The Washington Post has a story titled Defector's Data May Have Led to U.S. Hard Line on N. Korea that spends a great deal of time beating up the Bush Administration's North North Korean policy for the sin of exposing the 1993 nuclear agreement as failed appeasement. The key part of the article wasn’t about any of that. It was this passage:
The North Korean electrical grid is collapsing, experts say, and the North Koreans face food shortages as international deliveries of aid have been reduced. The United States last week announced it would provide 40,000 tons of agricultural commodities, with the possibility of 60,000 additional tons later in the year. Last year, the United States provided 157,000 tons, but officials have cited "serious concerns" about how the distribution of the aid is monitored.
The primary means of transportation in North Korea is train travel. North Korean trains are electrically powered. The collapse of the electrical grid means that the main North Korean transportation system has tubed.
The New York Times reported Feb 23rd that there are rural areas in North Korea that have not seen a train in years. (Note: The link is on the for pay part of the NY Times web site) The lack of power for train travel, fertilizers and manufacturing was blamed for the massive famines in rural areas. Since I printed out the article, here is the relevant quote from Timothy Savage of the California based Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainable Development:
""Energy is at the root of all North Korea's economic problems, including the famine," Mr. Savage continued, referring to severe food shortages in the mid-1990's that killed as many as two million people, or 10 percent of the population.Without power, electrical pumps could not irrigate fields, electrical threshers could not thresh grain and factories could not make fertilizer or parts for North Korea's ancient fleet of tractors."
Think through the implications of this electrical grid collapse. Even if the North Koreans keep the train power grid open to the major urban areas. The lack of spare part manufacturing for their trains is as much a problem as the lack of spares for their tractors. The major inland North Korean urban areas are going to see their primary means of cargo transport disappear sooner rather than later.
The total collapse of North Korea is rapidly approaching.
So will it collapse peacefully or will the NKs launch an al out attack on the south to get their hands southern wealth?
Is this an opportunity for furtehr diplomacy or for more war?
It is the opportunity for an ugly humanitarian catastrophe.
I don't think that the "Tony Sopranos" running North Korea would obey an order to shell Seoul.
I do think they will interfere with efforts to prevent the collapse.
Does anyone know what loads would be placed on that grid if all those nuclear fuel rods were to be processed for production of plutonium?
This indicates that NK has no capacity for a sustained war.
What could possibly constitute a positive outcome here? The capitulation of the North to occupation by the South and reformation of the economy? I see no way for this to occur except, literally over Kim Jong Il's dead body. In contrast, there are dozens of desperately bad outcomes to the situation from outright war to the spread of plutonium to anyone willing to prop up the regime with hard cash.
Stanley Kurtz has a depressing but perhaps prescient view on national review online today: http://www.nationalreview.com/kurtz/kurtz030303.asp
"Positive outcome" for whom?
South Korea will do anything to prevent the collapse of the North. Even help the North to build and sell nukes to Al-Qaeda. They have in fact done this already by secretly giving the North $100's of millions to billions of dollars to have a summit and "opening" to the North. That money was used in the North's nuclear program.
That was the act of an unfriendly power and is a clear and present danger to America.
In the immediate disposition of North Korean nukes, South Korea and China are America's enemies and allies.
Those who make diplomatic and conventional military solution to the North Korean nuclear threat impossible also make American preemptive nuclear attack inevitable.