Sleepwalking With the Bomb

by John C. Wohlstetter

  WHAT CHINA fears above all is a reunified Korea allied with the West, sitting on its border. Reunification, the stated goal of South Korean policy, envisions a democratic state living in peace alongside its neighbors. But a prosperous, democratic, unified Korea clearly would incite more unrest in China among those chafing under the rule of aging autocrats.

  Even if the most beneficial kind of regime change—reunification—were to come to pass, the problems would be monumental. Combining an advanced industrial society with a stupefyingly backward, desperately poor garrison state run like a concentration camp for more than six decades is a far more difficult task than reunifying West and East Germany—which was still a difficult task, although the latter was not nearly as backward or poor as North Korea.

  Thus South Korea itself, as well as China, should fear reunification. The 1990 reuniting of West and East Germany added to West Germany’s 61.4 million nearly 17 million people—all of them a generation behind the West Germans in economic development. The 1990 per capita GDP of West Germany was $24,485; the 1990 East German figure was $10,430, making the Western population two and one-third times more productive per year. By 2008, after nearly 2 trillion dollars spent in re-unification costs, the combined figure for Germany stood at $35,400, but East Germans continued to lag far behind their Western countrymen. Reuniting the North’s 24 million with the South’s 49 million people is a 50 percent population add-on for the South (versus 29 percent for West Germany). South Korea’s 2010 per capita GDP was $30,200, nearly 17 times North Korea’s 2009 figure of $1,800. The difference is seven times bigger than the gap West Germany faced in absorbing the East.

  Moreover, while East Germans were not schooled in entrepreneurial ways, they knew some semblance of economic life. North Korea has virtually no civilian sector at all. Its people have no real idea how to function in a modern economy like that of South Korea. Sadly, the Cold War jest about Russian factory workers wondering why, if they work in a baby carriage factory, all they can assemble are machine guns likely describes much of the North Korean economy.

  Finally there is massive malnutrition in the North. The estimates of people dying of starvation during Kim Jong-Il’s 17-year rule run over 2 million. The surviving population’s physical growth is stunted. The public health and economic implications are simply staggering. For the South, the ancient Chinese admonition about being careful what you wish for may prove all too applicable if the South absorbs the primitive Hermit Kingdom.

  Only reunification can end the North Korean nuclear threat. Such would prove a security boon to South Korea and the U.S. as principal nuclear guarantor of the South. But reunification might bankrupt the South. At minimum, the economic strain would be severe, with ultimate success by no means guaranteed.

  That the Hermit Kingdom has endured for more than sixty years, despite serial aggressive behavior, mass starvation of its people, and development of a rogue nuclear weapon capability, attests anew to the validity of the Fourth Lesson of nuclear-age history: NUCLEAR WEAPONS GIVE NATIONS A “DYING STING” CAPABILITY THAT VIRTUALLY PRECLUDES PREEMPTIVE ACTION AND CONFERS NEAR-TOTAL SURVIVAL INSURANCE.

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  20. On June 8, 1959, the submarine USS Barbero fired a cruise missile carrying 3,000 letters in the direction of Mayport, Florida. The missile landed safely and the mail was delivered. The postmaster general, Arthur Summerfield, offered this prediction: “Before man reaches the moon, mail will be delivered within hours from New York to California, to England, to India or to Australia by guided missiles.” Summerfield’s prediction came partly true: mail is hauled overnight worldwide, but by cargo plane.

  21. Established in 1947, the National Security Council is an advisory body that is part of the White House staff. The NSC advises the president and coordinates foreign and defense policy matters within the White House.

  22. The Natural Resources Council Database (accessed August 21, 2011) estimates that the U.S. stockpile of nuclear weapons was 369 in 1950 and 640 in 1951. These are year-end totals. Only a small fraction of stockpiled weapons was actually deployed and thus ready for use.

  In his centennial history of AT&T, Telephone, historian John Brooks writes that production of nuclear weapons went into high gear in 1951, after the desperate government had turned to the Bell System for its managerial expertise. Bell Laboratories took over management of the Sandia facility on November 1, 1949, at which time atomic bomb production was minimal. Russia’s first A-test supplied urgency. From one new design in 1948, two in 1949, and three in 1951, production increased to many designs starting in 1952. A key factor in speeding up bomb design production was the new availability of computing power.

  7.

  CHINA: IMPERIAL ASPIRATION AMIDST A SHIFTING NUCLEAR BALANCE

  Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.

  —QUOTATIONS FROM CHAIRMAN MAO ZEDONG, A.K.A. THE LITTLE RED BOOK (1966)

  CHINA’S DRIVE TO REGAIN ITS ERSTWHILE POSITION AS A PREEMINENT world power is but a generation old. Its effort to regain what it regards as its rightful place begins with supremacy in the western Pacific region. It is this intensely felt national ambition that makes ultimate confrontation between China and the United States, currently the world’s preeminent Pacific power, increasingly likely, though strategic accommodation remains a distinct possibility.

  Such a confrontation could come as early as the end of this decade. And if it occurs, it could lead—even without either the U.S. or China desiring it—to a regional conflict, possibly involving the use of nuclear weapons. China is not a revolutionary power like Iran, with ambitions to remake the world order. Nor is it a rogue power like North Korea, utterly indifferent to world concerns. It is, as is Russia, a rival: it desires to supplant the U.S. as the most influential world power, starting in Asia, then projecting influence globally. It does not, like Iran, wish to destroy America; China’s fortunes are inextricably linked with ours in many ways.

  But because China’s drive for ascendancy carries risk of a confrontation with the U.S., miscalculation during a crisis could lead to a war neither side desires. What emerges clearly in considering the U.S.-China relationship is the Fifth Lesson of nuclear-age history: THE NUCLEAR BALANCE MATTERS IF ANY PARTY TO A CONFLICT THINKS IT MATTERS, AND THUS ALTERS ITS BEHAVIOR.

  China’s Half Millennium of Self-Isolation

  TO SEE the roots of such a regional conflict one must begin with Chinese history, and the Chinese interpretation of it, which emphasized the harmful impact of its intercourse with the U.S. and other Western powers over the choices made by its own dictatorial rulers.

  From the early nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth, the European powers heaped serial humiliations upon China. The Opium Wars of the mid-nineteenth century led to Britain’s thuggish imposition of the degrading, enervating opium trade on the Chinese. The colonial powers pushed around the decaying Manchu Dynasty rulers at will. The crowning episode of this dolorous history was the Boxer Rebellion. Starting in 1898, the “Society of Fists of Righteous Harmony”—“Boxers” armed with guns, martial arts, and ecstatic spirit-possession—aimed to eject foreign powers and secure China’s release from imperial domination and exploitation. Allied with the Manchu empress Cixi, they laid siege to the foreign embassies in Beijing for 55 days in 1900. The Eight-Nation Alliance of Japan, Russia, Britain, France, America, Germany, Austria, and Italy crushed the uprising, offering the Manchu Dynasty a settlement in 1901 in which the Chinese paid heavy indemnities to the foreign powers, particularly Russia and Germany.

  All this came as the United States was beginning to flex its muscles in the Pacific. U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry’s 1853 visit to Tokyo Bay ended Japan’s 250-year isolation and opened trade between the U.S. and the Far East. After the U.S. Navy defeated the Spanish Navy at Manila Bay (looking out at the South China Sea), Secretary of State John Hay’s 1899 Open Door Policy pressed for wider trade with China, thus increasing pressure on the decaying Manchu Dynasty to op
en up to all sources of Western trade.

  Without in any way down playing the harm caused China by foreign powers, however, internal decisions and events were of immense consequence in retarding the global fortunes of China, arguably of greater impact than external pressures. In 1434 the Ming emperor (why remains unclear) suddenly halted the series of seven massive seagoing explorations begun in 1401, which had taken the great Admiral Zheng He as far as Africa, and dismantled the Chinese fleet. China’s fleet featured ships far larger than the tiny vessels in which Christopher Columbus sailed at the end of the century, and superior in many aspects of design and construction. The “treasure ships” of the fleet were purportedly 450 feet long and 180 feet wide—half the length of a World War II aircraft carrier. Unlike the voyages of European explorers, mounted in search of trade and treasure, China’s voyages, historian Daniel Boorstin explains, were simply to show the rest of the world how advanced and refined China’s civilization was.

  Just 26 years after China destroyed its awesome fleet, Prince Henry the Navigator launched the first of Europe’s great explorations that eventually would take Christopher Columbus to the New World (in 1492) and Vasco de Gama to India (in 1498). As China began to retreat into its shell—sporadically banning private shipping and coastal settlement—the West began its 500-year rise to global supremacy.

  The “Middle Kingdom” disdained “barbarians” from its perch at the center of the earth—China had a gross domestic product in 1820 that was, at 30 percent of world GDP, larger than that of the U.S. and Europe combined. (Chinese GDP was to be the world’s largest for 18 of the last 20 centuries.) But its feeble military position gave it few levers in the face of foreign aggression. A China that had stayed among the leaders in military power and influence would have been in a far stronger position to resist the incursions that began a full four centuries after the dismantling of its world’s-best fleet.

  The next huge event impoverishing China came in the mid-nineteenth century: the 1850–1864 Tai Ping Rebellion, in which ethnic Chinese revolted against the Manchus who had ruled China since 1644. With the aid of the French and British imperial powers, the Manchu overlords prevailed over the Tai Ping rebels, but at a tremendous cost. The crushing of the rebellion, combined with other mid-nineteenth-century turmoil, resulted in a staggering 15 percent decline in China’s population between 1850 and 1873, from 410 to 350 million. (Ironically, Tai Ping means “Great Peace.”) By comparison, the American Civil War—which ran four years—killed 2 percent of America’s population of 30 million, a slightly lower annual percentage loss, but for one-quarter the time span. To recall the impact of the Civil War on American politics to this day suggests the long-term devastation the ethnic enmities of the Tai Ping Rebellion have caused.

  In the twentieth century, China suffered several other signal catastrophes—two internal, and one from its neighbor—each of which, alone, would have derailed any normal nation’s progress. First was Japan’s 1937 attack against a China riven by civil strife. The subsequent eight years’ war was marked by extreme Japanese brutality, including the infamous Rape of Nanking that killed some 300,000 people in six weeks, and the use of outlawed chemical and bacteriological weapons. Estimates place China’s casualties at 35 million, with 20 million dead and 15 million wounded. Even in a country with over 500 million people, the toll astonishes.

  The second and third mega-events both came to China courtesy of one man: the self-styled “Great Helmsman,” Mao Zedong, who marched into Beijing on October 1, 1949, bringing doctrinaire Marxist economics with him. In 1958 he began the grand agricultural collectivization experiment called the “Great Leap Forward.” It lasted just shy of three years and claimed—through famine, oppression, and suicide—as many as 40 million lives. In a country with about 650 million in 1960, the Great Leap thus killed one of every 16 Chinese. For America today the equivalent figure would be over 20 million deaths. Compared to this stupefying mass murder due to ideological fervor, the 2 to 2.5 million toll from two Chinese civil wars (1928–1937 and 1946–1950) is almost lost in the shuffle.

  Add the four percent death toll of the Sino-Japanese War to the six percent death toll of the Great Leap Forward, and China lost roughly ten percent of its population in the two catastrophes. Now throw in the third mega-catastrophe, Mao’s 1966–1969 Cultural Revolution. In an effort to impose socialist norms, Mao purged academics, sent urban populations en masse to remote rural areas, and interred dissidents in “reeducation” camps. The result was an estimated 1 to 20 million dead.

  Over 120 years, the loss of some 150 million lives through the serial carnages of the nineteenth-century conflicts, Sino-Japanese War, Great Leap Forward, and Cultural Revolution—coupled with China’s half millennium retreat from world trade—surely had a vastly greater impact on China’s geopolitical fortunes than the much-trumpeted Western imperial humiliations of the self-weakened country.

  Today China has about 1.3 billion people. Its GDP in purchasing power parity (GDP adjusted for relative currency value) is roughly two-thirds that for the U.S., but spread over more than four times as many people. This means that once China’s GDP is adjusted both for purchasing power parity and per capita, it is perhaps one-sixth of America’s. One question lingers: Where would China rank today had it not suffered the series of catastrophes that began in 1434?

  China’s Resurgence

  CHINA’S FALL began with a retreat from the world, and its resurgence began when it opened to the United States in 1971, ending the American government’s refusal to recognize Mao’s regime. Later that year, the Communist mainland replaced Nationalist China as permanent member of the UN Security Council—and as sole internationally recognized representative of the Chinese people. President Nixon went to China early in 1972.

  Mao’s China appallingly underperformed economically and wreaked havoc socially and politically. But Deng Xiaoping succeeded him after his death in 1976, and in 1979 opened China’s trade to the world. Thus ended 545 years of first isolation and then reluctant limited participation in global commerce.

  China’s economic power can be overstated—it is well shy of the power of the U.S. economy, despite the latter’s recent severe trials. Yet its sheer size makes it a force to be contended with. China is America’s second-largest trading partner, holding a one-sixth share of American international trade. It holds trillions in U.S. securities and dollar-denominated reserves. It is not for nothing that in 2011 Chinese president Hu Jintao questioned the dollar’s status as global reserve currency.

  China is in the midst of a huge push to upgrade its military. It is building modern nuclear submarines and even an aircraft carrier—a warship only the U.S., Russia, Great Britain, and France have ever constructed. Its anti-ship missiles include models that can carry nuclear warheads a thousand miles. American air power based on carriers (or on Taiwan, often called by strategists America’s largest aircraft carrier) is a major part of America’s ability to project power across the Pacific. Neutralize these assets, and China’s ability to dominate the western Pacific becomes a strategic reality. (Neither South Korea nor Japan would be likely to allow its territory or equipment to be used in a U.S.-China conflict, lest China target it directly.)

  Most impressive of all is China’s 2010 rollout of a stealth combat aircraft prototype, the J-20. Its configuration and size suggest a medium-range fighter-bomber that can target Taiwan or American naval ships (rather than an interceptor, which would shoot down bombers, or a pure air superiority fighter, designed to shoot down other fighters). The J-20 will be markedly inferior to the American F-22, the world’s only operational fifth-generation combat aircraft. But that is cold comfort to allied strategic planners, since America ended its F-22 production run at one-quarter the number originally planned. The Pentagon’s assessment was that China would not have a stealth fighter before the 2020s. The 2011 test flight of the J-20 suggests China is on a faster track. This comes as America’s F-35, the future stealth fighter of choice for the U.S.,
continues to encounter technical problems that have pushed back its likely operational status into the mid-teens. Were China to deploy a sufficient number of J-20s, it could prevail over superior American quality in a major regional conflict.

  Underpinning China’s growing military machine is its nuclear arsenal. After American nuclear threats during the Korean War, the August 1954 first crisis over offshore islands Quemoy and Matsu, and then the American mutual defense treaty with Taiwan in December of 1954, Mao gave the go-ahead on January 15, 1955, to start China’s nuclear program. Although secrets stolen from the Manhattan Project may have played a role in China’s program, China early on developed a formidable in-country team of nuclear scientists. Russia also transferred technology and know-how, from 1954 through 1958 (the year of the second crisis over Quemoy and Matsu, when the United States threatened to use tactical nuclear weapons in a fight with China over its shelling of the islands). Henry Kissinger writes that a key motive behind Khrushchev’s decision to transfer nuclear technology to China was so that Moscow would not feel obligated to back China in event of another major confrontation with the United States.

  But in 1959 Khrushchev decided to halt Russian assistance, unnerved, Kissinger writes, by Mao Zedong’s nuclear brinkmanship over Quemoy and Matsu. Weapons designers Thomas C. Reed and Danny Stillman write in The Nuclear Express that the Russians, upon deciding to slow China’s march to nuclear weapon status, even supplied the Chinese with deliberately false data in order to sabotage their progress. But many of China’s top scientists studied in other countries, including the United States, and then brought their knowledge back to China.

  In 1961, Mao declared he would build nuclear weapons “even if the Chinese had to pawn their trousers.” He was expressing a sentiment the West would hear often, from various leaders, in the years that followed. In starting Pakistan’s quest for the bomb, Prime Minster Zulfikar Ali Bhutto famously said that his people would “eat grass,” if need be, to go nuclear. Starving millions did not deflect North Korea from its program. Put simply, no police state has qualms about pursuing weapons amidst its population’s destitution, even literal starvation.