By Ken C.Arnold Santa Monica
Los Angeles County is now threatened by the North Korean nuclear missiles. Southern California residents along with other West Coast residents are moving away from the rest of the nation on their perception that North Korea is a serious threat. Easterners don’t seem to have the same feel for the threat as we do. Perhaps that’s one reason why the White House over the course of several decades has fiddled around and not prevented North Korea from going nuclear.
California, with a population greater than North Korea, including a Korean expatriate community approaching a million views the threatening moves of Kim Jong Il as the sad and futile machinations of defunct but still very dangerous dictator. China’s economic miracle means an end to the Stalinist regime in North Korea. Overtly, the weight of responsibility seems placed on America, but the real recipient of North Korea’s bombast are the Chinese rulers in Beijing. The burden of the diplomacy is unevenly distributed between China, South Korea, Japan, Russia and America, but China is the real player.
The more diplomatic interests you have centered around a problem, the higher the probability is for something to go radically wrong. Under the last scenario, the people of California must be protected from the whims and fancies of North Korea’s unstable rulers or the likely probability that China or perhaps even Japan may take surprising military action against North Korea. We could be on the receiving end of a missile, even if China or Japan made an independent move on North Korea. China, South Korea or Japan being at close range to North Korean missiles cannot really do a thing to protect themselves from a North Korean attack, so they may be more willing to do something radical and out of the blue to protect themselves before they themselves are attacked. Even Israel, which recently warned North Korea not to sell nuclear weapons to it’s enemies, could conceivably attack North Korea. Russia might also attack if it thought North Korea capable of transferring weapons to Russia’s enemies.
How certain are we that the White House and Pentagon take our concerns here in California seriously? Washington seems so disengaged these days by trivial bits and pieces of information and back office gossip concerning the Congressional Page scandal, which oddly is light years away from the concerns and wants of Californians.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on October 21, 2006. Read the original PDF.