Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

However, in August 1998, a truly explosive development transformed this relatively benign environment into a paroxysm of Japanese and American overreaction and worst-case scenarios. On August 31, 1998, the United States government announced that North Korea had testfired a two-stage (later revised to a three-stage) liquid-fueled missile over Japan. The United States knew about the North Korean missile launch as it occurred; indeed one of the Air Force’s two RC-135S Cobra Ball surveillance aircraft, both assigned to the 55th Wing at Offutt AFB, Nebraska, was on station above the Korean peninsula to observe it.⁹

The Japanese, at least metaphorically, went ballistic. They condemned North Korea for a dangerous military provocation and an implied threat to Japan’s security. They cut off all contacts with the North and announced that they would launch their own spy satellites specifically to keep track of what was going on in North Korea and to end their dependence on military intelligence from the United States. They even professed to be thinking about withdrawing from the Agreed Framework.

It turned out that the North Koreans had used a three-stage rocket to launch a rather modestly designed satellite in connection with the celebration of the country’s fiftieth anniversary. Like the famous 1970 Chinese satellite that broadcast the Maoist anthem “The East Is Red” into outer space, Pyongyang Radio announced that its satellite was transmitting the “Song of General Kim Il-sung” and “Song of General Kim Jong-il,” which it labeled “immortal revolutionary hymns.” The satellite seems to have malfunctioned, and no one ever recorded these melodies. The North Korean foreign ministry also pointedly added, “We have never criticized the United States and Japan for having launched artificial satellites. We are well aware that these satellites have been used for espionage on our country.”¹⁰

Japan has in fact launched at least twenty-four satellites since its National Space Development Agency was founded in 1969. The Japanese (and Americans) also failed to mention that this was only the fourth North Korean missile firing on record and only the second in the 1990s, five years after the test of the Nodong 1 in May 1993. It also did not mention Japan’s own highly developed rocket program, including a behemoth called the H-2, which has a payload of 5 tons, considerably greater than the 3.8 tons the United States’ MX Peacekeeper ICBM can lift. This is not to imply that the North’s missile was not threatening, only that it was most plausibly an attempt to deter much more formidable strategic forces deployed against it by the United States and Japan.

The United States has continued to harp on the threat posed by North Korea’s missile capability. It ostentatiously flew B-52 and B-2 strategic bombers to its Pacific bases in Guam. Among the reasons for this belligerence was a desire on the part of the Defense Department and the arms industry to continue working on an antimissile defense system, an idea now considerably scaled down from the Reagan administration’s lasers in outer space but still devoted to intercepting an incoming missile by firing a defensive missile at it. The technological requirements of hitting a bullet with another bullet are fierce, and there is always a possibility that nuclear fallout and debris from a successful interception will kill more people than if the warhead had been allowed to proceed to its target.

The American government has so far spent billions trying to make the theater missile defense (TMD) work but has repeatedly met with failure. One of the things it had most wanted was to get the Japanese to help fund the project (which even if it does not work will be very lucrative for the companies trying to build it) and provide technical input into it. The Japanese had consistently balked. The TMD seemed to them a probable violation of the Anti–Ballistic Missile Treaty and, in terms of deterrence theory, utterly destabilizing. If one country should ever achieve a successful missile defense (or believe that it had), it would have a strong incentive to launch a preemptive strike against its opponents before they too achieved such a defense. This is the main reason why China has consistently denounced America’s infatuation with the TMD, as well as because it does not want to be drawn into a ruinously expensive arms race to develop it.