Jeopardy

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The New York Sun

The intercontinental ballistic missile raised to launch at the North Korean military base of NoDong means that the United States and its allies now live under the jeopardy of a man-made volcano. As with an eruption, there is no certain solution. Does the U.S. ride it out, just as if it were Mt. Merapi in Java, and accept the immeasurable damage to the comity of the region?

(Japan mobilizes, Seoul sags, Taipei judges, Bejing growls, Canberra winces.) Or does the United States take advantage of the fact that the missile is a manufactured alarm and risk an anti-missile shot or even a direct strike on the launch site?

As in the 20th century’s tests of statesmanship, Churchill’s “terrible ifs” accumulate around the Taepodong-2 missile threat. Looking directly into the coldest fog of the Cold War, we can glimpse a similar confrontation between a politically vulnerable leader of the Free World and an overreaching tyrant of a criminal axis that illustrates how a provocation can suddenly turn as dire as volcanism.

On February 9, 1962, Lester Lanin’s orchestra was at the White House to entertain the First Lady’s dinner dance for hundreds of good friends. All evening, President Kennedy kept slipping out of the East Room to check on the progress of a critical diplomatic gambit at the Glienicker Bridge in Berlin. (Kennedy also used his absences to mask a tryst.) Later, word came of the successful exchange of East German spy Rudolf Abel for U-2 pilot Gary Powers. Pierre Salinger announced the deal at 3 a.m., and a tipsy president celebrated with champagne toasts and a cigar. Kennedy hoped the ballyhooed publicity would oblige Soviet dictator Nikita Khrushchev into sober negotiations at the upcoming Eighteen Power Disarmament Conference at Geneva in order to defuse the twin crises of the Berlin Wall and atmospheric nuclear weapons tests.

Khrushchev ignored the stagecraft and demanded a face-to-face with Kennedy. The Soviet strongman had humiliated Kennedy the previous year at a personal meeting in Vienna. The Kremlin’s established judgment of the glamorous president was that Kennedy would do anything to avoid war, including desert Berlin.

Kennedy – disdained by Europe as irresolute, disregarded by Capitol Hill as facile, distrusted by his generals as gun-shy (the coup thriller “Seven Days in May” was the hot book in D.C.) – knew he risked all credibility at a second intimate jaw-jaw with Khrushchev. The president chose war-war. In late April, the U.S. resumed atmospheric testing at Christmas Island. Kennedy also dispatched combat troops to Thailand. Khrushchev answered Kennedy with firepower in Laos, where the Moscow-backed Pathet Lao launched an offensive, and with subterfuge in Cuba, where the plot was set in motion to deploy nuke-tipped Soviet missiles. (These stories are recounted vividly in Barbara Leaming’s new, “Jack Kennedy, The Education of a Statesman.” )

Today, what Kim Jong Il wants is the equivalent of personal talks – the DPRK and United States in a chateau alone, where North Korea believes the United States will serve champagne, cigars and cash. What the United States wants is Kim Jong Il’s Beijing quartermasters to defang their penniless puppet.

The Kennedy-Khrushchev gunfight of 1962 does suggest a way forward. The British prime minister, Harold MacMillan, counseled Kennedy to refuse the U.S. hawks’ demand for action (the revered Eisenhower advised using tactical nukes in Laos) and instead to seek reconciliation with Khrushchev step by step. MacMillan asked Kennedy to secure a test ban treaty first and only then to explore accommodations on Berlin or Laos. The test ban treaty did develop in 1963, but as an afterthought to the Cuban missile crisis and just three months before Kennedy’s assassination. By then, the eve of destruction had settled on Southeast Asia.

What the MacMillan approach might resemble today would be a search through the ongoing Six Party Talks for an accommodation that Kim Jong Il will acknowledge and obey, such as a ballistic missile test inspections program. Only after establishing something visible and verifiable will it be credible to seek the Lester Lanin dinner dance for the region: a rapprochement on the Korean peninsula.

A solitary Taepodong-2 missile is not a Soviet 30-megaton nuclear weapon test in Kazakhstan. The choice of war-war against the North Korean provocation invites the same sort of escalation that led to the catastrophe of Ho Chi Minh City and to the sinister creation of the tens of thousands of nuclear warheads still extant. This mini-me Cold War in East Asia is a remnant of the original creature and will not be won with gunplay. Accept the waggish observation that sometimes a missile is just a missile. Let Kim Jong Il smoke it.

Mr. Batchelor is host of “The John Batchelor Show” on the ABC radio network. The show airs in New York on 770 AM from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m.


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