going to have these weapons.
00:19:20.680The 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.
00:19:36.900It's not that the North Koreans already have nukes and then they can nuke South Korea or Japan or one of our allies.
00:19:46.800Even their conventional arms makes this situation seemingly totally intractable from a military point of view.
00:19:58.220For 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.
00:20:14.180One 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.
00:20:30.900This 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.
00:20:39.060Shells could also deliver chemical and biological weapons.
00:20:44.120So 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.
00:21:06.320And obviously, if you had evacuated millions of people from Seoul, you'd be tipping your hand as to what's happening.
00:21:13.340Is this really the issue, that there's just no way for us to knock out his capacity to harm Seoul quickly enough so as to make any kind of prevention or decapitation or turning the screws approach practical?
00:21:27.480Yes, yeah, that's the main reason why the United States hasn't done something like this a long time ago.
00:21:36.000When Richard Nixon was president, the North Koreans shot down an American warplane and killed, I believe it was 31 American service members on board.
00:21:45.380Nixon was not known to be a timid Seoul when it came to the use of military force.
00:21:50.500And he chose not to counterattack North Korea or to punish them militarily for doing that.
00:21:57.640And that was back in, what, the early 1970s when this capability was already in place to attack Seoul.
00:22:04.780So 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.
00:22:14.040And 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.
00:22:27.500Because after all, those are just South Koreans living in Seoul for the most part.
00:22:32.540And so in order to have the level of security that he feels he needs, the ability to attack the United States mainland has, you know, been their great quest in the last 20 or 30 years.
00:22:46.300So, you know, 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.
00:22:59.080Well, let's take this, the prevention case first.
00:23:02.900This is the all-out attack that attempts to prevent anything, even a single shell emerging from North Korea headed toward the South.
00:23:13.600In 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?
00:23:31.300Although 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.
00:23:46.780And 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?
00:24:13.700You know, if North Korea was, you know, 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.
00:24:30.120I think that the far more likely totals would be millions.
00:24:35.400So this is one problem with the second and third options.
00:24:38.880Well, so let's take the second option first, turning the screws, remind our listeners what that is and why it's problematic to consider.
00:24:49.180Okay, but first, if I could, Sam, I'd like to go back to the first option.
00:24:52.740If 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, that we were completely successful.
00:25:06.500We 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.
00:25:17.420We 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,
00:25:36.360and 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.
00:25:58.180A situation that would make our occupation of Iraq seem like taking your kids for a walk to the local playground, by comparison.
00:26:07.180So 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 that no calculation of this works to our benefit.
00:26:20.740Yeah, I'm really glad you made that point, because the best case scenario is so good.
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