UPDATE: The US biosecurity people have just ordered some details of the H5N1 research to be omitted in the papers that will be published in scientific journals. Rejoice!
The article has been modified accordingly. Use this version.
20 December 2011
North Korea and H5N1: A Sense of Proportion
By Gwynne Dyer
Western intelligence agencies have been warning for years about the terrible consequences that would ensue if Iran were to get nuclear weapons. Better bomb the place before they do.
But North Korea already has nuclear weapons, and now they are falling into the hands of a young man whose main qualification for office is that he is less weird than his half-brother, who was caught trying to sneak into Japan on a false passport to visit Disneyland Tokyo.
The North Korean story has got a lot of play in the international media in the last few days, partly because Kim Jong-un is such an obvious misfit for the job of “Great Successor.” What gives the story legs, however, is North Korea’s nuclear weapons (both of them), its huge army (fifth-biggest in the world), and its insanely belligerent rhetoric.
A mere two nuclear weapons, so primitive and clumsy that they are probably only deliverable by truck, are not useable for attack. Their only sensible purpose is to deter an attack, and North Korea’s are not very credible even in that role. All very well, the intelligence analysts say, but what if the people who control the weapons are crazy?
Well, Kim Il-sung’s understanding of the rest of the world was severely limited, and so was Kim Yong-il’s. Kim Jong-un may be no better. But for sixty years now North Korea has not attacked anybody. They can’t be all that crazy.
So we have, on the one hand, these not very convincing official claims, loyally repeated by Western media, that the latest dynastic succession in North Korea might “destabilise” north-eastern Asia, even lead to a local nuclear war. And on the other hand, we have this modest bio-lab in the Netherlands that has fabricated an ultra-lethal variant of the “bird flu” virus and plans to publish its results.
The Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam is a long way from the secret underground lairs where James Bond-style villains hatched their evil plans, and Dr Ron Fouchier, the lead researcher in the H5N1 experiment, does not look a bit like Dr. No. In fact, Fouchier is a decent man who means well. Yet what he has made is far more dangerous than North Korea’s bombs.
When the H5N1 virus first appeared in 1996, there was a global panic, for it killed about 60 percent of the people it infected. The panic subsided when it turned out that the virus could only be spread by very close physical contact between people; you were most unlikely to catch it by sitting next to someone on a bus.
It would have been very different if the virus had been as infectious as the common cold, which is usually spread by tiny water droplets coughed out by the infected person. Since H5N1 was not a “airborne” virus, it killed only a few hundred people, not a few hundred million – but viruses can mutate. How easy would it be for H5N1 to mutate into an “airborne” global killer?
That’s the question that Dr Fouchier set out to answer. He caused deliberate mutations in the virus and then repeatedly passed it manually from one lab animal to another – and quite soon, he had what he was looking for.
“In the laboratory, it was possible to change H5N1 into an aerosol-transmissible virus that can easily be rapidly spread through the air,” Fouchier said in a statement on the university’s website. “This process can also take place in a natural setting. We know which mutation to look for in the case of an outbreak, and we can then stop the outbreak before it is too late.”
That was the point of the experiment, of course. The research, funded by the US National Institutes of Health, was intended to discover just how likely such a mutation of the virus was. Nobody seemed to mind the fact that this involved creating exactly that virus – and, if normal scientific practise is followed, publishing the full genetic sequence of the mutated virus in a scientific journal.
Fouchier’s scientific paper has already been submitted to the scientific journal “Nature”, and the results of a parallel experiment carried out by Dr Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the Universities of Wisconsin and Tokyo, also funded by the National Institutes of Health, were submitted to “Science”.
The US government’s National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity has just ordered key details of the research to be omitted before publication, so that terrorists cannot use the information to create their own global quick-killer virus. The exact gene sequences and the exact details of the experiments will therefore be known only to the few hundred people who have already seen them. No doubt they can all be trusted.
But this is a classic case of shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. There are probably several terrorist organisations, and dozens of governments, that can duplicate Fouchier’s research now that they know how he did it. As former arms control researcher Mark Wheelis of the University of California, Davis, said: “Blocking publication may provide some small increment of safety, but it will be very modest compared to the benefits of not doing the work in the first place.”
There are more frightening things in the world than wonky North Korean dictators.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 5, 12 and 13. (“Well…crazy”; and “That…Science”)
20 December 2011
North Korea and H5N1: A Sense of Proportion
By Gwynne Dyer
Western intelligence agencies have been warning for years about the terrible consequences that would ensue if Iran were to get nuclear weapons. Better bomb the place before they do.
But North Korea already has nuclear weapons, and now they are falling into the hands of a young man whose main qualification for office is that he is less weird than his half-brother, who was caught trying to sneak into Japan on a false passport to visit Disneyland Tokyo.
The North Korean story has got a lot of play in the international media in the last few days, partly because Kim Jong-un is such an obvious misfit for the job of “Great Successor.” What gives the story legs, however, is North Korea’s nuclear weapons (both of them), its huge army (fifth-biggest in the world), and its insanely belligerent rhetoric.
A mere two nuclear weapons, so primitive and clumsy that they are probably only deliverable by truck, are not useable for attack. Their only sensible purpose is to deter an attack, and North Korea’s are not very credible even in that role. All very well, the intelligence analysts say, but what if the people who control the weapons are crazy?
Well, Kim Il-sung’s understanding of the rest of the world was severely limited, and so was Kim Yong-il’s. Kim Jong-un may be no better. But for sixty years now North Korea has not attacked anybody. They can’t be all that crazy.
So we have, on the one hand, these not very convincing official claims, loyally repeated by Western media, that the latest dynastic succession in North Korea might “destabilise” north-eastern Asia, even lead to a local nuclear war. And on the other hand, we have this modest bio-lab in the Netherlands that has fabricated an ultra-lethal variant of the “bird flu” virus and plans to publish its results.
The Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam is a long way from the secret underground lairs where James Bond-style villains hatched their evil plans, and Dr Ron Fouchier, the lead researcher in the H5N1 experiment, does not look a bit like Dr. No. In fact, Fouchier is a decent man who means well. Yet what he has made is far more dangerous than North Korea’s bombs.
When the H5N1 virus first appeared in 1996, there was a global panic, for it killed about 60 percent of the people it infected. The panic subsided when it turned out that the virus could only be spread by very close physical contact between people; you were most unlikely to catch it by sitting next to someone on a bus.
It would have been very different if the virus had been as infectious as the common cold, which is usually spread by tiny water droplets coughed out by the infected person. Since H5N1 was not a “airborne” virus, it killed only a few hundred people, not a few hundred million – but viruses can mutate. How easy would it be for H5N1 to mutate into an “airborne” global killer?
That’s the question that Dr Fouchier set out to answer. He caused deliberate mutations in the virus and then repeatedly passed it manually from one lab animal to another – and quite soon, he had what he was looking for.
“In the laboratory, it was possible to change H5N1 into an aerosol-transmissible virus that can easily be rapidly spread through the air,” Fouchier said in a statement on the university’s website. “This process can also take place in a natural setting. We know which mutation to look for in the case of an outbreak, and we can then stop the outbreak before it is too late.”
That was the point of the experiment, of course. The research, funded by the US National Institutes of Health, was intended to discover just how likely such a mutation of the virus was. Nobody seemed to mind the fact that this involved creating exactly that virus – and, if normal scientific practise is followed, publishing the full genetic sequence of the mutated virus in a scientific journal.
Fouchier’s scientific paper has already been submitted for publication, but the US government’s National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity still has the power to order key parts of the paper to be redacted, so that terrorists cannot use the information to create their own global quick-killer virus.
But the cat is already out of the bag: there are probably several terrorist organisations, and dozens of governments, that can duplicate Fouchier’s research now that they know how he did it. As former arms control researcher Mark Wheelis of the University of California, Davis, said: “Blocking publication may provide some small increment of safety, but it will be very modest compared to the benefits of not doing the work in the first place.”
There are more frightening things in the world than wonky North Korean dictators.
______________________________
To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 5 and 12. (“Well…crazy”; and “That…journal”)
26 November 2010
The North Korean Dilemma
By Gwynne Dyer
South Korea’s defence minister, Kim Tae-Young, was forced to resign after criticism that he was too slow to respond when North Korea attacked the island of Yeonpeong on Tuesday, killing at least four people. But what was he supposed to do? What can his replacement, former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff Kim Kwan-jin, do? Not much, really.
South Korean artillery fired back, dropping eighty shells on North Korean gun positions along the coast facing Yongpyeon, so honour has been served. But now North Korea is warning that the joint US-South Korean military exercises that began just off that coast on 28 November (and include a huge US nuclear-powered aircraft carrier) are pushing the region “to the brink of war.”
So what was US defence secretary Robert Gates supposed to do? Cancel the exercise (which has been scheduled for months, and was already postponed once to allay Chinese concerns)? Launch air strikes against North Korea and risk a wider war, maybe even one in which Pyongyang tried to use the primitive nuclear weapons it claims to possess? Resign?
And what is North Korea’s Chinese ally supposed to do? Beijing is doubtless appalled by what Pyongyang is doing. A major war in the region is the very last thing it wants. But China cannot publicly condemn North Korea’s actions without risking the collapse of the Pyongyang regime, which is the next-to-last thing it wants.
Beijing desperately does not want its people to witness the collapse of another Communist regime: it is still haunted by the events of 1989. It does not want a huge flood of North Korean refugees coming across the long frontier between the two countries. And it most certainly does not want a unified, democratic Korea as its neighbour along that frontier. So it murmurs platitudes and does nothing.
Even South Korea is deeply ambivalent about the prospective collapse of North Korea. In principle, every South Korean wants a reunited country, but in practice most of them don’t want it quite yet.
I happened to be in Seoul, interviewing people in government offices, on the day in 1994 when the death of the original North Korean dictator, Kim Il-sung, was announced. There was panic, understandably, since he had been in power since anybody in those offices could remember, and they had no idea what was coming out of the box next. But one of the things they feared most, they discovered, was unification.
I don’t think most South Koreans had thought it through before that day, but faced with the prospect of 25 million poverty-stricken North Koreans landing in their laps, they quickly realised that this was not going to be good for them. Like good patriots, they wanted the blessings of reunification eventually, but not on their watch.
It was understandable. They were the first generation of South Koreans to scramble back up to a decent standard of living after the devastation of the Korean War – by 1953, per capita income in Korea was lower than in what is now Bangladesh – and they feared that reunification would knock them back for another generation.
They had watched the reunification of Germany, and they knew that had been very expensive. But West Germans outnumbered East Germans by more than three-to-one, whereas there were only 45 million South Koreans to bear the burden of 25 million North Koreans. Moreover, West Germany was far richer than South Korea, and North Korea was vastly poorer than the old East Germany.
South Koreans are more used to prosperity now, but the cost of reunification would still be crippling, even if it happened peacefully. If it involved a North Korean attack, launched by a military elite who saw their privileged position in society slipping away, the level of destruction would be so great that it would take a generation to repair. So in practice, South Korea also wants the North Korean regime to survive.
In fact, everybody wants the weird North Korean dictatorship to survive – even the United States, although it would never admit it – because the level of uncertainty in East Asia if it fell would be utterly terrifying. That makes it very hard to “punish” the North Korean regime when it behaves badly.
It wasn’t punished for torpedoing a South Korean warship just to the west of Yonpyeong island last March (if that is what actually happened: the “international panel” that investigated the incident all came from South Korea’s allies). Neither will it be punished for shelling Yeonpeong island this month.
And it won’t even be punished severely if, as the North Korean news agency promised, it makes “second and even third rounds of attacks without any hesitation if warmongers in South Korea make reckless military provocations again.” Like the current US-South Korean war games in the Yellow Sea, for example.
This year’s North Korean attacks may be related to a power struggle within the military, or they may be a display of determination by the newly anointed heir to the throne, Kim Jong-un, son of current leader Kim Jong-il and grandson of “Great Leader” Kim Il-sung. Nobody outside Pyongyang knows what is driving this policy. But they are avoiding massive retaliation that would make matters worse, and hoping that the crazies are not in control.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 5 and 10. (“Beijing…nothing”; and “They had…Germany”)
24 September 2010
The Son Also Rises
By Gwynne Dyer
Next week, according to North Korea-watchers, the Korean Workers’ Party (i.e. the Communists) will hold an assembly in Pyongyang to anoint Kim Jong-un, the youngest son of Dear Leader Kim Jong-il, as the successor to his father and grandfather. There is already a song, “Footsteps”, that praises the young man’s qualities as a leader, and lapel badges with his image are already being churned out so that every North Korean citizen can wear one.
Egypt is not quite so weird, in the sense that the three generals who have ruled the country for the past 54 years were not actually blood relations, but it is getting weirder. It is universally believed that President Hosni Mubarak, now 82, is grooming his 46-year-old son Gamal as his successor. There were public protests about that in Cairo and Alexandria last week, though the police soon broke them up with the usual arrests and violence.
But where does this all come from? How can anybody believe that none of the 85 million Egyptians is better suited to be president than the son of the present incumbent, or that the “Young General”, Kim Jong-un, is the only one of North Korea’s 24 million people who is qualified to rule the country?
In fact, nobody does believe it, and neither of these men has a powerful personal following of his own. Moreover, these countries are republics, not monarchies. They may be dictatorial, repressive republics, but the whole notion of dynasties is alien to republics of any sort. So how can this sort of thing happen?
In monarchies, the son is SUPPOSED to inherit power from his father. In modern monarchies, they don’t usually get much power anyway, since the job is largely ceremonial, but at least there is a theoretical basis for passing power down in this way. In a republic, on the other hand, there is just no room for the hereditary principle in politics.
Power does pass down within families in democratic republics from time to time, as with the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty in India and the Bush family in the United States, but only if the would-be successor can win a real election. What’s happening in authoritarian republics like Egypt and North Korea is quite different – and neither the father nor the son may be the prime mover behind the choice of the latter as successor.
The first modern case of an inherited dictatorship was Bashar al-Assad, who succeeded his father Hafez as the president of Syria in 2000. The way he got chosen is quite instructive.
.Hafez al-Assad was a former air force general who had ruled Syria with an iron fist for thirty years. He did want to keep power within the family, but it was his older son Basil whom he was grooming to succeed him. However, Basil died in a car accident in 1994, and Bashar (who was studying ophthalmology in London at the time) was ordered back to Syria by his father and put into an intensive programme of military and political training.
When his father died six years later, Bashar, at the age of 35, was swiftly chosen to succeed him – but how did that happen? Hafiz al-Assad had wanted it to happen, but he was now dead. Why did all the other major players in the Syrian regime, a notoriously ambitious and ruthless group of men, agree to make this inexperienced nobody their leader?
Because they wanted to preserve their own privileges and power, and that could best be guaranteed by letting the old dictator’s son take power. In a one-party regime, there are no real rules for the succession, and the risk that a struggle between rivals for the leadership will destroy the unity of the party and bring the whole regime down is ever-present.
Unless the son of the late leader is a murderous megalomaniac, he is the safest choice no matter how poor his qualifications are for the job. He can lead in name while the real decisions are made elsewhere, and all the powerful people within the regime get to keep their accustomed places at the trough.
That is the logic that brought Bashar al-Assad to power in Syria ten years ago, and it is what creates support within the North Korean and Egyptian regimes today for the elevation of the current dictators’ sons to supreme power after their fathers die. It really doesn’t matter who is up on the reviewing stand taking the salute, as long as the thousand most powerful people in the regime keep their jobs.
So Kim Jong-un (now 27 years old) will be acclaimed as the next leader of North Korea by the Party congress – and will probably take up the job quite soon, since his father had a stroke two years ago and is now very frail. Gamal Mubarak will run for president in next year’s “election” in Egypt, and will win because the regime always fixes the elections. But despite the extraordinary durability of these regimes, they are not indestructible.
If you can credibly say about some situation that “it cannot go on like this forever,” then the only logical alternative is that it will eventually stop. Just not right now.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 5 and 6. (”In monarchies…successor”)