Poor Korea

I'll begin with several admissions:  I am not Korean.  And I am not in a position to coax either Korea to move in any particular direction.  My father was a veteran of the Japanese-American War, and that experience was so fulfilling that he spent the Korean War cleaning latrines in North Carolina.  Or at least that's the story fed to me as a boy.  But as I say, I have no significant ties to the peninsula, or for that matter, to Japan.  I've read histories and I think Inchon was lucky hubris and the Chinese didn't so much catch us by surprise as they came across the Yalu when we had our eyes firmly closed.

North Korea is facing an onslaught of a super-industrialized nation.  But tough people know that civilization is frail, and nukes are knives ready to be used against weak necks.  An illustration:  One sharp proposal that I read some years ago--I don't recall where--had the North Koreans launching a big rocket.  The payload would be a dirty nuke that would have only one goal.  Make space.  Then it detonates a few hundred miles above the Earth, and the debris and radiation spread, doing their worst.  Low-orbit satellites are rarely hardened against this kind of abuse.  Entire networks of satellites would fail, and humans on the space station would have to come home, and we'd loose GPS and communications.  Sure, yes, North Korea would be struck hard as a consequence.  Our man in charge is a man of action, and he gets particularly pissed when anyone perceives him as weak.  But it's sobering to realize that one bomb can cost trillions of dollars.

But what if I was in charge of Crazed Korea?  Here's my  strategy.  Purely mine, I think.  (Writers are never sure what they've stolen from others.  Or we are sure, and we choose not to mention the crimes.)  Missiles are problematic weapons.  A couple dozen nukes, and possibly only a few are small enough to be carried over the ocean.  No, what North Korea needs to do is dig holes.  Ambitious holes, but not outrageously deep.  They should tunnel into the south slopes of little mountains near the DMZ.  Pick mountains with strong bones.  Give the tunnels angles, like a cannon barrel, and then pack them with nukes and the usual foul wastes that come with reactors working overtime.  And then like every evil character in a Bond movie, they need to monologue.  Explain to the world that if they are attacked, they will detonate.  If the wind is from the north, South Korea will be poisoned for centuries, ceasing to exist.  And if the wind isn't from the south?  Well, what's the worst that can happen?  A few million of my own people killed, and Seoul still left contaminated by the next shift in the weather.

Oh, and if that isn't bad enough.  How about a suicide submarine off the coast of Japan, crewed by patriots, carrying a hydrogen-infused warhead and enough cobalt to sterilize a fat portion of Honshu?

See?  Simple crude and spectacularly destructive tactics are easy, and of course I don't want this to happen.  No, what I want is for every human with a spark of imagination to realize that a few kilos of uranium, used with flair, can define the next twenty years of life on this little world.

Which could be the last twenty years, sure.