Subject: ＥＥＥ会議（北朝鮮への先制攻撃：ペンタゴンの極秘計画）
Date: Sat, 1 Mar 2003 09:49:12 +0900
From: "kkaneko" <kkaneko@eagle.ocn.ne.jp>

各位殿
イラク危機と連動して北朝鮮情勢も次第に危険水域に入って来ましたが、ワシントン
の雰囲気は、日本人の想像以上に厳しいようです。　昨日のNew York Timesに載った
ニコラス・クリストフ（元同紙東京支局長、ピュ―リッツァー賞受賞記者）の署名論
文によれば、ペンタゴンでは極秘裏に北朝鮮の核施設や軍事基地に対する外科手術的
なミサイル攻撃を計画しており、それには戦術核兵器（地中貫通兵器「バンカー・バ
スター」）を使うことも検討されているとのことで、それほどにペンタゴンの連中は
crazyになっており、第二次朝鮮戦争の危険性もあるのだから、日本も事態の重大性
を認識しておくべきだと言っています。同記事の全文は以下のとおり、ご参考まで。
金子熊夫
*********************************************
Secret, Scary Plans
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF


Some of the most secret and scariest work under way in the Pentagon these
days is the planning for a possible military strike against nuclear sites in
North Korea.

Officials say that so far these are no more than contingency plans. They
cover a range of military options from surgical cruise missile strikes to
sledgehammer bombing, and there is even talk of using tactical nuclear
weapons to neutralize hardened artillery positions aimed at Seoul, the South
Korean capital.

There's nothing wrong with planning, or with brandishing a stick to get Kim
Jong Il's attention. But several factions in the administration are serious
about a military strike if diplomacy fails, and since the White House is
unwilling to try diplomacy in any meaningful way, it probably will fail. The
upshot is a growing possibility that President Bush could reluctantly order
such a strike this summer, risking another Korean war.

The sources of information for this column will be as mystifying as the
underlying U.S. policy itself, for few will discuss these issues on the
record. But it seems those interested in the military option ・consisting
primarily of raptors clustered around Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld and in
the National Security Council ・have until recently been slapped down by
President Bush himself.

Recently Mr. Bush seems to have become more hawkish. He is said to have been
furious when Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage (one of the few
senior Bush aides who know anything about Korea) told Congress that the U.S.
would have to talk to North Korea.

So the White House has hardened its position further, swatting away its old
willingness to engage North Korea bilaterally within a multilateral setting.
Now the administration has dropped the bilateral reference and is willing to
talk to North Korea only in a multilateral framework that doesn't exist. The
old approach had a snowball's chance in purgatory; now it's less than that.

"We haven't exhausted diplomacy," one senior player noted. "We haven't begun
diplomacy. . . . We could have a slippery slope to a Korean war. I don't
think that's too alarmist at all."

Other experts I respect are less worried. James Lilley, an old Korea hand
and former ambassador to Seoul and Beijing, says my concerns are "much too
alarmist." He says the State Department controls Korea policy and realizes
that "the military option is almost nonexistent."

Maybe. But meanwhile, North Korea is cranking out provocations and
plutonium. This week it started up a small reactor in Yongbyon. More
worrying, America's spooks detected on-and-off activity at a steam plant at
Yongbyon, which may mean that the North is preparing to start up a
neighboring reprocessing plant capable of turning out enough plutonium for
five nuclear weapons by summer. Look for reprocessing to begin soon, perhaps
the day bombs first fall on Iraq.

Dick Cheney and his camp worry, not unreasonably, that the greatest risk of
all would be to allow North Korea to churn out nuclear warheads like
hotcakes off a griddle. In a few years North Korea will be able to produce
about 60 nuclear weapons annually, and fissile material is so compact that
it could easily be sold and smuggled to Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria and Al
Qaeda.

The hawk faction believes that the U.S. as a last resort could make a
surgical strike, even without South Korean consent, and that Kim Jong Il
would not commit suicide by retaliating. The hawks may well be right.

Then again, they may be wrong. And if they're wrong, it would be quite a
mistake.

The North has 13,000 artillery pieces and could fire some 400,000 shells in
the first hour of an attack, many with sarin and anthrax, on the 21 million
people in the "kill box" ・as some in the U.S. military describe the Seoul
metropolitan area. The Pentagon has calculated that another Korean war could
kill a million people.

So if the military option is too scary to contemplate, and if allowing North
Korea to proliferate is absolutely unacceptable, what's left? Precisely the
option that every country in the region is pressing on us: negotiating with
North Korea.

Ironically, the gravity of the situation isn't yet fully understood in
either South Korea or Japan, partly because they do not think this
administration would be crazy enough to consider a military strike against
North Korea. They're wrong.