U.S.A.
December 18, 2017
THE ASIAN REPORTER n Page 7
Nobel laureates express concern
about politics, tensions, science
By David Keyton and Jim Heintz
The Associated Press
S
DECADES-OLD DOCUMENTS. North Korean soldiers look at the south side of the Demilitarized Zone
while a South Korean stands guard near the spot where a North Korean soldier crossed the border on November
13 at Panmunjom, South Korea, in this November 27, 2017 photo. Newly declassified documents from two de-
cades ago show that U.S. officials believed the U.S. and South Korea would “undoubtedly win” a conflict on the
divided Korean Peninsula, but with the understanding it would cost many casualties. (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man)
U.S. foresaw a costly victory in
war with North Korea — in 1994
By Matthew Pennington
The Associated Press
W
ASHINGTON — In a nuclear
standoff with North Korea more
than two decades ago — long
before the reclusive government had
atomic weapons that could threaten
America — U.S. officials planned for war.
Declassified documents were recently
published that show the United States
believed its military and South Korea’s
forces would “undoubtedly win” a conflict
on the divided Korean Peninsula, with the
understanding it would cost many
casualties.
The Pentagon estimated at the time that
if war broke with Korea, some 52,000
American service members would be killed
or wounded in the first three months.
South Korean military casualties would
total 490,000 in that time. And the number
of North Korean and civilian lives claimed
would be enormous, according to “The Two
Koreas” by Don Oberdorfer, a definitive
modern history of Korean Peninsula.
Today, with North Korea almost able to
directly threaten the U.S. mainland with
nuclear strikes, the possibility of conflict
looms as it had in 1994. U.S. President
Donald Trump has vowed to stop the North
Koreans from reaching such capability.
Twenty-three years ago, the stakes were
different.
At that time, then-President Bill
Clinton’s administration considered a
cruise missile strike on a North Korean
nuclear complex after it began defuelling a
reactor that could provide fissile material
for bombs for the first time. Former
President Jimmy Carter headed off a
conflict, meeting with founding North
Korean leader Kim Il Sung and helping
seal an aid-for-disarmament agreement.
The pact endured for nearly a decade,
despite frequent disputes and periodic
flare-ups on the peninsula.
“We had taken a very strong position
that we would not permit North Korea to
make a nuclear bomb,” William Perry, who
was defense secretary during the crisis,
said. “We have said that many times since
then, but then we really meant it.”
A declassified transcript published by
the National Security Archive at George
Washington University records Perry’s
discussion on the standoff with South
Korea’s president in 1998. Perry was by
then Clinton’s special envoy for North
Korea.
Perry told President Kim Dae-jung that
the U.S. had planned for a military
confrontation and that “with the combined
forces of the ROK and U.S., we can
undoubtedly win the war.” ROK refers to
the abbreviation of the South’s official
name, the Republic of Korea.
Speaking to South Korea’s Kim, who
pursued a “sunshine” policy of diplomatic
outreach to North Korea, Perry said the
“war involves many casualties in the
process. As a former defense secretary, I
am well aware of the negative aspects of
war, and will do my best to avoid war.”
North Korea has since made leaps and
bounds in its nuclear and missile
development, particularly under its
current young leader, Kim Jong Un. It
tested an intercontinental ballistic missile
with a likely range of more than 8,000
miles, moving it closer to perfecting a
nuclear-tipped projectile that can strike
all corners of the U.S. mainland.
Trump has not ruled out using force to
stop the North from achieving that
capability if diplomacy fails. Backing up
the threat, the U.S. has stepped up its
military drills with allies, which
Pyongyang condemns as preparations for
invasion. The U.S. and South Korea
recently held air force drills involving
more than 200 aircraft, including six U.S.
F-22 and 18 F-35 stealth fighters.
North Korea’s Foreign Ministry has
warned, “The remaining question now is:
when will the war break out.”
Speaking at an Arms Control
Association briefing in Washington, Perry
urged a renewed effort at diplomacy,
which he said wouldn’t get North Korea to
give up its nukes in short order, but could
lower the likelihood of war.
He said a nuclear-armed North Korea
wouldn’t attack America but may be
emboldened in military provocations
against South Korea that could spiral into
a wider conflict. The U.S. could itself
blunder into a nuclear war if it undertook a
conventional military strike on North
Continued on page 15
TOCKHOLM — An American
researcher who shared this year’s
Nobel Prize for medicine bluntly
criticized political developments at home
in his address at the awards’ gala banquet.
Michael Rosbash, who was honored for
his work on circadian rhythms —
commonly called the body clock —
expressed concern that U.S. government
support such as that received by him and
colleagues Jeffrey Hall and Michael Young
is endangered.
“We benefitted from an enlightened
period in the postwar United States. Our
National Institutes of Health have
enthusiastically and generously supported
basic research ... (but) the current climate
in the U.S. is a warning that continued
support cannot be taken for granted,” he
said in a short speech at the ornate city
hall in Stockholm.
The 2018 federal budget proposed by
U.S. President Donald Trump calls for
cutting science funding by billions of
dollars.
“Also in danger is the pluralistic
America into which all three of us were
born and raised after World War II,”
Rosbash said. “Immigrants and foreigners
have always been an indispensable part of
our country, including its great record in
scientific research.”
Literature laureate Kazuo Ishiguro of
Britain expressed concern about in-
creasing tensions between social factions.
“We live today in a time of growing tribal
enmities of communities fracturing into
bitterly opposed groups,” said Ishiguro,
who was born in Japan.
He said Nobel prizes can counterbalance
such animosity.
“The pride we feel when someone from
our nation wins a Nobel prize is different
from the one we feel witnessing one of our
athletes winning an Olympic medal. We
don’t feel the pride of our tribe
demonstrating superiority over other
tribes. Rather it’s the pride that from
knowing that one of us has made a
significant contribution to our common
human endeavor,” he said.
In the Norwegian capital of Oslo, a
survivor of the atomic bombing of
Hiroshima compared her struggle to
survive in 1945 to the objectives of the
group awarded this year’s Nobel’s Peace
Prize.
Setsuko Thurlow, who was 13 when the
U.S. bomb devastated her Japanese city
during the final weeks of World War II,
SPEAKING OUT. Literature laureate Kazuo
Ishiguro of Britain has expressed concern about
increasing tensions between social factions. (AP
Photo/Alastair Grant)
spoke as a leading activist with the
Nobel-winning International Campaign to
Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN).
Thurlow said the Hiroshima blast left
her buried under the rubble, but she was
able to see light and crawl to safety. In the
same way, the campaign to which she
belongs is a driving force behind an
international treaty to ban nuclear
weapons, she said after ICAN received the
Nobel prize it won in October.
“Our light now is the ban treaty,”
Thurlow said. “I repeat those words that I
heard called to me in the ruins of
Hiroshima: ‘Don’t give up. Keep pushing.
See the light? Crawl toward it.’”
The treaty has been signed by 56
countries — none of them nuclear powers
— and ratified by only three. To become
binding it requires ratification by 50
countries.
ICAN executive director Beatrice Fihn,
who accepted the prize along with
Thurlow, said that while the treaty is far
from ratification “now, at long last, we
have an unequivocal norm against nuclear
weapons.”
“This is the way forward. There is only
one way to prevent the use of nuclear
weapons — prohibit and eliminate them,”
Fihn said.
The prize winners were announced in
October. All except the peace prize were
awarded in Sweden this month.
The other laureates were American
Richard Thaler for his work in behavioral
economics; American physicists Kip
Thorne, Rainer Weiss, and Barry Barish
for confirming the existence of gravity
waves; and Jacques Dubochet of
Switzerland, American Joachim Frank,
and Richard Henderson of the United
Kingdom for advances in electron
microscopy.
Associated Press writer David Keyton
reported this story in Oslo and AP writer
Jim Heintz reported from Moscow.
Salvage team sinks fishing boat off Hawai‘i reef
By Caleb Jones
The Associated Press
ONOLULU — A commercial
fishing vessel carrying foreign
workers that ran aground and
later burned and leaked fuel just off the
beaches of Waikiki has been towed out to
sea and sunk by a team of salvage workers.
After being patched up and filled with
foam to regain buoyancy, the 79-foot
Pacific Paradise was hooked to a tug boat
and hauled into deeper water as a crowd of
people on the beach cheered.
An attempt to tow the boat to sea earlier
failed after it was removed from the reef,
but then became stuck again in a shallow,
sandy area about 600 feet away, forcing
salvagers to wait until high tide.
The plan was to move it about 13 miles
offshore to an EPA-approved disposal site,
according to Coast Guard Chief Petty
Officer Sara Muir. Officials say there could
still be up to 1,500 gallons of fuel
remaining on the boat.
The crash raised new questions about
H
the safety and working conditions of
foreign laborers in the Hawai‘i fleet. No
one aboard called for help when it crashed,
and rescue teams responded to eyewitness
reports. They rescued 19 foreign workers
and an American captain, who were then
taken by U.S. Customs and Border
Protection agents to a pier to be
interviewed and placed on other boats.
“There’s a little bit of concern as to why
there [were] so many crew members
onboard,” said Honolulu resident Jeff Olin,
who was at the beach to watch the
removal. “That’s definitely another part of
the equation that needs some answers.”
The vessel usually has a crew of six, and
while it was unclear exactly how many
bunks were on the Pacific Paradise,
similar boats typically have no more than
10 beds for crew to sleep. It would have
taken at least 12 days for the boat to make
it from American Samoa, where it picked
up the Southeast Asian crew members, to
Hawai‘i.
The Pacific Paradise — based in
Honolulu and used to catch tuna in the
Pacific — smashed into the shallow reef
just before midnight on October 10 in
about six feet of water just a few hundred
yards offshore. Days later it caught fire as
a salvage team prepared it to be towed,
causing extensive damage that slowed its
removal and sent fishing hooks, fuel, and
oil into the ocean.
A 2016 Associated Press investigation
revealed the fishing fleet exploits a
loophole in federal law to employ men from
impoverished Southeast Asian and Pacific
nations for a fraction of the pay an
American worker would get, with some
making as little as 70 cents per hour.
The men do not have authorization to
enter the United States, so they are
confined to boats while docked in Honolulu
and not eligible for most basic labor
protections. The AP report revealed
instances of abuse and claims of human
trafficking among the fleet.
Under the law, U.S. citizens must make
up 75 percent of the crew on most
American commercial fishing boats. But in
Continued on page 15